Good morning. Thanks for coming. We're going to get started here in just a minute, so get your last cup of coffee. Welcome to day one of a two-day event about driving change, securing tenure, innovations in land and property rights, hosted by New America. We're hosting Princeton's Institute for Sustainable Studies here today. I'm very excited about this. If there's any tweeters in the audience, the hashtag is, hashtag ISS cases. And if you're watching on the live stream, you can tweet questions there. So, to start the day, we're going to have Professor Emery Slaughter, Peter Rabley and Jennifer Widener. We're going to start with Emery Slaughter, who is the CEO of New America and doesn't really need an introduction. So it's my great honor right now to introduce Emery Slaughter. Peter's about to welcome you. I like the fact that Mike actually said needs no introduction and then gave no introduction. Generally when people do that, they say needs no introduction and then go on for five minutes. So I compliment you. And I, you know, it's a Princeton event when I get called Professor again. That's been a while. But I have a number of things to say. This is a particularly sweet event for me because I was the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School when ISS was founded. Indeed, I was explaining to some of you yesterday that I recruited Jennifer. And one of my jobs as dean of the Wilson School was to rebuild our international relations and comparative politics faculty. And I had known Jennifer from when we were at Harvard together and I went all out to recruit her successfully, happily. And part of what she wanted to do was this work. She didn't know that it was this work exactly. What she knew was with her deep Africa expertise, coming to the politics department and the Woodrow Wilson School jointly appointed that she wanted to put, to draw on her knowledge of Africa, to work on the ground that would be directly relevant in policy circles. And you would think, well, yes, there was the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Yes. But it wasn't always so obvious to the university. I think that's a fair statement. So I, as dean, put in initial funding and supported what was then the program on fragile states and is now ISS. And I'm thrilled to see that in some ways things have come full circle for me and that our Future of Property Rights Initiative started to work with ISS through Omijar, even really without my knowledge. So when Mike originally said this, I'm like, yes, this is fabulous. I think ISS is wonderful. I will say one other thing about that history, which is just the shift from the program on fragile states to innovations in successful societies tells you something quite important. It is more important to focus on the positive, on the resilience, on what makes for success in what are often fragile societies than to focus on fragility, a general life lesson as far as I'm concerned, but certainly something I think in this work that is very important to do. So I couldn't be happier to have Jennifer here on stage. The second thing to talk about is why the Future of Property Rights Initiative is so important for New America. Now part of this is technology. One of the things that led me to leave, not just the Wilson School, but academia, for New America was that I saw New America as a place that not only did technology policy, but had technologists on staff. We had engineers here, we had designers here, data scientists here, and as somebody who spent my life studying, teaching, and practicing public policy, I am passionate about the need to combine technology and public policy to bring together what technology can do, which also means understanding what it can't do, and I'll come back to that in a minute, with the traditional tools of public policy, which are mostly law, economics, and of course deep expertise in a particular area. It is striking to me that even today at the Kennedy School, the Wilson School, of great public policy programs, students can graduate without knowing anything about technology. We don't make them economists, but we at least teach them enough to ask important questions of economists. We should be doing at least that much in technology, and even better, we should be having joint degrees with computer science, data science, design, all the different disciplines that feed into what we think of as technology, and I am talking about information and communications technology, primarily digital technology. So I love the tech focus here, but I will say it isn't just technology. It's technology, and you know this, I went through your case studies, it's technology, ideology, sociology, and we could add others, but let's take those three. So many of these cases are about what happens when technology runs into politics, and in Washington, I talk tech all day.  I'm constantly pushing on, wait a minute, the technology will not succeed of its own. It must be married with an understanding of culture, of society, of the local politics, of the national politics, and that's what this program is putting together. It does not think that having an electronic land registry is magic, it's all done. It says having an electronic land registry when combined with an understanding and knowledge of the local culture and the politics, then, and there's still no magic bullet, but then we have new tools married with deep knowledge of the kind that you do in comparative politics and sociology and history, and other, I actually would add literature, maybe that's going yet in another direction, but then you have a better chance of succeeding. So technology, ideology, new ideas, particular political ideologies and sociology together is really what New America's about. Now the last thing I want to say is why host this wonderful international global program at something called New America? And as many of you know, in my career in international relations, international law, foreign policy, why New America? It's actually a question I often get. Why did you leave international relations to run something called New America? Well, a number of reasons, but here's why I think it's okay, more than okay, good, to be hosting something like this project, which is global, at New America. We believe in networks, and we're all here supported by the Omijar Network, so I don't think I have to talk about the value of networks particularly, but I have spent 25 years studying networks and have just published a book on the strategy of connection, what it means to build networks strategically and how you exercise network power and how you lead in networks. And in a network, you do not lead through command, you lead through connection and cultivation and curation and cross-fertilization and being a catalyst. From that point of view, New America is a place that is dedicated to solving America's public problems, both in domestic policy and foreign policy. It sees itself as a central hub in what I would love to be a global network of New India, New South Africa, New Jamaica, not controlled by New America, quite the contrary, and quite possibly having different names, but places in other countries that would bring together technology, politics, and policy, bottom-up change, as well as top-down change. New America, just like, in my view, America, the country, the United States is a country, is a central hub. What does it mean to be a hub? It means to disseminate ideas, but also to take in ideas. You cannot lead in a network without taking in as much as you put out. So that vision of what we do here doesn't make us the hub, certainly doesn't make us in control, means we are a place that supports that cross-fertilization of ideas and that thinks about leadership itself and public problem-solving itself in a different way. So all told, I couldn't be happier to be partnering with ISS. I couldn't be happier about the connection between technology, ideology, and sociology, and real bottom-up work, as well as top-down wall-making and norm shift. And finally, although we're at New America today, I can imagine future meetings at whatever the equivalent is in multiple countries around the world. And with that, it's my pleasure to turn it over. Is Peter here? Did he? Right there. And your hand was down to Peter Radley. Thank you, Anne-Marie. And welcome, everyone. It's very exciting to see this day come to fruition. First of all, a few thank-yous. Thank you to Jennifer and Pallavi and Maya and her team at ISS. They've done a fantastic job and we're very excited today to see the results and to hear from the different protagonists. Thank you, Anne-Marie and Mike Grelia, who's in the back there. And New America for hosting and being engaged. I think this is what we hope is the first of many of these types of events. And thank you to all of you who've traveled so far. I know some of you have come quite a long way. I see some familiar faces and I know they've come from literally halfway around the world. So we look forward to hearing from you directly about all of our work and detail around these use cases. So I think it was about two years ago or so, Jennifer, I think. 18 months. Menzee, well, that's all right, I won't probe that. But 18 months ago we approached Jennifer because Jennifer had actually already done a case study on the Georgian Land Registry, if I remember. And actually one of our employees in London used to be at ISS with Jennifer. And so there was a good connection already to work with ISS and the team. And the idea that our team came up with was that I think as a community in the land and property rights space we're very good at describing in great detail all the problems that we have and how complex land and property rights are and how we have to be so careful about all the nuances that are so different everywhere in the world. And there are special cases and if we don't pay attention to all these special cases we'll never move forward and get anywhere. And we were struck by how little in our minds we had in terms of solutions. Presentations of solutions. And we asked around and said there have to be some solutions out there. People have to have dealt with this problem. It can't be solutions and woe is me type of thing. There must be some solutions and if we don't have solutions then we have a problem but if we do find some solutions let's dig into them let's find out what they did how they solved the problems what were the challenges and see what we get. And I think as you see and if you've read the case studies you'll see actually there are a couple of common themes that come out. One is two it's not an easy problem to solve. It takes time, it takes a lot of resources and what all of the case studies show is that when you commit time and resources you can get success. And what I was struck by is how similar many of these case studies are. Many of them have to do with institutional reform. Many of them have to deal with organizational change, resistance to change from within. The way things have been done for a very long time. It's very hard to question and say do we need to continue to do this simply because we've always done it that way. And then I think external drivers as you saw from Landgate from Terranet and even from Jamaica. Pressures coming from the outside. Market forces saying you need to keep up with demand and agencies realizing they were struggling in keeping up with demand. Agencies realizing that information technology was changing so quickly that they were not in a position to take advantage of the IT and nor was that skill set theirs and that their skill set was something else. And I think you'll hear about those in today's presentations. So I'm very excited with the result. Again really would like to thank Jennifer, Pallavi and Maya for the hard work. I think these are important use cases now that hopefully will go into the literature. We hope they'll be used as part of online courses, MOOCs. We hope that it will be picked up in educational material elsewhere. And I guess what I would throw out is we're very interested in hearing from you today what you think we could do as a next step. If this is just the beginning what could come next? What could we do? How could we expand the use of this material? How could we generate additional material? Because while this is the end of this particular chapter we'd like to open up and see what the next one might be. So thank you all again very much for coming. I hope this is and I'm sure it will be a very vibrant discussion today. And I look forward to meeting all of you throughout the course of the day. Thank you again. So thank you all for coming today and because I'm a professor I can be a little bit more forthright and say you have an assignment today and it will be graded. So let me just say a few more words about the focus of today. I think Peter and Emory have set this up beautifully and I thank them very very much for that. So I want to say a few words about the focus of the purpose of the cases what your role is I hope in the course of the day and for those who are staying for tomorrow as well and I want to offer some additional thanks and maybe I should offer those additional thanks first because when we started this emphasis on land tenure and land registries 18 months ago there were actually two partners. The Ombudier Network was a tremendous partner in this but the UK Department for International Development also joined us and DFID has financed about half of this program and although you're not looking at all of the work that they have supported some of that still in the field I think they've been a very important element of this as well. So thank you to New America to Mike Greggly and Emory for participating in this. Thank you very much the Ombudier Network which has done so much on this subject and has helped bring this together and thanks also to DFID. So I say a few more words about the purpose. You are really at the center of this 18 months ago a little bit longer than that. We said what are some of the really tough problems with which reform leaders in governments around the world really struggle and a land tenure security is a big one. Land tenure security was a repeated theme in the interviews we were conducting with reform leaders everywhere. It affected economic growth. It affected conflict levels. It affected forest protection and so many other things. So we thought we really ought to do something with this but we entered this area with great trepidation because as you know because you are the people who do this it's highly technical and we thought do we really have the skill to do this. Now we are not emulating what you do. We are the loyal scribes of the university. We go out there with our analytic tools and the social sciences and the writing tools and the capacity of the space in the university to try to pull things together but I regard us as loyal scribes with maybe a little extra twist on it. We said we can help you share your experiences in order to advance innovation and learning in this area. So you are really at the center of this. We can not only help practitioners like you share ideas and maybe find those solutions Peter referred to but we can also channel this into training a rising generation that's what universities do. So channel the learning into public policy programs or business school programs or other kinds of programs to help people who are learning to work in this area know more about some of the implementation challenges they are going to face, some of the design challenges they are going to face and perhaps tactics for getting around some of those big challenges. So that's our second mission and we have a third mission which is to back out some kind of academic scholarship as well but I won't go into that. So that's how we got involved in this and there are really two strands of work. One focuses