Peterborough became the 8th local authority to migrate and digitise their local land charges (LLC) with HM Land Registry (HMLR).
Peterborough now join Warwick District Council, Liverpool, City of London, Blackpool, Isles of Scilly, Norwich and Lambeth.
However, HMLR have learnt extensive lessons throughout the opening year with an emphasis on pre-migration becoming a priority in the future. It is hoped that this will reduce time scales moving forward.
Currently, each local authority migration is taking between eight and nine months to complete.
At the current rate, it is predicted that it would take 18 years to migrate all local authorities which is why improving processes has been so important.
In all, there are approximately 23 million charges to migrate from the 316 English local authorities.
HMLR would like to manage between 50 and 60 migrations at any one time. However, they were preparing 22 local authorities with nine in flight at the end of 2019.
By the end of 2020, a target of 60 local authorities in pre-migration had been set.
Watford will also join the digital LLC local authority community on Thursday 6th February.
Karina Singh, Director of Transformation at HM Land Registry, said:
“Migrating Peterborough to our national LLC Register is a significant milestone for us as it’s the largest number of paper records that we’ve digitised so far. This will make life easier for property buyers across the area, providing round the clock online access to the information they need.
Michelle Abbott, senior lawyer for Peterborough City Council, said:
“We are proud to be the eighth local authority in the country to transfer its land charges data to HM Land Registry’s digital service.
“Speeding up the property-buying process benefits ourselves, our residents and our businesses.
“Improving the quality and ease of access to over 30,000 local land charges will improve the experience of buying and selling properties in the Peterborough area.”
