The government will publish a landmark roadmap setting out the steps it will take for a “once in a generation” change to home buying and selling, Baroness Taylor of Stevenage told the Propertymark One conference on Friday.
Baroness Taylor, the parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, told the 2000-strong crowd that the current system is “slow, costly and uncertain”, and “reform is needed to drive improvements for consumers and property professionals who lose millions each year”.
According to Baroness Taylor, reforms will include upfront information to “give buyers the clarity they need at an early stage”, along with a code of practice for property agents including mandatory qualifications.
There will be a strong focus on the accessibility and sharing of property data, Baroness Taylor said, with the government planning to make “full use of digital information”.
“The current lack of accessible data can’t continue”, she said, adding the secretary of state for housing and the Department for Science, Trade and Industry had been “discussing the potential benefits of smart data property schemes” that share information quickly and securely.
The government will also bring forward “significant reforms” to commonhold and leasehold, which will be “carefully considered, properly sequenced, proportionate and fair, real and irreversible”.
Pre-legislation scrutiny was the first step of reform, the Baroness said, with the committee’s reporting providing a “valuable set of recommendations to strengthen the draft bill.”
Earlier in the conference, Conservative MP Sir Mel Stride said scrapping stamp duty was a “central part of [the Conservative] agenda”.
Stamp duty has “an adverse effect right across the economy” he said, and its “damaging effects will grow worse and worse”.
He added: “Stamp duty isn’t the only problem in the housing market. The planning systems is in urgent need of reform. Stamp duty is the easy part, the simple lever the government could pull but is choosing not to.
“[The government] is quietly allowing the problem to become worse as time goes by, failing our economy and failing our young people.”
But speaking in a question and answer session after Sir Mel’s speech, former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner insisted the government is addressing challenges that had been “around for a decade”. 
Answering questions that had been submitted by the audience, Rayner acknowledged the government needed to “turbo-boost the work that has already been started”, but said there is a package of reforms that is driving “a cultural change”.
“We haven’t invested into critical infrastructure in decades”, Rayner pointed out. “That comes out in frustrations at local elections, and people say if we do this, this will happen – that’s not true.
“There isn’t one lever – there are a lot of complex issues.”
Reforms including the mayoral planning model, local plans, and changes to the right to buy system are instilling confidence into councils and local authorities and bringing about a cultural shift, Rayner said.
“There are genuine concerns around transport and services and a lack of infrastructure with large developments,” she explained. “To see a massive uptake in housebuilding we have to look at the other challenges like dentistry and the transport system. There are so many challenges.
‘We’re giving local authorities the means to bring more planners on board. Those things will start to make a difference.”
When questioned about the Labour party’s power struggles, Rayner said she isn’t interested “in playing leadership pinball” – but noticeably refused to rule herself out of any challenge.
More important, she said, was a commitment to delivering the party’s manifesto promises, pointing out that when criticism had been levelled it was “when we deviated from the manifesto”.
In response to Sir Mel’s commitment to scrapping stamp duty, which he said would save at least twice the £9 billion cost elsewhere, Rayner said: “Abolishing stamp duty has a £14 billion cost. You can say something on a headline but there are choices that have to be made.”
One Response
There is a powerful irony in the minister’s remarks yesterday that conveyancing is “slow, costly and uncertain,” because they reveal just how deeply the government has absorbed the law tech sector’s narrative while overlooking its own role in creating the very problems it now seeks to solve.
The profession has warned that Australia’s experience with e‑conveyancing is a warning, not a blueprint. Centralised digital platforms do not simplify the system; they concentrate power, increase costs, and leave practitioners carrying unacceptable professional risks they do not create. Yet the government seems determined to repeat the same experiment, convinced by the promise of magical digital pipelines that bear little resemblance to the realities of UK property law.
What is most striking, however, is the government’s inability to join the dots. Just as with its commonhold agenda, it is blundering through a property landscape it barely understands, and doing so while ignoring the single greatest source of delay, cost and uncertainty in the system: its own vast AML edifice. No amount of portals or “innovation” will compensate for a regulatory mountain that has grown so heavy it now distorts the entire home‑moving process.
If reform is to mean anything, it must begin with honesty. The profession is not the problem. The technology sector is certainly not the saviour. And conveyancing will not be fixed by importing models that have already shown their limits abroad.
Real change starts with understanding conveyancing as it is, not as the law tech sector’s slogans would have it.