on land registries trying to improve performance of land registries. So that means reduce error rates, improve delivery times so it's a business process issue. Protect from undue influence corruption and this is extremely important. Many parts of the world we certainly work in a lot of countries where land registries are not secure and for this reason it's very hard for people to invest in their land to improve agricultural production or whatever else. So land registries are one strand and we have one panel today focused on land registry improvements and that's going to focus on Canada, Jamaica and Australia. Canada having pioneered some approaches Jamaica having learned from that, other countries having done so further and Australia having done some things to push the envelope further. We invite you to offer reflections based on other situations you know we've obviously worked in other parts of the world on this too. The other panel today taps the other strand of this work which is really land tenure systems and improving land tenure security by trying to come up with legal systems and practical systems that will help people secure their land rights further and we're going to introduce some of these tough problems by going shortly to a two person panel on South Africa which Peter Radley and I agreed was kind of ground zero for this because South Africa has layer after layer of challenges so we decided well let's take the hard cases and we're going to take two examples of and I'll say partial success but more success than most have had we're going to take two examples this morning and see where they might translate usefully and then we're going to later in the day look at Mozambique and Tanzania and we'll consider some other cases as well but we want to think about land tenure systems that are particularly useful if you have people who've been living in communal areas or who graze animals together and and cultivate together these are particularly challenging situations especially where there has been no effort of formalization in the past so we're inviting you to participate heavily in this this is your homework assignment not homework you're going to do this here but you're we're asking you to draw on your experience to throw us tough questions throw the people on the panel tough questions think about well where does this approach have some potential utility what are the pros and cons of this how do you mitigate the downsides how do you amplify the strengths in each instance and then for those who stay tomorrow we're inviting you to help us develop the kind of teaching materials these cases are like Harvard Business School cases they put the practitioner in the driver's seat and then they walk people in with a great deal of operational detail through the steps taken and how they dealt with some of the implementation challenges and design challenges but if you're teaching these cases whether in a staff training college or to a group of your peers in a land registry or in a classroom in a public policy program what does the instructor need to know that's extra so what other angles should we be bringing into this we want to talk a little bit about that and how you develop a curriculum around these so there again we are enlisting your help and we really appreciate all of your ideas and tomorrow will be breakout groups so small group discussions and then we'll come back together so let me leave it there there is one additional person I'd like to thank this was a talented team of ISS researchers because they had to master a lot of new material very quickly and integrate both interviews that they conducted and a lot of other forms of data and Leon Schreiber who is our researcher based in South Africa has played a really central role in that as is Maya Gainer and I think Leon you didn't get mentioned so there you are and Leon has been key in this as well so with no further ado we're going to move into the first panel which as I said is really on South Africa with layers and layers of challenges and I'm going to invite David Mason and Katherine Ewing to come up I think we're already mic'd up for this so I'll do the introduction so our first guest today oh I've got probably two mics going here but our first guest today is David Mason who helped facilitate an effort to improve security of land tenure in a communal area in South Africa and as many of you know this is a particularly challenging problem in South Africa because you had former homelands and you had colored reserves under the apartheid system and the question is how do you secure land tenure now in the new era David is going to explain how one community did this successfully I think many others have wrestled with this problem he helped facilitate this and he found an approach that has worked although it's still in progress David is with and I'm going to mispronounce it Pudassani what we would call a non-governmental organization in South Africa our second guest is Katherine Ewing who is director of the violence prevention through urban upgrading program in Cape Town and she is going to explain how VPUU worked with residents of a peri-urban community where violence was a problem and where people had migrants had moved into the area and had no secure land rights how they tried to introduce an occupancy certificate to give people a little bit more stability it's short of full ownership but an occupancy certificate that would allow people to have an address qualify for services then the kinds of services that other people had available to them serve as a basis for say a cell phone contract and perhaps serve as a basis of other forms of collateral so they could invest in their land and the aim was partly to bring down levels of violence but also for greater investment in the area and there are lots of interesting levels of this problem as well so we're going to dig into the complexities in this instance both land tenure systems, the legal side of this and the registry side because certainly in the Monroe VV Park case in Cape Town you had to figure out how you create a registry for this, how do you make these systems manageable for a registry so we're going to turn to David first and then Catherine and then we're going to open it to Q&A and I will try to accumulate a few questions and throw them to the panellists. Take it away David. Good morning everybody Good morning Can you hear me? No Is this working? It's really great to be here to share our experiences and to hear and share with others who are facing very similar challenges I think to what we are doing the way you pronounce the company it means to develop it's really an instruction to people to develop okay the rights of the poor who live on and make use of communal land across the globe are increasingly insecure and under threat the vulnerability is heightened when firstly land governance and administration systems are weak land is managed by external officials and when there is inadequate record of rights insecure land rights opens the door for elite capture and makes rights holders reluctant to invest their labour and money into that land land activists across the world are in search of remedies to reverse this toxic trend and we argue that partial immunity lies in the development and legal recognition of local land governance and record of systems which enhance local control and which are backed by legal reforms that provide legally secure rights there you go we're busy doing this in Ebenezer with the Ebenezer community on the west coast of South Africa and I want to talk about this experience with the Ebenezer community and for many centuries but before I talk about Ebenezer specifically I want to contextualize this process in three ways firstly by looking at the broad history of this possession in South Africa secondly by looking at land reform program in South Africa and thirdly by looking a bit at the history of Ebenezer itself the San and Koi people are considered to be the indigenous people of South Africa and when the Europeans first set up an able supply station in Cape Town in 1652 the San and Koi were living across various parts of South Africa colonial expansion and the development of agriculture in the Cape relied on slave labor and the Koi San fought many wars of resistance but were either turned into slaves or vagrants on their own land and until 1934 beg your pardon most farm labor was based either on slavery or on restrictions, vagrants with restrictions contained in the various Koi codes and vagrants vagrancy ordinances many of the Koi San settled on mission stations which became established across South Africa and they did this to resist the oppressive laws and to retain at least some access to land wars of conquest waged in the 19th century meant that by 1900 most of South Africa was under colonial control the process of creating black homelands and colored or mixed race reserves was the cornerstone of apartheid and it meant that by 1994 just 13% of South Africa was in the hands of black people and the remaining 87% was either owned by white owned companies, individuals and the states let's talk to turn to land reform in South Africa with the end of the formal apartheid in 1994 we introduced a land reform program which was based on the property cause in the constitution and it has three legs of the land reform firstly restitution that is where individuals or groups or communities that were dispossessed of land under the previous government could claim restitution of that land either restoration of the land alternative land or cash compensation the second component of land reform is around redistribution those people that never had any access to land can apply and get access to land for a variety of reasons and the 30s 10 year reform where those that are living on land currently but with very insecure rights are able to then access support to strengthen those rights the 10 year reform there has however been significant failure of land reform since 1994 over 8 million hectares have been transferred and at least 50% of that land is either un or underutilized importantly the majority of this land is held by communal entities land property entities either trust or communal property associations the department of rural development and land reform that is responsible for these CPAs reported in 2016 that only 208 of 1,490 of these entities were compliant with the law this failure of land reform is extremely complex and involves many factors but we argue that the lack of governance and administration of land rights is one of the most important factors in this regard let's turn to Ebenezer's history the Ebenezer community descended primarily from the Koi people, the indigenous people of South Africa and when the whites arrived in that area in the early 1800s they found the community death the state allocated some crown land to the mission church and to the community under the management of the church and so at that time the first time the Ebenezer community got access and formal rights to land was in 1837 but that land access was under the management of the church the reynish mission church at that point in 1909 a law was passed which transferred the land allocated to many mission stations back under the control of the state the policy priority, this is early 1900 sort of 1900 to 1930 the policy priority for government was creating opportunities for poor whites many of whom were dispossessed of land in the wars between the British and the Boers right at the end of the 19th century the idea this purpose had devastating consequences for the community the state decided to build a dam and a canal system to provide an affirmative action land reform program for poor whites and this targeted the Ebenezer community which was located at the end of the canal system so the state passed a law which dispossessed the community of the most productive part of their land and removed them into alternative but inferior land over the hill adding a number of other portions of land in the process on this reallocated land 153 families were allocated a plot a house plot an arable plot with water and communal grazing land and that number of land right holders remains today so there are still 153 plot holders with 1.6 hectares of land and 8 grazing camps which are subdivided into sub-camps for rotational grazing purposes the community in the meantime has grown to 2,500 people this land continues to be owned at the moment by the national state and the land rights have been managed with various degrees of success by the municipality when we began our work at Ebenezer in 2013 we found the following there was no management of land rights by the municipality 65 of the 153 plot rights holders had not been formally allocated after the death of the former rights holders and disputes were aplenty amongst the rights holders and within the community generally on the grazing areas, communal grazing areas 97 individuals without formal rights were on that land farming with sheep and cattle and there was significant elite capture by some people who were able to keep others out of the areas that they were allocated so for Ebenezer there are two land reform processes one is restitution for the land that they were dispossessed of and second is tenure reform strengthening the rights on the land that they are on I'm only going to deal with the tenure reform processes given the focus of today's discussion the applicable legislation there is the transformation of certain rural areas and that really is focused on all these mixed race or coloured reserves of which there are 23 in South Africa and it requires the community the future owner of that land and management of that land they can decide to cut it up and divide it amongst them they can decide to hand it over to the municipality for the municipality to manage it on their behalf or they can decide to hold it as a community establishing a communal property entity which is what Ebenezer decided to do they established what's called a communal property association so there are two focuses of our intervention one is on the ground developing local tenure arrangements at Ebenezer the second focus is at a national level a broader policy intervention to develop a national record which recognises communal land rights within a land rights continuum so there were three processes that we then undertook at Ebenezer the first was to manage a land rights inquiry process to clarify what rights to the different portions of land the second was to facilitate the design, a participatory design of new tenure arrangements at Ebenezer which would be under community control and the third was to design an appropriate local land rights recorder system on the land the land rights inquiry involved five processes the first was the enumeration of right holders who says that they have a right to a land the second was adjudication with adjudication it was very important for us to understand the difference and the relationship between customary understanding of land rights and the formal legislative manner in which land rights were obtained and transferred we looked at certification in adjudicating does the person have a certificate who is actually using the land now so who has de facto rights to the land on the ground and then we looked at was this person who says that they had a right eligible to be a member of the CPA the communal property association according to the membership criteria the third component in our land rights inquiry was around mediation and arbitration there were a number of conflicts and disputes around the allocations that were made the fourth was to then take that to the municipality who was the formal administrator of the land to get that confirmed and passed in a municipal council resolution once that had happened then we facilitated on the ground agreements around boundaries