Land Registry: Insufficient investment in technology
HM Land Registry (HMLR) will have “automated almost all simple requests to change the register” by 2035, offering “a near-instant service” for home buying and selling.
By this time, staff will “spend almost all their time directly serving customers with complex needs or supporting them quickly when things go wrong”.
The body set out its ambitions in its Strategy 2025+ published this week, noting that “a lot has changed” since its Strategy 2022+.
During that time, HMLR said, it had introduced “new digital-by-default applications for customers, new automation and new people capacity”.
By 2035, it will have made it easy for people to update simple changes to their property ownership details themselves, and information will be “near instant and accurate”.
Along with automating “almost all simple requests to change the register”, HMLR would be “automating more complex cases, alongside experts who are providing human quality assurance, decision-making and focused customer support”.
The aim was to provide “reliable and fast services, regardless of the market demand”, with property information “available and instantly accessible online”.
HMLR will also complete the creation of a register that shares property information as spatial data, “so it can be viewed and used by others in countless ways to map the data they are most interested”.
Meanwhile, staff at the organisation will have gone through “workforce transition”, so they “spend almost all their time directly serving customers with complex needs or supporting them quickly when things go wrong”.
HMLR said it had made “good progress” with offering fast and reliable automated services, digitally handling nearly 22m information requests and a million updates to the register of property title “almost instantaneously, each year”.
There was a single digital register for local land charges.
But it acknowledged that the property system in England and Wales was still “slow, complicated” and lacking in “modern digital experiences”.
A quarter of transactions did not complete, “causing a financial loss of around £400m for those trying to sell”. A digital property market “would help fix this”.
HMLR conceded that, like “many public bodies”, it had not invested enough in technology and was “struggling with maintaining legacy systems which are not serving our customers, or us, well”.
“We must embrace new technology at the same time as protecting our customers, our registers and services from the inevitable cyberattacks and threats that will come from malicious users of the same technology.
“We must fix and update our technology if we are to be able to provide our customers with the trustworthy, accurate, digital and 21st-century services they rightly expect.”
The aim, by 2035, was to have created a “geospatial and fully digital land register where vital property information such as ownership, leasehold, rights of way, covenants, contractual arrangements and boundaries is accessed in a way that allows layers of our data to be viewed, interrogated and overlaid against other geographical information layers”.
This would save developers “time and money because they can directly collect, process and analyse vast amounts of our spatial data in real time”.
Iain Banfield, interim chief executive and chief land registrar, commented: “Strategy 2025+ represents our commitment to unlock a better, faster and less stressful property market for everyone through improved digital services, enhanced expertise, and customer-centric approaches.
“This transformation will play a key role in supporting government ambitions – from building new homes and regenerating places, to unlocking clean energy infrastructure and transforming planning.”
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