Land Registry: Progress but more to do
Efforts to reduce the number of avoidable requisitions that the HM Land Registry has to make are working, new figures have shown.
Six months after receiving their avoidable requisition figures individually, nearly 30% of law firms and other business customers have reduced them.
The proportion of customers with an avoidable requisition rate under 1% has risen from 17% to 20%.
Andrew Robertson, HMLR’s head of customer policy and service improvement, said: “But there is more to do: the average is 4.6%. Sixteen customers have an avoidable requisition rate of 20% or more, with 28.57% being the highest; 294 customers have an avoidable rate of 10% or more.
This is soon to become public, with HMLR publishing every law firm’s avoidable requisition rate next month; currently, it just details how many requisitions firms have received each quarter.
Figures last year showed that 22% of the more than 4.4m applications received in the previous 12 months (947,000) required a requisition, each containing an average of two points, but many with more.
As well as adding on average 15 working days to the time it took for a transaction to be registered, HMLR estimated that requisitions could be costing lawyers as much as £19m, with £3.6m attributable just to getting names wrong.
It identified 30 of the most common administrative mistakes, from missing documents and witness details to incomplete or unsigned forms, as avoidable requisitions, which could be addressed before sending in the application.
Then, in May, HMLR emailed all customers who had 10 or more completed applications in the previous six month with details of their avoidable requisitions, along with links to free training and support – nearly 9,000 attendees from more than 1,640 firms have taken part in 18 online workshops so far.
Overall, since May, 29% of firms have received fewer requisitions, said Mr Robertson. “We continue to enhance our training for customers and are introducing automated checks to help improve application quality.” These aim to catch common mistakes before submission.
He added that independent research by data and market research company Savanta showed fewer customers reporting frustrations with requisition handling.