so we got neighbors to come together at the boundaries and say is this the agreed place we took the coordinates and then got them to sign an agreement that that is very important the second component was developing what we call the land use management system essentially the tenure arrangements for the future what we did there was was firstly we researched and provided technical detail about each of the different land parcels on the land and then conducted a community process which involved people dividing up into focus groups those focus groups then visited the different portions of land came back and developed proposals around what kind of land rights what kind of management systems what are the responsibilities for each individual and so forth and then presented that to the plenary which was then critiqued we as Pushkissani then wrote that up proposals which are in the process of going through the community for final acceptance this participatory process that we ran was extremely successful for the first time community felt that they were involved in determining their future of how the land should be what rights should be there how it should be managed and so forth and for the municipality and the department of agriculture it was the first time that they had been involved in a process and we were also very excited about it some of the key issues that emerged out of this process were the following firstly how do we clarify individual rights on community land and it was agreed in the absence of other forms of formal rights it was agreed to provide members with title but with restrictions in that title that if they wanted to sell transfer that land it had to go to a member of the community property the second was how to clarify given the nature that grazing rights that it was communal grazing how to clarify that right what kind of rights should it be eventually a fully tradable communal grazing rights was agreed to and then finally it was around management how should this land be managed given as community land the first is the CPA appoint a manager but there is an association of users that works with the manager with regard to the record system there is no there is currently no system of recording communal rights in a local and national register in South Africa so for Ebenezer we're drawing on the thinking and development of such systems internationally and we've decided to go with the social domain model which has been designed and developed by the global land tool network connected to the UN habitat this approach seeks to clarify the nature of the rights that a person or group has to a specific spatial unit a piece of land water body or natural resource the design of this at Ebenezer has been quite challenging but we're making progress very closely with the GLT the objective is that this record and management system of rights will be locally controlled by the CPA so that is community control this requires a record system which is cheap which is locally operated and easy to update but which is linked into the national system to allow oversight and further formalization if required our work at Ebenezer is linked to our national policy of intervention to find remedies against elite capture South African property law does not easily accommodate criminal land rights in the absence of such a law is one of the reasons that the rights of people in such circumstances are so vulnerable Pujlistan is playing a leading role in a broader intervention to reform property law in South Africa and the aim would be to provide for local management and register of rights which cascade up through the municipality into the national deeds office the intervention is located within a national titling debate where individual title is considered the apex of property rights oh that's it so the jury is still out about how successful this intervention will be but it's critical in South Africa 30 million people live in context where their rights fall outside of the formal property system so our aim has been to avoid capture of land by elite in communities and to achieve the land tenure security objective which is espoused in our constitution and the key lessons that we've drawn from this experience are firstly within with land rights inquiries we must really spend time to understand the nature in custom in law and on the ground secondly the process to clarify and formalize the land rights and tenure arrangements must be participatory in design involving as many of the community members as possible to ensure and enable sufficient consensus these processes must be practical affordable and supported by adequate technical information so that people can make proper decisions the record all systems must be sufficiently flexible to capture and certify the range of rights making up the continuum in each context fourthly the land rights management and recording systems must be supported by the local state in order to enable local level land holding entities to implement the agreed tenure system and to contain the power of local elite to appropriate resources beneficial to the poor finally the record systems must link to national formal recording systems otherwise the nature of these local rights will be undermined and relegated to secondary status second cost status so these have been our experiences at Ebenezer I'm really putting it out there we're in the process of establishing these the days are still early but really looking forward to sharing the process involved in other areas thank you good morning everybody I feel quite privileged to carry on the South African context and we take the front floor at the beginning of the two days so thank you very much for everybody involved in this whole process thank you very much to all the people back home as well particularly the CEO of VPU Michael Krause so I just wanted to say a very big thank you to him and all the partners we have we've talked about networks in the beginning and I think it's an amazing network and an opportunity to have so thank you so I'm going to zoom us into Cape Town and straight into a case study so we're going from rural South Africa to urban South Africa so monobisi means hope we've simply separated that though the case study is about hope and I never give up we've been working there for seven years now and I still believe that we have some good examples and I still believe that we have hope so this is the current situation that we do have in Cape Town around housing delivery we've been stuck in a housing delivery system in Cape Town that delivers a one-house one-proth scenario but what we experience is very different from this in the informal areas we're working in and I think that we need to change we're in a point in South Africa where we have to change we don't change our issues of crime our issues of violence, extreme violence and all our general social issues will be extreme so I'm just going to explain a bit about VPUU is that it's not only around land tenure for us it's about a lot more that we deal with so we deal with a strategy that starts with prevention particularly crime prevention but what we do is we turn it around and we start with innovation so we work with early childhood development and youth and local economic development some of these things will fall in but I just wanted to explain that the other is also like the previous example is working with the community so it's not but not only working with the community it's working with the government as well and there are lots of challenges of being the person in the middle the mediator the facilitator, the intermediary but we believe that partnerships are at the core of this and they need to be fostered and also cared for we deal with the protection and this is where my main role falls into the spatial planning and the book environment area but it's also about neighborhoods providing equal access equal access and rights to the communities it's also dealing with the residents vulnerability and last we deal with evidence based it's about research and development working with people with technology on the ground but also working with a soft side and measuring the quality of life we found these to be incredibly valuable in working with governments as well in terms of being able to show service delivery and what actually service delivery means on the ground so I'm going to zoom into Cape Town it's quite a long way from here as I've realized so we work in Cape Town and Parle and Villiersville we work in a big metro city we work in a medium sized city in Parle and a rural town in Villiersville in Cape Town we work in predominantly three areas but the area I'm going to show you today is called Kailicha it's about 35 kilometers from the city center so we started in 2009 actually and with the city of Cape Town the municipal government and it was about a revised approach to upgrading of informal settlements in South Africa something had to change and we couldn't just ignore the informal settlements that we have but it's moving from not only an infrastructure based approach to a more holistic based approach about the quality of life and the built environment for us that automatically changes the levels of crime it's about an approach based on needs and priorities identified through the involvement of communities and it's about the implementation of pilot projects to find and test the methodologies and processes we haven't got any solutions as such but we're working on processes and I think that to get away from the idea of a product is something that is incredibly important for us so we started with an informal settlement called Lonaviti Park but I think we didn't start with tenure we started with a variation of different levels of the spatial environment and some of those we're looking at a safety strategy an education strategy particularly for young children a tenure strategy and also looking at movement networks linking it to technical infrastructure working with the the municipality of Citikotan so that's what I wanted to say we didn't start out with tenure tenure was something that we realized was very important as we went along but in terms of tenure what we did we find out we found out that we needed to incrementally secure a tenure through both administrative mechanisms at an individual level whilst also legal recognition that secures the formal status of the settlement as a whole they had to work together however since that and all the challenges that we've experienced along the way we have also added a third one securing the public realm for long-term development at a precinct scale this is something that in informal settlements you don't often have you don't have a land that is institutionally set aside for public facilities or public walkways so back in 2010 we started with urban landmark with Lauren Royston and Tessa Cousins and Mark Napier and the study of Cape Town going through workshops to try and understand and although we said it's a step by step process we realized it wasn't quite step by step so the first one was around the status quo what it is and carrying out an enumeration and that was considered step one step two was to be the legal recognition so we proclaimed the area and go through land use management applications etc and that would lead then to securing the long-term tenure and that seems quite simple when you put it in step one, two and three but it's not that simple and we often flipped between the long-term number three with the community saying what is the long-term vision and then going back to step two and then back to step one all at the same time so let's just get to the context Monroe BC Park some of the facts 25,000 people it's a big informal settlement the size of a small town in Etterby we have 6,470 new households and I can say that from an enumeration however we do have changes but that's good, life changes people die, people are born and so it goes on we have about 65 households for a working town and 19 households share a toilet that's a lot however 79% of the residents feel they'd be living in Monroe BC Park in five years' time and that was through a survey we conducted last year 85% of the registered households are on the community register that sort of flips between 80 to 90% because people also change so that's also something we have to monitor and 59% of the residents perceive that they feel safer after receiving tenure certificate we work very closely with a local the local community the local leadership is called the Safe Node Area Committee so they're not only a political group they range and they are inclusive of faith-based and youth organizations as well we're on four parcels of land here it's owned by between the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Government so we are on government land and also are adjacent to a nature reserve and then on the other side we have a formal Kaili chair we've done a mapping process since 1996 and we continue to do a mapping process we have much better technology and aerial photography at our fingertips than what we did when we started I think that's also something that we've experienced over the seven years is access to information and the way we can use technology cell phone apps etc is so much more advanced and really does help produce just a quick snippet so this I'm constantly on the ground taking photographs just in a few years somebody painted their house they claimed the area, they claimed the front space on a more institutional level 2012 an entwongenia of the public space that's what happened, we had a crash developing so let's just quickly go through administrative recognition so it goes back to what was called the book of life and I called it the book of life as well because it's like this big Harry Potter book and I think Leon I described that to Leon and I was amazed when I saw this book but when I looked at it it didn't hold a registry that was viable and it actually writes to it so that was when we decided that land tenure actually was a very important part of what we were doing in informal settlements it has a history of what was given to the area through the years from 1997 also what was quite important and it was quite hard to find one of these was a service registration card but we did find one and it takes us back to what the process with the municipality started so there has been a process with the government and with the municipality right back from 1997 so we set up not an enumeration we set up a community audit and the reason it was that was because there was this register in place it needed to be an updated community register called a new register because of the politics on the ground so we liked that that came from the community themselves updating our existing register but we realised that it had different parts of it enumeration spatial, tenure and skills each one we assigned to different responsibilities to different areas whether with local leadership local authorities or ourselves as the implementing agents then conducted the community audit and this was the municipality called the enumeration form we called it the community audit of the dwelling questionnaire and dwelling particularly not house or home it had to be the house household which linked to a dwelling there were different aspects of what it did so we asked more questions in this process than we had to but we needed more information we worked with students initially we started working with volunteers and we trained up people to work on the ground with cell phones and GPS's there was an existing number a WP number and then through our process we went through a process of stickers to know which houses 6,500 houses is quite a lot of houses to enumerate on the mound there was a community register office set up at one of the we built a small community facility and we set up a community register there where people were