*THE SECRETARY FOR SCOTLAND (Lord BALFOUR of BURLEIGH), who had given notice—"To call attention to the system of registration of writs relating to heritable property in Scotland, and to present a Bill"—said: My Lords, I am afraid I must admit that the subject which I propose to call attention very shortly to this afternoon is one of a highly technical character, but it is not controversial, and I hope your Lordships will have no difficulty to-night in allowing the Bill which I shall present to be read a first time, and that it may subsequently pass into law. The land register, with which the Bill deals, is really the general register of all transactions connected with heritable property in Scotland; it is really the land register for the whole of Scotland. The order in which writs relating to this class of property are registered fixes the priority of title, and therefore registration is practically compulsory of every writ connected with land, and has been compulsory for a very long period of years. There are considerably over 40,000 such writs registered every year, and therefore the business which is done in this office is not only of a very large and complicated, but of a most important, kind. The method which is followed at present is that when a writ is presented for registration it is entered in what is known as the Presentment Book for the county in which it is desired that it should be recorded. A careful Minute of each writ has to be made, and this, of course, is skilled work, involving conveyancing knowledge of a high-class character, which has to be correspondingly paid for. This Minute Book is made accessible to the public as soon as possible, and the transactions of each 75 year are bound up separately for the year and preserved, each year separately by itself. In addition to the Minute which I have mentioned, there is also what is known as a search-sheet. This document is kept upon a different principle. It is not a general register, but a particular register kept in a series of books in ledger form, and it is cross indexed both under the names of persons and places, and from an examination of this search-sheet may be seen the burdens and transactions which have affected every property for the last thirty-five or forty years.
At present all writs sent for registration have to be engrossed and copied at length. This is work also of an important kind, and every writ is collated twice; that is, after it has been engrossed it has to be read, and read a second time, so as to make sure that it is accurately transcribed. This is very laborious work, and I am told that the work of collating the different writs is very much more trying and very much more disliked than the actual copying out of the writs themselves. Various inconveniences have been found in the past at certain times of the year. Your Lordships know that almost all transactions in land in Scotland take place at one or other of the two terms Martinmas and Whitsunday, and a considerable rush to have writs registered arises in consequence. A strong Committee, presided over by one of the Judges of the Court of Session, was appointed by myself a few years ago, and upon that Committee there were represented not only the Treasury, but different branches of the legal profession. They made a unanimous Report in the direction that the existing system of control and the procedure are confused and require regulation, that the present practice under which every writ is engrossed and then twice collated by the clerks of the establishment has very serious disadvantages, that the amount of labour involved is very great, and various suggestions have been made from time to time for getting over these difficulties. It has been suggested that the writs should be printed, but this Committee to which I have alluded reported that printing would not save either time or money, and it would not do away with the necessity of most 76 carefully collating every writ after it had been printed, and there would also be this great disadvantage, that there would be a considerable risk of loss or damage because the writs themselves would have to be entrusted to the printers.
The Committee therefore reported against printing the writs, but in favour of a process which is called photo-zincography. I must apologise to your Lordships for the use of such an apparently barbarous term, but it is, I understand, a process of photographing the writs on zinc plate. This is not a new process; it is used in the Ordnance Survey Department. It has also been used for the reproduction of the Doomsday Book and many historical documents. I understand it was also used for the reproduction of the Book of Common Prayer which is kept in the Library of your Lordships' House. Very exhaustive experiments have been made with regard to this process. The whole of the writs registered for the county of Fife for a month, over 200 in number, have been carefully reproduced by this process for the use of the Committee. There is, I believe, a general consensus of opinion that this process, if it could be made legal, which is the object of this Bill, would work a very great improvement in the present system. The writs, being reproduced by photography, must necessarily be exact facsimiles of the original. Many more copies can be got with much less labour than by writing, and the process can be so carried on that the writs, although exposed to the photographing process, need never leave the possession of those who are responsible for their custody. I have had placed in the Library of the House copies of the writs which were reproduced before this Committee. They are bound in volume form, and in case any of your Lordships might wish to see them the volumes will remain for some weeks in the Library.
I do not anticipate any real difficulty about it, but the urgency of the matter is this, that considerable extensions are being made to the Register House in Edinburgh, and we have now arrived at the stage when it must be decided whether the upper storeys of this building are to be prepared for people who are to 77 sit writing, or for those who are to use this process of photography. The Treasury have given their consent to the introduction of this Bill. I believe that there is no doubt that a certain saving will result from the adoption of the process, although that, I am bound to say, neither on the part of the Scottish Office nor the Treasury, is the real reason for the introduction of this Bill. We believe it will be a process better in itself, more suitable for the purpose for which this preservation of writs is designed, and one which will really afford the possibility of more copies being produced for preservation and circulation to those concerned. I hope that with this explanation your Lordships will give the Bill a First Heading.
§ On Question, Bill read 1a. To be printed. (No. 1.)