The purpose of valuation rolls was to allow local authorities to have access to an accurate survey of the ownership, tenancy and occupancy of all properties (except those exempted) within each county or parliamentary burgh, to allow rates (local taxation based on rental value of properties) to be levied annually by local authorities (such as county councils, town councils, parochial boards and school boards) to levy local rates for services like poor relief, education, policing and public health.
The Assessor in each county or parliamentary burgh had to draw up a valuation roll by 15 August each year, to allow appeals by any owners and occupiers who disputed the rateable values by 15 September following. Once the appeal process had ended, the resulting roll was authenticated and was made available for public inspection. The roll was in force from Whitsunday in the year of collection to the Whitsunday following. In Scotland the legal quarter day of Whitsunday (or whitsun) was fixed at 15 May.
To summarise this process, using the example of the 1915 valuation roll shown above, the staff of the Assessor for the Burgh of Edinburgh would have carried out a survey of properties between autumn 1914 and summer 1915 and compiled the roll by 15 August 1915. It would purport to show the property owners, tenants and occupiers of each property in Edinburgh at 15 May 1915. After appeals had been dealt with and corrections made, the roll would be made available for public inspection on or before 15 September 1915.
Every six years the County Clerk or Town Clerk (or other custodian of the valuation rolls in each county or burgh) had to send copies of the six preceding valuation rolls to Register House in Edinburgh to become part of the national series of valuation rolls and it is this series which is held by National Records of Scotland (NRS). This periodic transmission also explains why some valuation rolls (especially for some small burghs) are bound up in 6-year volumes.
This timing of any changes to ownership of occupancy of a building can have consequences for when the changes appear in the valuation rolls. For example, if a tenant moved into a house in late 1915, after the assessor’s survey had been carried out, he or she would not normally appear in the 1915-16 roll and would first appear as tenant at this property in the 1916-17 roll deposited at General Register House.
So much for the theory. In practice, the way that each Assessor dealt with corrections and changes to the rolls varied and researchers and archivists frequently find anomalies in the recording of changing ownership and occupation of buildings (and of new buildings appearing for the first time). Local authority archives sometimes hold working copies of valuation rolls which have been marked up in manuscript by the Assessor's staff, which show changes during the year.
Occasionally these manuscript changes are visible in the General Register House copies too, where a local Assessor has sent a working copy as one of the batches for preservation to Edinburgh.
A time-lag of one or more years is sometimes encountered, where someone using valuation rolls for legal purposes or historical research has evidence that a building was completed and in occupation or a change took place in one year, which ought to have been represented in the following year's valuation roll, but the change is not recorded until the roll two or more years after the change. For example, a new tenant might have taken a lease of a property in December 1894 and should therefore be recorded as tenant in the 1895-6 valuation roll, but does not appear until the 1896-7 roll. This unexpected time-lag is a very frequent occurrence in local archives and in NRS and it is hard to account for it and should be borne in mind when using valuation rolls for research.
