The speed of turnaround of local authority searches is a postcode lottery with some councils turning search requests round in 24 hours, while the worst offenders are taking nearly 2 months.
The average turnaround time for a local authority search in England and Wales is 11.5 days according to recent research by quick-buy firm Spring. The speediest councils include Salisbury District Council, St. Edmundsbury Borough Council, Forest Heath District Council, North Wiltshire District Council and Taunton Deane Borough Council.
However Canterbury City Council and Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council take 60 days on average to return a local authority search, with the 10 worst councils averaged 42.5 days, nearly a month longer than the national average.
| Top ten slowest local authority searches | Turnaround (Average Days) |
| Bridgend County Borough Council | 35 |
| Royal Borough of Greenwich | 35 |
| Oldham MBC | 35 |
| Hackney London Borough | 35 |
| Salford City Council | 40 |
| Tamworth Borough Council | 40 |
| Islington London Borough Council | 40 |
| Camden London Borough | 45 |
| Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council | 60 |
| Canterbury City Council | 60 |
Commenting on the research, Cormac Henderson, executive chairman at Spring, said although local authority search turnarounds play a part in the speed of property transactions, an increase in the average conveyancing caseload per firm and a fall in the number of practitioners has exacerbated the issue.
“There is a vast discrepancy in local authority search times across the country which can be driven by various factors including property demand, staffing and resource levels in each area. While there are some winners getting searches returned in less than 24 hours that does not necessarily mean a faster overall conveyancing process. At the bottom end, those in slower areas are waiting up to 5,900% longer, which can contribute to a greatly protracted and stressful moving saga.
“When put into the mix with waning demand and a shortage of buyers in some areas, slow processes, under resourced departments and chains collapsing, this presents a real headache for movers who just want to get on with it.”
Adding average caseloads have increased by 79% over the past decade, accompanied by a 13% fall in the number of practitioners working in residential conveyancing from September 2021 to October 2023.
Work to digitise the process of collating Local Authority searches recently hit a milestone with the 100th Broxbourne became the 100th local authority to migrate its local land charges (LLC) data to the national Local Land Charges Register. Since the programme was launched in 2018, more than 6.5 million data items across England and Wales have been cleansed, digitised and standardised. In the authorities where the LLC1 data has been migrated the time taken to obtain LLC information has fallen from an average 12.5 days to instantaneous.
