A regular survey carried out by Ipsos Mori has revealed that levels of customer satisfaction with HM Land Registry (HMLR) have fallen for the second consecutive year, as reported by The Law Society Gazette.
HMLR says it will improve service speed after the survey findings which appeared in their latest annual report.
A quarterly survey is conduced by Ipsos Mori tracking the percentage of customers rating the registry’s overall service as “eight” on a scale of one to 10. The findings showed that in 2022-23, “60% of customers rated its services as good to excellent, compared with 63% in 2021-22”.
Prior to 2019-2020 – when customer satisfaction was reported to be 67% – data for this specific key performance measure was not gathered.
In 2020-21 satisfaction peaked at 70% before falling to 63% in 2021-22. For the second year in a row, customers’ trust in the integrity and accuracy of the registers decreased.
In 2019-20, 78% of clients gave Land Registry’s capacity to maintain the registers accuracy and integrity an 8-10 rating. In 2020-21, trust peaked at 80% before declining to 77% in 2021-22 and 72% in 2022-23.
When this specific performance indicator was developed, the risk to the integrity of the register was rated as one in 2021-22, but it has since increased to 1.2 in 2022-23.
The metric is an early warning indicator that provides a view of the frequency of errors and their potential impact and it does not assess the overall integrity of the register of title, the report says. The Land Registry stated that this year it would focus on “targeted improvement activities as we process our oldest and most complex applications”.
The positive news is that Land Registry produced 99.5% of applications in 2022-23 – an increase from 97.88% in 2021-22 when comparing the percentage of applications completed to those received, as The Law Society reported.
Excluding the time spend waiting for a customer response and other third-party actions, the processing time of application to amend or generate new register entries more than halved from 16 median working days in 2022-23 compared to 38 in 2021-22.
A conveyancer must wait 350 days in 2022-23 – an increase from 206 days in 2021-22 – for all known changes to be registered in the register.
The figures, according to the research, take into account the time an application spends with Land Registry, any time it may need to go through a tribunal, and any time it spends with a customer or third part to supply extra information.
