Foreword
National Records of Scotland (NRS) is gathering views to inform the proposed Scottish Register of Tartans Fees Amendment Order 2025.
Since 2009, NRS has maintained and overseen the Scottish Register of Tartans (the Register). The Register is internationally recognised as the pre-eminent repository for the promotion and preservation of tartans. With more than 10,000 tartans, the Register promotes and protects information about one of Scotland’s most recognisable cultural assets.
NRS is a non-ministerial department in the devolved Scottish administration. As such the Scottish Public Finance Manual (the Manual) applies to NRS. Guidance in the Manual states that our fees should recover the costs of the services we provide. Fees relating to the Register have not changed since they were first set in 2009. That means that NRS currently do not recover the costs of the service. Scottish Ministers set the fees through secondary legislation and have agreed, in principle, to amend the fees to recover the costs of the service. This consultation seeks stakeholders’ views on our proposed new fees.
Your valuable insights will help ensure that the Register continues to tell the story of tartan for current and future generations in Scotland and across the world.
Alison Byrne, OBE
Keeper of the Scottish Register of Tartans
Consultation purpose
Scottish Ministers intend to revise the fees associated with the Scottish Register of Tartans. The fees have not changed since they were first set in 2009 and consequently NRS is not able to recover our direct operational costs associated with the Register. Without a review of the existing tartans fees, there are significant risks that the service may diminish because of a lack of appropriate funding. Scottish Ministers have agreed in principle that the fees should increase. This consultation therefore seeks your views on our proposals to revise the fees. NRS will use your views to make recommendations to Scottish Ministers, who will make the final decision as to the appropriate fee level.
Context and background
The Scottish Register of Tartans
In 2008 the Scottish Parliament passed the Scottish Register of Tartans Act (the Act). The Act established the Scottish Register of Tartans. The Keeper of the Register of Tartans (the Keeper) maintains and oversees the Register and new registrations. The Act:
- created a publicly held and maintained register of tartans
- set up a system for registering new tartan designs
- provided a statutory definition of tartan for the purposes of the Register
- conferred on the Keeper the functions of keeping and maintaining the Register and overseeing the registration of new tartan designs
- provided the Keeper with a power to charge for services provided in relation to the Register, such as registration of new tartans and provision of copy material from the Register.
Registering a tartan does not confer any intellectual property rights such as copyright or design rights. Nor does it affect any existing intellectual property rights.
The purpose of the Register is to promote and preserve information about historic and contemporary tartans from Scotland and the world. The Register fulfils its purpose by acting as a repository for the preservation of tartans and a source of information about tartans.
The NRS Chief Executive, Alison Byrne, acts as the Keeper. NRS administers and manages the Register, under instruction of the Keeper. The Register was launched on 5 February 2009 and now holds over 10,000 tartans, with around a further 400 registered each year. The public can search the register through the Scottish Register of Tartans website.
The Act gives Scottish Ministers the power to set the fees relating to the Register by way of an order. For example, customers currently pay a fee of £70 to register a new tartan. Scottish Ministers set the fees in 2009 when the Register was first established and have not reviewed them since then.
Scottish Public Finance Manual
The Manual provides guidance to public bodies on the proper handling and reporting of public funds. It emphasises the need for economy, efficiency and effectiveness and promotes good practice and high standards of propriety. The Manual is relevant and applicable to NRS since NRS is a non-ministerial department in the devolved Scottish administration.
The Manual provides guidance on charging for goods and services. The standard approach to setting charges for public services is full cost recovery. It is also good practice to set fees to recover accumulated past deficits. The Manual states:
Running costs
The direct costs to NRS of running the tartans service in 2023-24 was around £60,000. Yet our income from tartan fees was only about £31,000 – a loss of £29,000. The most frequently used service is registering tartans. In the year 2023-24, 87% of service requests were registration applications, accounting for over 90% of our tartan fee income. Tartans registrations have been increasing in recent years:
| Year |
Registration |
Income |
| 2020-21 |
304 |
£21,280 |
| 2021-22 |
357 |
£24,990 |
| 2022-23 |
398 |
£27,860 |
| 2023-24 |
400 |
£28,000 |
We expect this trend to continue.
