Digitising land and property information

The UK has one of the most valuable property markets in the world with housing being the UK’s biggest store of wealth.

At HM Land Registry for England and Wales, we safeguard land and property ownership, which is valued at £7 trillion, and enable over £1 trillion of personal and commercial lending to be secured against property. We record ownership changes, mortgages, leases and other land and property rights, thus allowing the property market to function efficiently.

We aim to help make conveyancing simpler, faster, and cheaper by continuously improving our services. Key to this is digitising services that will make the process of buying and selling property easier. Building and launching the digital Local Land Charges (LLC) Register was an important part of this.

Local land charges (LLC) are restrictions on the use of property; for example, planning permissions or tree preservation orders. A search of the LLC Register is required when buying a property and allows buyers/lenders to see what restrictions there may be on a property before committing to buying/lending.

We launched our digital LLC Register in July 2018 and have so far migrated the LLCs of seven local authorities onto it.: Warwick, Liverpool, the City of London, Blackpool, the Isles of Scilly, Norwich and Lambeth. This has entailed adding spatial information to each charge and digitising and updating all the datasets. To give you an idea of scale, there are 316 local authorities in England, with around 23 million LLCs. So far, we have transformed over 300,000 records and updated around 60 per cent of these. The quality of the data is of paramount importance, so we are taking the time to do stringent checks before each migration.

Prior to migration, each local authority delivered search results in a different format and layout, with searches taking differing amounts of time, and prices varying between authorities. Once migrated to our central LLC Register, each LLC search result can be delivered in seconds. Access to the online service is 24/7, the results are in a standard, easy-to-read layout, and an official search result costs £15.

Data is being transformed from this:

To this:

We believe there are wider economic benefits to be attributed to digitising the LLC data, which is a keystone to the information required by property investors. We are working with Nationwide Building Society, which wants to access LLC data instantly to inform its decisions in principle on mortgage and remortgage applications. Providing LLC information earlier in the decision-making chain allows more informed investment decisions for the borrower and for lenders.

We are also currently working with more local authorities to migrate them to the central register and have developed new tools which should enable the process to pick up pace.

The digital LLC Register, alongside our other digital innovations such as the digital mortgage, enables customers to make property transactions much more easily, and improves the property market overall.