interviewed people could also locate themselves on the map this also took some training to be able to train people to work with maps and then because the houses were geolocated we could accurately pinpoint exactly which houses hadn't necessarily come to the community register office or they hadn't been interviewed each then person that the household head was then asked and they had a photograph taken to take away all the conflicts we also worked with the University of Cape Town on conflict mediation we then had new numbers put in place some of the information we got was gender headed households 50% were female headed households electricity information and how we could actually work with the local electricity department to actually then electrify the community the mayor then gave out 10 years certificates in 2014 and then we continued to work with the community and we did a recent evaluation on how useful was your 10 years certificate access to electricity of course came up as the biggest one we also through all the information we also still continue to monitor taps and toilets using cell phone apps it's important as well for the tenure and the quality of life of people in the area legal recognition so instead of taking the normal route subdivision consolidation rezoning to an establishment we realized that there were different levels that you could tap in to be able to get some form of legal recognition and that didn't necessarily mean that you had to have one to be able to get the other so we started a process in 2010 where we co-designed with the community and I have to say we did co-design with the city of Cape Town but they seem to forget that where we we did a lot of work on the ground we did mapping we mapped the whole area the geospatial we walked I walked all those areas we mapped them time and time again and we continue to map them as well the landscape we're in a dune system we're on an edge of the nature we then developed a spatial structure that could then start working that made more sense and then we worked with the developable areas we worked with the biodiversity area in the city of Cape Town we worked with the planning department in the city of Cape Town we worked with the fire department and safety to work out the safe width of a neighborhood block we developed a network that could give you quick and easy access access for people walking home so you're improving your safety levels but also access for fire engines and refuse trucks etc we called that the special reconfiguration plan the city of Cape Town then asked us to call it a development framework put it into legal terms so what we also did was we renumbered all the areas to have a better understanding of what the areas were so different block numbers so 18A, 18B, 18C this also then worked with your tenure certificate so the two had to run hand in hand the spatial development framework and the administrative reconmotions we then looked at different options you could have various options you could do block development you could do sub block development in individual plots but that was almost leaving it to the end because what we would do is just recognize the area as a settlement not an informal settlement but a settlement in land use management terms so that was what we got to in 2013 we submitted the land use management application that land use management application still sits with the municipality of Cape Town so there were many challenges to taking it to the next step in terms of legally recognizing the system and I've got a few ideas around that as well but I know I've got two minutes left but what I did want to say was that we have managed to incrementally put some strategic projects on the ground so you can do things we built 25 public spaces I haven't had time to even talk about our public space program we built two community facilities we put there's about 98% electricity to the area we've got a few more people coming in we've got ECD programs running, we've got youth programs we have a movie night on Fridays we have all sorts of other things going on but what the idea was to focus that implementation in two particular areas and those were based around public space projects so this was one of our Entongeni and our Entongeni means public space in 2014 and then we slowly bit by bit have been working there we had our open day on Saturday which is why I didn't, I only arrived yesterday because we had a very big open day where we built a community facility and particularly in Brick as requested by the community and we've got building plans approval for this what we've also done is we've surveyed the site we've managed to identify and peg out this area for long term institutional space for a community facility which is not something that we often think about in tenure we often think about the individual house and I'm saying house, not even a household here because we have tenants and all sorts of other things so for us moving that to a totally different domain is very important we're also working on safe walkways now safe walkways are also good points for putting your services as well but I think in closing I think that's almost my last slide is that the next step so what do we want to do next we can't necessarily get legal recognition without going through full engineering processes but we do want to work with grey water systems we do want to work with fire systems we do want to work with safe walkways so you don't necessarily need the full legal recognition to do things so some of our lessons that we have learned is that the two go hand in hand administrative recognition and legal recognition needs to work together there are various elements to each of those but the one also if you miss one it's not necessarily the end of the world you can keep working on these things but I think it's also about a process and it's about allowing a medium to long term development which is often doesn't fit within a government process short term quick wins we've been through three mayors on this project so where are your political champions to drive this and then it also is desperately in need of engineering standards and an upgrade in terms of how do we deal with a four by four that can go in and access a community or a bicycle that can pick up rubbish you don't have to have a big refuse removal vehicle to do this so I think it's about I think in the beginning we said we need to question the way we are doing things and we need to deal with this resistance to change and that goes from all levels from NGO from government and from community and with thanks for questions and what I'd like to do is take three questions first and then throw them to the panelists and then we'll see whether we have time left and there's another time during the day where we can talk further and please introduce yourself the second presentation I just came back from South Africa too I was disappointed by just how segregated it still is even in cities but I was very much encouraged by your presentation I wanted to ask several questions one, the enumeration system is that similar to the slum dwellers international enumeration how does what difference, what's the same second one of the things I heard about when I was there was buffer zones but people still settle on that so who's monitoring that to make sure that those buffer zones stay safe, unsettled and third so in some ways you are dealing with the easier situation of city owned land and what I was hearing in another place is the real tough nut is informal settlements on private land in municipalities so then the electricity company feels like they can't provide electrical services because that is starting to recognize those settlements and clearly there is a private owner so what do you do in those situations ok, thank you very much great we have another question over on this side my name is Gip Feperman I'm an economist I run the global business school network so I wanted to ask an economist question you've worked for many years and this is a very complex multifaceted social engineering program what are the resources that you put into this it looks to me of hand I would guess that a lot of money has gone into this per person and how do you assess the benefits at the end Susana Lasterria from the University of Wisconsin my question is that relates to gender and rights to land in both of these projects it sounds like the Ebenhouser I'm not sure if that's the name is correct Ebenhouser project with the communal land title I'm assuming that everyone in the association becomes one of the owners corporate owners of the communal land but then and that I think does include women because everybody over 18 is a member of the association is that correct with the individual land titles are those legal land titles or are those certificates that are handed out by the CPA if they are either way I'm just wondering whose names are on those titles are women's names also included in the titles regarding the townships Cape Town outside of Cape Town again when you are handing out the occupancy certificates or the residential certificates are whose names what is the criteria for putting names as occupants or users or owners on those and I assume those are not legal titles those are just within the community itself recognized within the community itself and then related to both of those I'm just wondering what are both the norms and the rules for inheritance rights and do those include daughters and wives thank you thanks so you have a full agenda I think the last one relates to me yes the community as a whole owns the whole land men definitely dominate in the rights to the arable plots but it's not only men that own those that have the rights to those plots in the custom the current land holder can decide who that land goes to and many of those situations have been where the woman daughter wife takes over that land and then becomes the land rights holder it's up to now it's been restricted to the 153 primarily because of a restriction on water there's hopefully an upgrade of the dam and there will probably be additional water that comes into play and then any expansion there there's a particular focus within the community saying those must that must be particularly for women that I think it's a recognition that in the past that women within the custom have not actually been advantaged in access to that you asked whether the title is a legal one or not at this point it's not and that's why we are also involved in a national intervention to try and get communal rights and or a continuum of rights to be recognized and recorded at different levels so at the moment it's not at the moment in fact implementing this thing the rights that are held are very insecure some of whom don't have a certificate with the local municipality so this is the anticipated system that will be implemented once the land is actually transferred to the community in terms of I think inheritance I explained it's really in custom most often men receive the right and that currently it would be the right to communal grazing and to the arable plot but it's not unusual for women to also do that but most mostly men do do that what we found out in Monabisa Park is that it was about 46.5% of the household head was a woman and so what we particularly did was worked out with the community of what they thought was the household head and in a lot of cases you had couples coming together as well a lot of women who are not necessarily married so so what we also allowed was a secondary name on the list there was always allowance for somebody else so one so the household head and then another what we also did we made sure that the tenants were also on the community list as well I was amazed at that percentage in South Africa I mean I think for that amount of women to be considered the household head I was blown away and it really was and very important as well what it was but it also shows the urban context and how people migrate and move around between urban centres in terms of the inheritance aspect we have an ongoing community register so it allows for people to come and register deaths and births and life particularly but the problem that we hit was the tennis advocates are not necessarily updated by the city of Cape Town so then the local not necessarily administrative recognition but the local recognition has a gap for the long term use of it there was no intention that it would last so long in terms of that we could get quicker legal recognition plus administrative recognition but we still stuck on local recognition but we do realise that there is a need for that ongoing inheritance or maintenance it's like a broken tap when it breaks you got to fix it just like a registry you got to keep it updated very important I'm going back to the first question from Claire do we use a similar enumeration system to some dwellers I think we did but enumerations are they're kind of quite standard but what we did was really try and understand what it meant at the beginning what is the status quo so we did a lot of the work on the ground trying to understand whether it was what the community wanted was this enumeration system so yes a similar process was followed but I think what we're making sure is it's continuous because a lot of enumeration people come in from the outside they do the enumeration and then it goes what we wanted to make sure was there was some kind of continuity and activity to it and community ownership it's all run by volunteers the community register office is run by volunteers they've been trained up in geolocating mapping there are wizards on the computer now they have all our community facilities have Wi-Fi access there can be live data that's fed straight to the municipality on correct systems at the same systems municipality in reality buffer zone so who monitors we had a land invasion in 2014 before the elections in South Africa by one of the political parties but the people who came to the forefront was the local leadership and they blew us away they literally people wanted to burn down the register office and so kind of normal community dynamics but to it's almost extreme and the safe note area committed snack they sort of stood there and hold hands and stop people and there are very few kind of in migrations but there's a lot of internal growth of what we find so you can't stop internal growth a husband, a brother comes from the eastern Cape and sephals in Cape Town and that's normal so but the ongoing monitoring is very important what about privately owned land I didn't have the opportunity to present our other area but we are working in another area called Lotus Park that is a very different environment on Prasa land so the local rail organisation but they're a subsidiary company and they're not government so we do have that problem where we have one and a half thousand households on land that is not state we're going through a different process with it but it still is one that one can deal with incrementally as well that one's been a three year land transfer in the process the land transfer part the legal part doesn't necessarily take that long the negotiations everybody around the table is the difficult part just to the economic part the feasibility of all of this I personally can't put an amount to improving somebody's quality of life I find that that is insurmountable I can't the amount of value we have I think is quite minimal our staff members on the ground have one local community facilitator on the ground and we have various people who technical staff as well as ground staff who we're employing from the local community so I feel that there is a little bit of feedback we have a little construction team doing a public space who live in Monobiqui Park so they're all getting training and field development through the process I think partnerships