Enabling power
The Register is underpinned by legislation. Section 14 of the Act states:
“(1) The Scottish Ministers may by order specify—
- the fee payable in respect of matters mentioned in this Act for which an appropriate fee is payable,
- other matters in relation to the Register in respect of which fees are payable and the amount of such fees.
(2) The power to make an order under subsection (1) is to be exercised by statutory instrument; and a statutory instrument containing such an order is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of the Scottish Parliament.”
The schedule of the Scottish Register of Tartans Fees Order 2009 (the Fees Order) sets out the current fees payable for services provided by the Keeper. The fees are detailed in table 1:
Framed certificates
For several years NRS has not offered framed certificates. We struggled to find a supplier that could provide good quality frames at the price specified in the Fees Order. Many frames were being damaged in the post, especially those that were sent overseas. Demand for this option is minimal. We have received very few queries about framed certificates since we stopped offering them in 2019. To align the Fees Order with our services and to manage customers’ expectations, we propose removing reference to framed certificates from the Fees Order.
Certificate of inclusion
Before the Register was established in February 2009, there were three independent, non-statutory registers: the Scottish Tartans Society, the Scottish Tartans World Register and the Scottish Tartans Authority. Tartans in these registers were automatically included in the Scottish Register of Tartans on its creation. NRS have not routinely produced certificates confirming their inclusion in the Register, but we are occasionally asked for such certificates. We will only provide them to people associated with the tartan, for example, the designer, the owner or a close family member. Evidence of ownership is usually required. NRS propose that the fee for such a certificate will be £32 in line with the fee for a copy of a certificate of registration.
Postage and packaging
The current fees are inclusive of postage and packaging. We don’t propose to change this. The revised fees will also include postage and packaging costs.
Questions
Question 1
Do you agree that NRS should recover its costs for delivering the tartans service?
Please explain your answer or provide more information.
Question 2
Do you have any comments on the proposed revised fees as set out in Table 2?
Please explain your answer or provide more information.
Question 3
Do you agree that future fees relating to the Scottish Register of Tartans should increase with inflation?
Please explain your answer or provide more information.
Question 4
Do you agree that NRS should discontinue providing framed certificates?
Please explain your answer or provide more information.
Responding to the consultation
We invite responses to this consultation by 23:59 on 29 June 2025.
Please respond to this consultation using the Scottish Government’s consultation hub, Citizen Space. You can access and respond to this consultation online. You can save and return to your responses while the consultation is still open. Please ensure that consultation responses are submitted before the closing date of 23:59 on 29 June 2025.
If you are unable to respond using our consultation hub, please complete the Respondent Information Form and send to:
Policy Team Leader
National Records of Scotland
HM General Register House
2 Princes Street
Edinburgh
EH1 3YY
Handling your response
If you respond using the consultation hub, you will be directed to the About You page before submitting your response. Please indicate how you wish your response to be handled and whether you are content for your response to published. If you ask for your response not to be published, we will regard it as confidential and treat it accordingly.
NRS is subject to the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. We would therefore consider any request made to us under the Act for information relating to responses made to this consultation exercise.
If you are unable to respond via Citizen Space, please complete and return the Respondent Information Form included in this document (see supporting documents). To find out how we handle your personal data, please see our privacy notice.
Next steps in the process
Where respondents have given permission for their response to be made public, and after we have checked that they contain no defamatory material, we will make responses available to the public online. If you use the consultation hub to respond, you will receive a copy of your response via email.
Following the closing date, all responses will be analysed and considered along with any other available evidence to help us. An analysis report will also be made available.
Comments and complaints
If you have any comments about how this consultation exercise has been conducted, please send them to the contact address above or email enquiries@tartanregister.gov.uk.
Consultation process
Consultation is an essential part of the policymaking process. It gives us the opportunity to consider your opinion and expertise on a proposed area of work.
You can find all our consultations online. Each consultation details the issues under consideration, as well as a way for you to give us your views, either online, by email or by post.
Responses will be analysed and used as part of the decision-making process, along with a range of other available information and evidence. We will publish a report of this analysis for every consultation. Depending on the nature of the consultation exercise the responses received may:
- indicate the need for policy development or review.
- inform the development of a particular policy.
- help decisions to be made between alternative policy proposals.
- be used to finalise legislation before it is implemented.
While details of circumstances described in a response to a consultation exercise may usefully inform the policy process, consultation exercises cannot address individual concerns and comments, which should be directed to the relevant public body.
