HM Land Registry has launched its strategy to deliver vision of a more efficient, fully digital property market supported by a modern land registration system, with secure paperless buying and selling of property potentially becoming “the norm” within three years.
The current homebuying process does not meet some basic expectations for a modern, professional service. HM Land Registry will work with the property market to co-create a homebuying process of the future that is quicker, more efficient and more user friendly, under its new strategy launched today, 31st August 2022.
Strategy 2022+, “Enabling a world-leading property market”, sets out how HM Land Registry will transform land registration in England and Wales to cut delays for customers and influence the market to realise the potential of cutting-edge digital tools and solutions.
The next stage in transforming HM Land Registry into a global leader in digital land registration sees the organisation taking on a convening role as it invites the UK property sector to work in partnership to create a simpler, paperless, and transparent process for buying and selling property which will benefit homeowners across the country.
Also published today is the new three-year Business Plan, a clear roadmap for how the organisation will implement the strategy and deliver improvements for customers.
“The strategy comes at a pivotal moment”, said Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar of HM Land Registry, Simon Hayes, adding that “the very high level of activity in the property market in recent times has underlined the urgency with which all players in the market need to work together to improve the system.” He continued:
“With property transactions taking record time to complete, it is imperative that we work as partners to innovate and remove friction so that the process is as quick and painless as possible.
For HM Land Registry, that means a step-change in our offering to customers so that they receive an outstanding, fully digital service.”
Automation will bring speed and resilience
For 160 years now, HM Land Registry has served as the critical institution protecting the right to property and enabling the market to operate. The better land registration works, the better conveyancing and the property market function. As such, HM Land Registry’s Strategy 2022+ is informed by the need to urgently build the organisation’s resilience to volatility in the property market which is the leading cause of application backlogs.
Under the strategy, many more land registration processes will be automated to significantly improve service speeds for customers. Automation, and further investment in their people, will give HM Land Registry the capacity and capability to deliver its services swiftly even in periods of very high demand, ensuring backlogs are a problem of the past.
A significant investment to automate most changes to the land register by 2025 will result in the end-to-end automation of up to 70% of all updates to the register, while maintaining the accurate and fraud-free registers that provide trust and confidence in the property market. Automated applications will be completed within one day – many of them in seconds.
Greater levels of end-to-end automation on simpler application types will also allow the Land Registry to refocus its expert caseworkers onto the more complex applications that demand their expert judgement, reducing wait times for complex property transactions.
HMLR also want to work with conveyancers who are facing the pressure of increasing demand in the market to help reduce inefficiencies elsewhere in the process.
Currently, one in five applications to HM Land Registry (more than 3,500 applications every day) require HMLR to follow up with the applicant to resolve an issue in the application. This increases to around two in three for more complex applications.
This causes extensive delays to the affected applications and HMLR’s average speed of service times. HMLR are working hard to help customers reduce avoidable errors in their applications, which will save both HMLR and conveyancers time and money.
Better access to vital information
A lack of upfront information can cause up to 8% of property transactions to fall through, costing the buyer up to £2,700 per transaction. A new drive to rapidly digitise the information the public and conveyancers need most will allow people to access HM Land Registry’s information on ownership, location, mortgages, local land charges and more in real time, so that when making a decision, people are better informed and buying and selling property is quicker and less uncertain. This will benefit those involved in all types of property transactions, both residential and commercial.
HM Land Registry’s ambitious agenda to work with the property sector to enable property to be bought and sold digitally will see it encouraging the market to adopt new technology – such as digital ID and e-signatures – by introducing new standards and working with property partners to create an open, integrated ecosystem of digital services that support property transactions. This will mean that people only need to provide their information once, rather than sending the same information to different people multiple times throughout the process of a transaction.
Opening up property data to benefit the economy
Strategy 2022+ also sets out HM Land Registry’s commitment to open up property data so that it is more transparent, easier to use and supports a strong, sustainable economy and the UK’s Net Zero targets. For example, the commitment to complete the new instant-access Local Land Charges register within the next four years is expected to add around £3bn to the UK economy.
HMLR is committed to making its data more findable, accessible, interoperable with other data and reusable (or “FAIR”) to increase its potential to generate insight that helps the government and others tackle complex social, environmental and economic challenges. HMLR will continue to energise innovation in the use of property data, in particular through the Digital Street research and development programme and the Geovation accelerator, which has already supported 137 start-ups to develop new products and services and has created more than 1,500 jobs.
HM Land Registry’s strategy is supported by stakeholders from across the property and conveyancing sector.
President of the Law Society of England and Wales, I. Stephanie Boyce, said the Society “welcomes the new business strategy and the focus on digital”. She added:
“Technological change in the conveyancing market, which was accelerated because of the Covid-19 pandemic, continues at pace.
We look forward to continuing to work with Land Registry and the industry more widely to further digitise the conveyancing process, to promote better and earlier decision-making and make residential property transactions smoother for buyers and sellers.”
Beth Rudolf, Director of Delivery at the Conveyancing Association, said:
“In the past, HM Land Registry’s five-year strategic plans have referenced the move to digital/machine-readable and the creation of notional registers but this time it has already started the process through the delivery of the Digital Registration Service.
This is very encouraging in an industry where we need to be able to deliver digitally for the consumer and other stakeholders in order to reduce the waste of the extended transaction times and fall-through rates, and to enable the consumer to understand the implications of the title on their intended use and enjoyment to reduce claims and therefore PII premiums.”
CLC Chief Executive Sheila Kumar added:
“We welcome HM Land Registry’s Business Strategy Paper, and particularly its focus on core projects to improve how the conveyancing process can be made more effective and beneficial for all parties.
The CLC has a keen interest in all of the projects and believe if successfully implemented, they have the potential to deliver significant positive change for those involved in the home buying and selling process.
We have also worked with and supported HMLR on many projects before and look forward to doing so again on these new and ongoing plans to deliver improvements to the conveyancing process for both consumers and firms.”