so we don't work alone we work in partnership so that's very important we work with our early childhood development that is done in partnership so that network that we spoke about at the beginning that for me is what we need to do and we need to be innovative we have to deal with these areas the idea was to set up the pilot and see how we can run it out to other areas so the sustainability sustainability of it also means how can we ingrain learnings and teaching beyond just what we are doing and with the city of Cape Town as well so this for me is an important platform to actually share the information and get further continuity of the project as well just on the economic one you know if you consider that 13% of South Africa's land in former homelands and 8% of the land has now been transferred through land reform so we are talking the order of 20% of South Africa's land which is either underutilized or unutilized completely I don't know if people that have been to South Africa have been driven through the former homelands in many areas people are not cultivating anymore and that's primarily because of land administration breakdown because they can't trust that someone else can come in and eat their cabbages so people stop producing so the value of doing this and it's going to cost a lot because there are many communities involved and there are many land rights that are not clear enough but the value of doing it means that it's going to make a major shift in the economy bringing those areas of land under production at Ebenezer itself many of the portions of land are not utilized partially because of the lack of land rights but partially because of the ineffectual canal system but there again there's a proposed new canal system being implemented at the moment and that with an ability to go to a bank and say here's my certificate for my land rights it's going to make a major difference to the person's decision to intervene to invest in their land and that is going to be the part of the spin on the quite large amount of money that's going to have to be spent on implementing this across the country Thank you very much I think we are at the end of this session so I want to thank the two of you and then after this I think we're talking to the back of the room and we'll be able to help in but thank you very very much and we'll let the people have more questions Thank you and you're kind of locked in and certainly we can read you you're on I'm Mike hello hello we can come back to our seats okay thank you so the next three cases we're moving from what we just learned about in South Africa helping people get their rights to the institutions that manage those rights keep them live and keep them valuable and generate valuable for the owners of those rights and for society so up on stage we have Jody Kent from Western Australia Landgate which is a statutory authority we have Elizabeth Stair from Jamaica which is the NLA which is an executive agency and we have Elgin from Terranet now a private company that started as a public-private partnership so something I'm interested in is three different models of the types of organizations and I think the Canada is particularly interesting because good question as we look over to Australia and see what's going on is it the future of where some of these registries are going but I'll save it for the questions with no further due it can be a lot of fun to learn about these agencies as Princeton said they went out and saw really innovative and pushing the edge so this is going to be a crash course in how you either make or evolve an agency to get some best practice from around the world Good morning Prior to Jamaica deciding to create a national land agency the national land policy which was published in July 1996 referred to effective land management and administration institutions shortly thereafter the government took the decision to merge the four land administration departments dealing with land titles, survey and mapping, land valuation and estate management the push for more effective institutions was also as a result of Jamaicans demanding more from the government in terms of performance transparency and accountability so the pre-enlight status there are four government funded departments with individual heads reporting to our permanent secretary with two different ministries we all had contact with each other but we did not rely on each other we didn't really know each other we had different goals, different procedures and our staff had different office cultures we all had statutory responsibilities and operated in our private silos we received our budgets from the Ministry of Finance and it was difficult to plan as it varied from year to year we had minimal control in hiring staff and there are no formal standards for our customers so in merging the four departments the government decided to use the executive agency model of governance this includes a delegation of departments focus on performance measurements outputs rather than inputs managerially autonomous agencies and the provision of quality services especially related to customer service the transition started in just about 2000 and it went for about 18 months so what did we do we created a new structure we prepared new job descriptions we advertised all the posts in the agency and we interviewed all staff coming into the agency there was no automatic transfer of staff if the staff was unsuccessful in their applications for the agency or if they did not want to work in a new agency they were redeployed to other government departments or they were retired on the grounds of reorganization and this was important because the terms and conditions of employment were changing from a government a real government institution so in the end approximately 25% of the staff were redeployed or retired during the transition we also gave a lot of attention to communicating with the staff during the transition by way of general staff meetings newsletters, focus groups our customers because we needed our customers to understand what we were trying to do during the transition the CEO was also appointed and so approximately 6 months before the agency started I started work so a lot of the matters I was able to influence from the very beginning we commenced operations in April 2001 and under this new government structure the CEO reports to the minister and not the permanent secretary the CEO and all directors and managers of the agency are on 3 year employment contracts the executive agencies act was introduced several months after we started and this is what gave power to the CEO to manage the operations of the agency although the individual legislations for the different core areas of title service etc are still standing because those govern their statutory responsibilities so in terms of our structure I'm just going to mention two things the advisory board this board is appointed by the minister and their role is to advise the CEO on the strategic and business responsibilities they are not an executive board they are not a management board it's currently chaired by an attorney at law and we have other stakeholders the value is represented on it the land surveyors, a businessman and a finance person information technology is also a very important part of our operations in that it gives us the ability to improve service delivery we buy software services and build some internally the CEO receives delegation of authority instrument from the minister of finance this sets out my obligations and duties and I'm the accounting officer for the agency I have full HR responsibility but if there's an appeal for example somebody is dismissed then that is dealt with by the services commission the issue of accountability was brought sharply into focus for us all the executive agencies are monitored by a wide range of government agencies we have to do several reports quarterly, annually we are set targets for each year or we set targets along with the ministry and if we want to give an incentive payment to our staff at the end of the year then we must meet at least 80% of those targets in our 16 years of operations we have never failed 100% of the revenue earned by the agency is from the fees provided and these are kept totally kept by the agency each year we have to give the ministry of finance or projections for revenue if we earn more than those projections we keep 50% and 50% is given back to the ministry of finance in some cases we can apply the full amount over our budget the 90% of the fees are actually earned by the land registry which we call the title office we also enhance our revenues by creating new services and this was as a result of the merge databases we also divest lands for government by sale or lease we don't keep those monies but we keep 5% of those monies as a discharge for that management in 2003 we undertook a major business process review to change operations of the land registry from a totally manual system to an automated system this also resulted in improving the linkages between our surveys and our title in areas all titles have now been scanned also the majority of our land documents and these are all available online the documents are electronically signed so that helps to improve the turnaround times for the process we now have approximately 600,000 titles in the registry plus the original documents which includes transfers mortgage documents birth, marriage, death certificates so we still have to maintain hard copies of those documents so we have them all online so as you can imagine storage is a major issue there's a document tracking system which allows persons to go online to see how long it will take for their documents to be completed and when it will be completed because we found that people kept on calling the office we have online forms where they can go online and complete the forms print them and present them to our office along with their supporting documentation we offer a subscription service for something called property watch where we can warn you if there is some kind of activity against your property and most importantly we designed a fee calculator so you don't have to call us to find out how much should you pay you don't need to come online in the office to find out how much you should pay so that helped a lot for customer service I've highlighted just three services and tracked their delivery times and you'll see that it's pre-2001 as at December 2016 and in 2008 and about 8 years after the agency started generally there has been a marked improvement in turnaround time of the services provided some matters we can do 24 hours some matters and that's at an additional cost and some matters we do for two days in two days but at no additional cost in November 2001 when we were going through the major changes of creating the agency and putting it in place the customer service index which was measured by an outside person was 2.9 out of 10 when we looked at it again in March 2005 it had increased to 8.1 out of 10 the merger allowed us to create new services because of the huge amount of data no available in one place so Elan Jamaica service is an online service it's a paid service where you can look at your title or the supporting documents or the plans and you can print them at your leisure and Elan Jamaica is a free service and it's really maps so you can look at the maps to search by street name community names coordinates etc we are currently working on having those two services mobile enabled the agency has other achievements as a result of the merger and one of those things is the map products that we cannot produce so we can map anything we want us to map, we will do it we offer services to our developers that if you are doing a subdivision we will do the splinter titles for you within 40 days and this is a paid additional service if not it takes on average 150 days with the in and out of the documents if we don't achieve the 40 day turnaround time we pay about the expedition fee but you still have to pay the normal fee in 2010 we established a VRS reference network island wide to improve the accuracy of our service and this will ultimately help us to build our cadastral map of Jamaica we established regional centres outside of Kingston because people don't want to come into the city all the time so it appears we are doing something right because we have received several awards one of them in 2008 was the prime minister's award for the best customer service agency and in 2010 for the most innovative and creative public sector agency but we did not go through these changes without learning some important things business process review is an important part of the change it makes no sense to computerize or to digitize things that are manual processes so we have to keep on reworking to improve performance communication is extremely important you have to ensure that the staff is on the same page with you and we can't forget the customers so newsletters focus group meetings meetings with unions and you need to manage their expectations because everybody wants everything at day one we also have to bear in mind the worst before they get better be prepared for the brand new computer software you have invested in to not work quite the way it should on the first day that you open to the public so delivery times for services will decrease but it is important to just keep focusing and keep talking to the customers and telling them it will work after we worked through all these issues with the delegated authority that the CEO now has I need to tell you that autonomy is great we can now plan we can now save we can become the masters of our own destiny and that is really important it has helped us to grow as an agency and it has helped us to challenge ourselves to have new products and services so we now have several services from which we earn revenue next steps more change the agency has received funding from the World Bank to carry out some studies towards introduction of electronic titling which it is expected will further reduce turnaround times and give some increased security to our title data this of course will necessitate legislative changes to the Registration of Titles Act we have found that a traditional separation of agencies may have had administrative convenience but it led to duplication of functions a loss in the value of information and longer turnaround times to produce services by combining the four departments the agency combined the data sets reworked some processes created new products and services and drastically reduced the turnaround times for providing the services we regularly have focus group meetings with our customers and review our business processes with a view to reducing turnaround times and just as a side note our customers the most difficult ones we try to ensure that they are on the focus group meetings so that they are a part of the process we realize that the need to provide quality service to our customers will continue to drive the process of improvement our motto on agency one goal this was as a result of the need to let the staff understand that we're no longer working in silos we're all working together for one goal I thank you Good morning I'm Elgin Farwell the CEO of Terranet like my colleagues I'm here to talk about a story of transformation and land registration services I think you're going to hear that none of them were achieved overnight and none of them were achieved without challenges those challenges can be political policy operational technical and if you've ever worked in land registry they certainly can be emotional while I'm here to talk about the Terranet experience in many ways it's more about the Ontario land registry staff that had the vision the commitment and the leadership to make it all happen in Ontario meaningful transformation took