The future of the conveyancing process is informed by digitised data, in which transactions are both wholly digital and wholly secure, and the financial value of property is easier to realise. HMLR has a critical role to play in enabling these changes and ensuring the resultant system is consistent with the vision laid out in the UK Digital Strategy, namely a system that ‘works for everyone, not just the privileged few’.
A vision of a world-leading property market
Planning for the Future White Paper
Property data has a vital role to play in supporting the development of new housing stock by helping private and public sector organisations identify land that may be suitable for housing. The proposals in the Planning for the Future White Paper for a digital-first planning system depend on being able to use HMLR’s data, as does the Geospatial Commission’s plans to prepare the UK for electric vehicles and autonomous transport over the next five years (UK Geospatial Strategy). Furthermore, the role and future use of land (and therefore land data) to address sustainability challenges creates opportunities for environmental gains alongside economic and social ones. The true value of the geospatial and personal datasets we own is likely to be considerably greater, offering significant potential to drive innovation over the coming decades.
Digital economy
Our transformation is well underway and you can read more in our Business Plan 2022-2025. HMLR is a founding member of the Geospatial Commission and, in partnership with Ordnance Survey, our property innovation accelerator programme (Geovation) is already propelling the growing digital economy through a new wave of start-ups. We have already reshaped the law to enable digital conveyancing and recently reached the milestone of registering 10,000 digitally signed mortgages.
While most of our registration queries are already fully automated our plans for the future envisage a radical overhaul of the registration process through a fully digital end-to-end process.
Our digital Local Land Charges Programme offers proof of concept for how we can level the playing field for our citizens, improving access to information about a property and its neighbourhood across local authority boundaries, which can also help with planning and improving community cohesion.
New strategy
In August 2022, HMLR published a revised strategy with a focus on the economic and social benefits that can be derived from our data. More detail on our strategy can be found here.
At the heart of the new plan lies an aim to dramatically increase the use of digital data at all stages of the conveyancing process. This will allow much more information to be available, more quickly, to everyone with an interest in any property. Land registration is a part of every transaction and so ensuring that data is accurate, available, and integrated is critical to much-needed improvements in the process of buying and selling properties. It will also pave the way for HMLR to achieve its long-held ambition to automate many more of our processes, including our most straightforward applications and casework decisions. This will increase our basic speed of service, make us much more resilient to changes in demand, and reduce the likelihood of backlogs and service delays.
It will also allow our expert workforce to focus on those areas where human involvement makes the most difference: complex, technical registration issues, and providing a brilliant service to our customers and partners.
Leadership
To take us through our transformation we have put together a leadership team with Non-Executive Board Members from FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100 companies, to sit alongside HMLR’s own expertise from across government and the wider public sector. In 2023 we launched the Digital Property Market Steering Group bringing together the most influential stakeholders across the marker to remove barriers and spearhead a concerted drive away from paper-based processes and embrace transactions through interoperable date.