almost a decade and well both the model that delivered the transformation as well as the services have continued to evolve since that decade I'm here today to share the early Terranet story by setting the impetus for change the strategy and the structure to address that need and talk a bit about some of the high level lessons and results that have been realized so a decade might sound like a long time but not so much if you think of it in the context of a land registry service that had not changed in close to 200 years settlement European settlement started in the 1600s in Ontario but it wasn't until 1795 that provincial statutes were introduced to establish land registry and land rights at the time land was administered under a deed system which was a variation board from the British but in the late 1800s Ontario adopted the new Australian Torrin system for first grants to property now well enhancing property rights for some this also created disparity that would last for another 100 years for those that were still under the registry deed system and over those 100 years Ontario itself went through profound change and growth initially 80% of the Ontario population was rural in nature and was spread across a geographic area four times the size of Great Britain so over 60 registry offices county based registry offices were established to service and administer property rights in the province each of which had their own interpretation of the provincial registry and land titles act given the geographic distribution during the 1900s Ontario became Canada's economic engine population more than quadrupled and the demographic profile shifted to 85% urban development of land became intense and like most jurisdictions development fueled surveys, transfers and mortgages which in the registry were all fueled paper and more paper this in turn put significant pressure on the urban registry offices in particular in Ontario a real estate transaction does not close until you actually register the transfer in the registry office in other words you don't get the keys to your house if you don't get registered on your Friday afternoon by your lawyer in the 1980s with population and the economy booming the land registry system was not coping the first thing that seems with paper staff and customers we were actually setting up tents in parking lots where offices could extend their services and lawyers and conveyances would come to register register was consistently missing the legislative timeline to complete transactions and in a period of intense development this created exposure for the province for properties managed under the torrent system and was potentially putting confidence in the land registry system itself at risk and confidence and trust is fundamental to land registry services by the 1980s roughly 50% of the provinces the properties in the provinces were titles and 50% were still under the deed system registry staff and legal community had to maintain two legislative administrative systems and workflows as well as the expertise that would be prescribed by each to manage them again it also meant that those who held interest in land did not have equal rights and protections provided by the province some were able to rely on a provincial guarantee while others simply had to rely on their lawyer so in the mid 1980s government concluded that the inconsistency of rights the increasing cost of the service and the decreasing level of service was creating too much risk for what would be considered a critical piece of economic and social infrastructure so to address this the government created a vision for real property administration in Ontario that planned to leverage the newly emerging information technology capabilities and that vision was to afford all property interest holders the same protections and benefits by proactively converting the deeds properties to a qualified title under the torrent system create an electronic parcelized ownership database for every title in the province integrated electronic workflow to enhance the efficiency of the registry staff and coincidentally create a digital parcelized geospatial map fabric as an index to the property records as well as an expandable database for property attributes that could inform public policy finally it included a long term vision to automate the real property document creation and registration process today some know this as e-convancing now many jurisdictions in the 80s were building title databases so that was not that unique what I think was unique was at the time the decision to convert millions of properties property records from a deed system to a title system as a starting place and then envisioning a world where the end-to-end land transaction would be paperless, automated and conducted remotely was unique and while it was understood that the effort to attain this long-term vision was large the government did not know at the time that the scope of magnitude of the vision would become much greater than anticipated and this in turn would drive the need to be innovative in the way in which that vision was achieved initially the land registry took on attaining the vision on themselves and started by designing and developing the polaris land titles database and operating system and then to support the records conversion they developed enabling legislation and procedures to streamline the process to search a deeds property parcelize it, automate it and certify it under the torrent system unfortunately after a series of pilots the land titles team concluded that the cost, difficulty and resourcing to convert and map almost four million titles and the complexity of the desired enabling information technology as well as a related investment to enable all of that exceeded the government's capacity so to their credit, to the government's credit they did not reduce the scope of the vision they were trying to achieve they looked for an alternative model to achieve the vision and concluded that a new trend in public-private partnerships for hard government infrastructure might actually be adopted to a soft infrastructure environment so government saw an opportunity for a private sector partner to bring capital, discipline competency and capacity and surveying technology and process optimization as well as bring a commercial lens to customer service and to market newly created data again to their credit they anticipated that unlocked value in land registry would be released and that this could be captured and retained by government so they could be associated with a private sector partner to accelerate that vision and in 1991 Terranet was created as a 50-50 partnership between the Ontario government and a private sector consortium Terranet and the private sector were expected to bring the capacity and the expertise to accelerate the conversion of titles drive IT solutions innovation allow government to guide and government project outcomes on processing day-to-day land registry records and then provide the capital and be motivated through an economic model that maximized and accelerated the benefits of automation to land registry and its customers it took two tries to get the right consortium but ultimately a private sector owners were comprised of survey firms legal firms, technology firms all backed by capital that committed the required funds up front to the province however vision capital and experience was not a guarantee for long-term partnership success so why did it ultimately work clear accountability of roles rights and decision making and the adherence to these trickled down from a joint Terranet board that had equal representation from government and the private sector partner as well as independent expert members Terranet would be accountable to meet performance and production criteria that included quotas timelines and quality and quality for records conversion the government continued to own the data and certify the title using the system that Terranet would deliver Terranet on the other hand designed operated and owned the system within which the data resides this created a symbiotic reliance on one another and a shared and aligned view of the customer Terranet retained fee revenue government retained fee control so fees were predictable and grew at a pace that was known to the customer base once critical mass was reached on the number of parcels automated Terranet could commercialize the data but government had the approval rights from a privacy perspective and a market perspective Terranet was only compensated by retaining statutory fees on automated properties in the early stages this motivated the company to focus on simpler land titles properties generally found in high turnover urban areas government also set performance standards for system availability the rate at which properties needed to be converted and data integrity for those properties all of which had significant penalties attached so you had the combination of revenue upside and performance downside which motivated Terranet to successfully standardize the processes and the performance standards for title certification staff in a unionized environment and having been around the world I can tell you that's not easily done in the complex world of land registry well this model drove revenue to Terranet which would be used to fund more conversion it also allowed government to process records more quickly due to the advantages of automation long term nature of the arrangement it was important that government was not fettered in making policy or legislative changes that might need to be reflected in the systems that Terranet was maintaining on their behalf so a comprehensive governance structure was established and evolved to monitor contractual performance and customer service but more importantly it was a commitment to dedicate the right talent and decision makers that facilitated the ability for the regulator and Terranet to work collaboratively on advancing the vision being innovative and adapting to new needs within the marketplace and within government and to jointly engage stakeholders and customers and I'll talk about that in a minute a fund was established and collaboratively annual planning process so Terranet would fund on an annual basis any changes government wanted to the system which could be driven from an operational perspective or by legislative changes and I'd say the most significant of which was a move towards reducing fraud property fraud and enabling that with systems checks in the 90s I believe another key to the success of Terranet was that from the beginning it was not singularly private sector in composition Terranet was seated with government board members and the voluntary transfer of government land title staff over to the company when it first started and to this day we continue to recruit and retain a contingent of both government and more specifically land titles capabilities and DNA in the organization having government representation at the board level in the first decade and hiring former deputy ministers or sorry deputy registrars not only allowed the company the credibility to engage and contribute to the transformation in a true partnership with government and stakeholders but it also allows us to understand and work within a government context it appreciates that public interest as a business interest a conversion project that was supposed to take roughly 10 years took 17 but that was because the number of properties and the complexities of those properties were underestimated in the 90s or the 80s despite this by 1999 critical mass was reached and with the busiest and largest counties automated and converted to land titles so in 1995 anticipating success Terranet and the province set about to introduce the electronic remote registration system but the vision did not just see the automation of land registry processes as they existed today it also envisioned the reform of land registry practices policies and legislation by moving away from the submission of evidence to use to the use of legal statements government collaborated with Terranet but they actually led the engagement of stakeholders in this endeavor and it became a joint effort with the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Bar Association to reform and change the real property practices with a goal to rely more heavily on the legal profession reduce property risk and create a more efficient marketplace the legal community was engaged and allowed to influence which ultimately turned them into champions of change when we rolled out the system we worked closely with the government to design and develop the system based on the reformed and more efficient workflows supported by auto certification sorry auto signatures online collaboration between parties in the industry office the auto population of title details from that automated database into the electronic documents so that you knew that information that was being submitted could be checked and would be right as well as being able to be automatically abstracted and registered without human intervention prior to the launch Terranet and the government together delivered a comprehensive change management program to ensure that the community was aware supported and trained and as mentioned the legal community was in support led by the law society and in 1999 Terrabee became the world's first digital land registration system and it immediately transformed the practice after the successful launch of Terrabee with the records conversion nearly complete the government sold its 50% interest in Terranet in 1993 to its partners three years later we went public through an IPO the government participated and saw a return on investment I'll talk about that in a second in 2008 Terranet was taken private by a pension fund and is now operating the electronic land registry system for the province under a 50 year concession arrangement and has strict performance and customer service requirements including a contractual commitment to maintain the registry in a modern state but above all else the governance regime that provides clear accountabilities promotes joint strategy and the funding and collaboration to achieve it remains the underpinning of success the province's original equity investment in Terranet was that actual Polaro system that they built in the 80s which was valued at less than 30 million dollars but since the province divested and over the life of its relationship with Terranet its return the investment received in hard proceeds so these are checks being cut will exceed 4 billion dollars 6.4 million parcels have been automated and converted and 99% of documents are created and registered electronically today this is in an environment where the properties the number of properties have doubled transactions have increased by 25% and the land registry in Ontario has been reduced by 75% through the use of public kiosks the land registry staff have been reduced from anywhere between 1200 to 1400 depending on the time of year they've been reduced down to 200 but the backlogs have gone from 20 days down to one day and finally customer service satisfaction is in the top desk we measure that regularly this has been a journey this has not been a journey without its challenges they always are but a commitment to the vision and the innovative business model has transformed land registration in Ontario Terranet continues to deliver e-convancing property risk and realtor solutions across Canada and has recently entered into a 30-year concession with the province of Manitoba where once again we are faced with paper, paper and more paper and we'll start that transformational journey once again I'm my name is Jodi Cant I'm currently the chief executive of Landgate from Western Australia and I'm absolutely delighted to be here today to share our journey which we're incredibly proud of as an organisation so Landgate is a commercial statutory authority and what that means is we have a commercial board but we have one shareholder and that's our minister it's an interesting balancing act to get both your commercial board and your minister happy but so far we've managed to do that and we provide secure land titling services to underpin a property register and property rights which is very important for the economy valuation for taxation purposes for commercial and open data for government so just to give you an idea of the size of us we're the biggest legal jurisdiction in the world so we claim we're bigger than Texas this map shows that our claims are correct we're also one of the oldest land masses in the world and our indigenous people, the Aboriginal people have 50,000 years of claims on our land our connection to land in WA is very deep and very ancient and very important so today while we're a business that looks ahead with contemporary ideas looking to continually reform and reinvent who we are we also have a very deep, deep connection to our land so our heritage stretches back to the beginning of this one river colony that's 1829 in 1829 this first survey General John Septimus Rowe charted much of our coastline and at the time he was a real innovator himself, he was a naval man who bought naval survey techniques to the land and at the time people thought he was a bit crazy perhaps we've kept the crazy going but we regularly claim that exploration is in our DNA, we were founded by explorers of the state, it's a very big state and for us the guardianship of property ownership and conduct being custodians of our location data is hugely important so we're not your average public sector agency as explorers we approach things with no boundaries we say our motto is we know no bounds and we're working on living that out it's been really important for us to look at our rapidly evolving sector and embrace digital disruption so 200 years after Rowe what happened, 2007 in our world two things happen, the first is the iPhone where everybody became a property expert and a data expert and information was at fingertips and it was no longer paper was no longer going to be the way of the world for Landgate we were also formed so prior to that we'd been a couple of separate government departments we were formed into a commercial statutory authority which allowed us to do things a bit differently and while we had much of the restriction of government we also had an ability to own shares in companies and really take control of our own destiny including keeping the funds that we made or a percentage of them while we give a percentage back to government we can also keep funds that we make so we really knew that for us to take on the challenges that would be we needed our DNA our explorers DNA but we also needed to change how we did business we needed to keep our customer focus as an agency but we also need to take on the digital economy so digital disruption our choice was we felt was to disrupt or be disrupted and given that choice it's a pretty easy one to make we saw things happening around the world that was going to change everything about our industry and that started as soon as mobile technology came along so to maximise the value of our asset we had to reinvent the way we worked both our technology our engagement with our customers and our relationship with our shareholder we knew we were sitting on a valuable asset and we knew it wouldn't be long before other people recognised the value of the asset and came knocking on the door with a big check so where did we start our transformation absolutely started with our own people it has to I can't overstate the importance of having your own people on board we're a values driven organisation we take our values very seriously we all of our projects include reference to our values which are there at Landgate we make the decision based on creating value and being true to our values so it's been a really interesting journey and we start with our customers at the heart of everything we do so what's our digital transformation look like our strategy and reform agenda had to be developed in parallel because you have to keep providing the business that you're there to do we could see that there are new opportunities in the sector we knew the power and the value of the data that we collected we had a strong commercial sensibility and that was both at the corporate executive level and at the board level so our corporate leadership was certainly made up of people with commercial experience and government experience to give the balance going forwards our focus shifted to changes in thinking, in technology and as I said our customer journey so we've driven a really strong bold cultural change program through our organisation and we've got a smaller but more empowered workforce we're flexible, more agile we've gone in the time that I've come from approximately 1200 people to we're about 550 these days we've done all of that so far voluntarily for every person that's exited our organisation it's hundreds of hours of talking and support and retraining if required we've also bought in new skills we've downsized and funded that ourselves so at the same time our ratings have gone up so why did we think we had to change this is a model of the electronic market place it's a reference model we use based on work by two gentlemen, Schmidt and Lindemann I think they won a Nobel Prize in the late 90s for it and this is a view of electronic markets and in Australia when e-convancing was introduced after many years of not going anywhere in 2012, 2013 e-convancing was introduced and what we recognised that when you look at the property market it was just right for disruption so our own area of land registry is over here on the right hand side but everywhere we looked things were happening differently on the left hand side you had things like auction.com and Zillow down in the financial area you've got peer to peer lending and blockchain so in the middle, which is where it says the box that says PECTA I'm not sure if you can see it that's our electronic convancing company that looks at electronic lodgment across Australia so from Landgate's perspective we knew that we had to update our registration systems to work in this new environment we did a global search we have an IT, our IT policy says buy up the shelf first we did a global search and couldn't find a product that we thought suited our needs but what we did find was a market for just that product if we could develop it so with our IT provider in partnership we did a proof of concept funded by our innovation program and we ended up with the world's first cloud based multi-tenanted land registry and what that means is that the land registry we've developed we can use not only to do our own work but we can provide land registry for the first time to other users so it's very exciting for us and what it means for our customers is that the land title transactions that used to take days now take seconds are fully automated basic land transaction is down to 23 seconds untouched by human hand which is pretty phenomenal and why so our prediction of big checks coming in and and land registries putting themselves up the sale or maybe not themselves but their ministers certainly putting them for sales things were happening in Australia that were changing so in the time since we've been looking at this the New South Wales government has come to the market for a provider we have South Australia in the market for a provider and Victoria just announced a scoping study to look at what they might do with their land registry so we would argue what we predicted would happen and the dominoes are falling so what was our response as a commercial statutory authority we can form companies we spun off a company called Udbara Udbara is 78% owned by Landgate and 22% owned by a deco which is the multinational parent company of our IT partner Azulon this subsidiary company is able to work outside of the restrictions placed on a government agency like Landgate but obviously the 78% we have a controlling interest Landgate then licensed the IP that we developed around our land registry to Udbara to commercialise so Udbara is now the IT service provider for Landgate to coin a phrase we eat our own dog food so we developed a system when we were the first customer for Udbara Udbara has just been successful as part of the concession in New South Wales and is the technology consultant on the consortium that was successful against strong international competition for the work in New South Wales so for a little company from Western Australia that's pretty exciting for us our second customer of many more the consortium that consortium sort of gets the keys to the New South Wales office probably around July this year so it's going to be a really exciting journey for us to be on and we're obviously looking now at what the other states are doing and what other tourist jurisdictions around the world of which there's approximately 40 all of them who we know through the search we did earlier so if you need a new system come and talk to me Udbara really exemplifies what Landgate's about and our value of innovate and achieve so it was originally an idea put through our innovation program by a staff member Spur on the other hand is our location in Innovation Hub and Spur is all about tomorrow so while we're trying to do things as the best of breed in the world today and tomorrow we formed Spur a year ago to really help grow our own economy to provide government data to start up so that they could build businesses on the back of it and to continually challenge ourselves about how we do things so Spur is about using our knowledge, experience connections and know-how to help others create businesses and by that I mean trying to find a place in government if you have a good start-up idea and you try and find a government department and the data that will help you do it you can be on an endless cycle of phone calls but because we've worked in this space for so long we can have one conversation and really help a start-up get off the ground so in our first year we've got 847 open data sets available from other government agencies for every one of those data sets it's probably about 10, 15, 20 conversations to try and convince them that they should make their data available we've had four start-ups four new businesses launched we've funded nine grants we had our first round of grants we had 47 applicants funded four of them and it really is for us about creating that extra value for government we've also, last year we've been running a formal innovation program in government in Australia since 2008 last year we were named at number 22 in Australia's most innovative companies list so that's across all private public and not-for-profit we're incredibly proud of this number we're a very small agency you know, with quite from the outside what can look like a fairly mundane brief the only public agency that beat us was the CSIRO which is Australia's big scientific research very well funded to give you an idea they're the guys that invented Wi-Fi so I'm actually totally happy to be number 22 just behind the Wi-Fi inventors and for this, this is hugely important for our staff and for the recognition that all of us should have because it takes all of us to innovate and we've we've absolutely encouraged our staff we allow our staff 5% of their time to work on an innovation of any kind doesn't have to be business related and it's it's really paying off for us so of course back to our customers and community we've been relentless about our focus on value creating value for our our masters we've generated $52 million worth of savings in IT just in the next five years we've gone from 900 over 900 to under 600 staff we've delivered $104 million in profit back to government in 10 years we're also shareholders in PECSA the electronic conveyance in company our shareholding has approximately doubled we invested about $35 million it's now conservatively valued at about $70 million and ADBARA you know is just beginning and we really pitch ourselves as a value adder and a value creator for government and it's hugely important to us because this allows us to write our own destiny and not wait for people to come and tell us what to do I have to say that while we saw the opportunity and saw what was coming and have responded to it no one has ever told us we need to do these things however now that we're doing them everyone's saying what a good idea it was that we did so I should also add that these numbers were going through the middle of the global financial crisis so pretty successful and obviously with the decision out of New South Wales you know we hope the world's ADBARA's oyster so dollars are one thing satisfied customers are another so these are our stats our customer stats which we're very proud of our turnaround times are down significantly our backlogs are down significantly and our customer sat is increasing and remains very high so we become more efficient, more focused on delivering what our customers actually want and more technically capable to meet their expectations so the future for us we believe this is just the beginning we've been sharing our knowledge and internationally for over 25 years we've worked both in country and we have a lot of fellowships if you have a group of people in your country that would like to come and spend some time in western Australia please come and talk to me we've worked with countries as diverse as Vietnam, Fiji, Indonesia China, Bhutan, Nepal Africa so and that's across all of the things around registering and securing property rights for economic development I believe you with three takeaways on our journey your people and your customers must be at the heart of everything you do you cannot do any of these changes with technology alone you can't communicate enough you need to communicate and communicate and communicate and when you think you've done enough communicating you probably need to start communicating it is hugely important and the other thing is you need to be resilient you need to be prepared to fail and as we're discovering you also need to be prepared to succeed thanks very much great thank you all very much impressive I have a number of questions before I go are there any questions in the audience we have Mike okay go ahead my question is specifically on Terranet and I was wondering if you have looked at having considered whether this PPP model would be applicable in developing countries and why or why not I would say it's got some applicability and I think about it in two ways there's the PPP model as Terranet was originally established which puts the government and the private consortium together and you share the risk whereas the model as it has evolved today into a consortium the risk transferred to the private sector so in both cases in our world it comes down to the risk and the assessment of risk which goes to technology risk political risk economic risk and while I think you could set it up if you had the confidence that the commitment was there the economy will sustain the business model within the PPP then those are the mechanics that drive the change and advance it and you'd be able to bring the capabilities to bear through that private sector component Hi, my question is to both Canada and Australia my understanding is that in both those countries you have first nations groupings who live on land which is separate and I understand that that's communal land and I was just wondering how that puts into the land registry system if at all Yeah, we do we're actually quite an interesting land rights issue in Australia which I'm sure you probably know more in detail information on it than I do but we have a lot of Aboriginal communities on Crown land that have rights over the land and one of the you know we have some of the issues that I see in the South African examples where how do you prove your rights when it's communal rights so it's quite a complicated structure and while they have rights to live on the land and government provides a lot of services so at the moment government provides schooling, housing health but it's an issue that I don't think we've got nailed yet we have multiple service providers that go out to some of those very very remote areas and some of them are just if you went there you wouldn't see anything there it's but the very strong connection to land for the people is important so we do recognise all of that land through Crown land in the title register and how it's managed is communally and it's also provided by the government at the moment in Canada Aboriginal lands are generally managed federally so this would be the reserves and they are communal or leased so there would be a leasing infrastructure within that so they're not managed within the provincial context or by the provincial registry and the registry services or the registry integrity I would say is light but there's lots of conversations about introducing a titling system into Aboriginal lands I think the other area that comes into play are lands that are in dispute so Aboriginal claims which would be on title blend and the registry does come into play there as you're trying to define the scope of land, the extent of land and those rights Frontenwell, Peter and Julian Hi, thank you for those really interesting presentations my question is to Jodi and to Elizabeth you both touched on the challenge of convincing different government agencies or government departments to share data with each other and there's a clear case of course to be made for the sharing of data and for the kind of sum is greater than or whole is greater than the sum of its parts of combining different data sets making it interoperable to know the challenges around getting different actors to share data with each other I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of the back story of how you succeeded in convincing these parties to play in the same sandbox For us before the agency started it was very difficult for everybody to share data everybody held on to their data once the agency started however we were all in one place so they had to share the data but the problem still occurs because there is actually work going on now to provide a government data sharing policy so that the other departments will also share with us to help improve that database it's still difficult because I have to also remember that some people earn from their data and so when they put it into this big pool they haven't quite figured out yet how to give everybody a little bit of the share of that pie so it's still an ongoing problem that we are working through I guess in another few years we'll sort that out but it's been worked on So we started we have a thing in Western Australia called Wallace for the West Australian land information system and we run another thing, we love acronyms doesn't this industry just love acronyms we also run a thing called the shared location information platform so we've been in those two spaces for Wallace for over 25 years and slip 13 or 14 years and what we did was build the infrastructure and then start the conversations we'll start the conversations and then try and convince people to make their data available so through slip I think we've got almost 3,000 government data sets and we're able to because of how we've developed the platform you can have open and free data you can have open data that the agencies charge back and you can also have data that's not available that's locked down data which agencies can look at but the public can't look at and we've been able to accommodate all of those things but have we got all of the data so no we haven't our government has an open data policy and we have a location information strategy signed off by cabinet but there's no mandate so every data set that we get available through slip is much relationship building conversation giving confidence that the data is going to be safe one of the things we found with our agencies is when you ask them why they won't share their data they say because our data set is not good enough and then you say to them are you making decisions based on your data and they say oh yes we're doing that and you go okay so that's interesting I guess the other thing that I see in WA we're coming off the back of a large mining boom there's been a lot of money in the economy we don't have that and the dropping market is the lowest it's been since the 80s we would be in serious trouble if we had not disrupted ourselves and what I'm seeing in government agencies there's been massive cuts across the board to funding and all of a sudden people who didn't want to share data or wanted to have duplicate services are now coming and saying you know how five years ago you said I could have you know I didn't need my 50 staff to provide the service do you want to have that conversation so for us as things get tighter the opportunity actually increases so you know I'm hoping that some of the people who've had this bastion of staff that they've kept hold of are now going we actually can't afford to duplicate services so I think out of adversity comes opportunity if you're ready to take it but it's a lot of relationship building and it's very very time consuming and you just got to keep at it because it's you know for the benefit of our citizens and our shareholder it's the right thing to do Hi Peter, Rabli again from a media network thank you all for your presentation it's a question for all three of you and perhaps Elizabeth if you would start as you went through the conversion process how big a problem was fraud both in the records and with staff and how did you deal with it and is it an ongoing problem or have you seen that dissipate thank you okay for us fraud was a problem in the registry missing documents documents torn out of the big books if any of you know what that registry looks like and and I think one of the reasons with fraud is because things took so long to be done that people pay the people to get to out near matters quickly we because of the conversion we have done and we know have all the documents scanned and we have more security of data and we put in more secure systems and have because we're still on a paper based system we put in water marks in the documents etc it is made a little bit more difficult for people to make their own titles because people did that does make sense tearing it out of the book anymore because you don't see the book when you come into our offices you know look at it on the on the computer screen so that has improved quite a bit there's no need to pay anybody to get out your documents because you can pay us and get it in one day or you can wait two days and get it or you can wait the normal time which is five days so there's a big improvement in turnaround time has assisted the whole matter for being reduced drastically or the conversion process the public would come to registry offices and could easily access a title book so they could take it out so they wanted to rule out the mortgage or that was a potential I don't think it was viewed as prevalent when a fraud affected an older homeowner that got a lot of attention but it wasn't prevalent what was unknown was a bank because banks don't readily tell the world that there's been fraud on their properties but as the records became automated they became secure and the government saw an opportunity to enhance that through the supporting processes and in the mid-2000s enacted legislation that required lawyers to register transfers of property they had to verify identity so that was part of their function under their practice procedures lawyers were not allowed to act on both sides of a transaction unless they're in northern Ontario where the nearest lawyer was a thousand miles away so there were a number of things that could be actually put in place and enabled by the electronification of the processes and systems so it still happens you still care about it but I would say it's a more secure system and process today but occasionally people they want to set out to do it they may be underway I think similar for us it certainly wasn't prevalent but they work through e-convancing and now automated land registry the e-convancing work has been done with all the registrars the title registrars actually agreeing that e-convancing is the way forward and one of the reasons for that is the security that it gives and so our new land registry that we've developed to fit with that it's certainly our belief in our registrar's belief that the more you automate and go to an electronic model the more secure it is but I agree with Elkin in as much as when people want to they'll try and find a way but we're very aware we had a fraud a few years ago with people copying documents and going through Africa where then someone was away on holidays and that got a lot of media attention and certainly things like verification of identity and other things have been tightened since then so it's not something that happens a lot but we are once is too often we're acutely aware but really the move to electronic convancing and electronic register actually decreases the ability for fraud two more questions actually three we'll go one here and then the lady and then the gentleman in the back I'd like to come back to the idea of disruption which you raised it seems like most of you experienced not only disruptive technology but disruptive economies disruptive institutional factors and it seems like that's not going to go away particularly the technology side and so I'd like to ask each of you to perhaps identify your top three factors that you think provide resilience to land registration systems resilience to the system or resilience do you mean the whole the whole in the face of disruptive change I guess so when I think about something like blockchain I go back to the torrent system where what's really important is the underpinning of that government guarantee of title and the integrity of it and so that as a disruptor it's got to still support that somebody can't just start playing registry in our context anyways and say this is where you're going to come now because it lacks that that government underpinning and integrity of that guarantee to title which is why people are prepared to secure money against property I think one of the things that's really important to the resilience the whole system and the organizations is I've come back to the people it's really important that you spend, that we spend the time changing our culture and getting our culture ready for that because I agree disruption is everywhere and it's not going away so a few years ago when I spoke to our staff and someone put their hand up and said but we're change fatigue we've had all this change and there's more change you know what are you going to do about it and I said at the time if you're change fatigue now you probably need to get another job and that's okay it's actually okay for people to not be comfortable where they are but they need to make a choice to leave them so in my most recent rounds of staff talks where people if people are getting up in the morning and dragging themselves into work and saying I'm going to that place again don't come it really is that simple it's a valid absolutely a valid choice work somewhere where you can you know add value and that fits your values and if that's not us that's cool there's plenty of other places that are so the power of your people and what you can achieve because at the end of the day people you can have all the technology in the world and you have governments and boards and but the people on the ground are the ones that give the customer service and make the change so I would say don't underestimate the value of investing in your people and recognize the time that it takes to do it but disruption is a it's just here and there's not an industry that you can look at to go how could this be more efficient and as a personal plea if anyone's got any great ideas about fixing how you get on an airplane you know in a quicker way then I stand in those queues and I think my god where is the disruption when you need it for Jamaica like Canada and Western Australia we're also on the touring system so we have that very secure base in terms of our title I agree with Jody that people is really the problem because you could do everything but if your persons are not properly trained they don't know how to speak to the customer if they don't know how to calm down that customer who comes in then disruption will continue so we regularly put our staff especially the front line staff back into training as to how to deal with the customers because there's always that one customer who will push the staff over the line so we try and make sure that they are prepared from a technical point or a legal point so that they can answer the questions and be calm Mary Tara Oh Pacific Forum CSIS this is related to the question that was asked earlier about fraud as we digitize more of the property information it opens a new area of concern and that is cyber attack which is much beyond the fraud so as we talk about when we usually think about cyber attack we think of like infrastructure and we think of enormous chaos that we create but if property information is also a target of something like that then that would also be a huge disruption to the economy in many areas so how much of the mindset and the process of security were involved in the creation of the digitization process as well as currently ongoing I just want to throw in one example within the United States the OPM Office of Personal Management held all kinds of personal information and they were stolen massive theft and in general that office is not in the mindset of security but they held the data so I'm just wondering if you can talk about that aspect I can start certainly we are in the mindset that it's really important and it needs to be secure so a couple of things one is when we developed our new registry service and it was cloud based we had quite a lot of questions come from people about the security of the cloud and our argument would be if it's in the cloud it's actually more secure than if it's in a data center somewhere which has a single point of failure whereas with cloud have seamless backups so if something went wrong at one area you can move over I guess the other thing is to cyber security is an ongoing issue and the soon issue fix one whole someone clever and smart it goes through another we've made sure we've had independent verification we actually have one of the worlds leading cyber security areas at one of our universities so we've had independent verification as we've built our system every few months come and test you do everything you need to do it's absolutely front of mind will that mean that we're never impacted possibly not but certainly we recognize what we hold and the importance of it so I think in a modern digital mobile world you have to weigh up the pros and cons I mentioned that we have performance standards that are around data integrity, security availability and ultimately we lose the company we lose the contract if that happens so we do take it very seriously I would say it's proportionally in terms of increases in investment over the last 10 years security would be the highest growth in terms of the required investment just because of how technology is evolving and we do run data centers but they run hot hot, they're dual you've got backups we can duplicate we can still bring it back within