Corporate report

Performance report

Published 16 July 2020

Overview

The purpose of the overview is to give a summary of HM Land Registry, its purpose and performance against objectives.

Our ambition

HM Land Registry is committed to becoming the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data, and aiming to achieve comprehensive registration by 2030.

Our mission

Your land and property rights: guaranteed and protected.

Our primary role

Land is our nation’s greatest asset. Clarity and security of land ownership is essential to a functioning property market. A healthy market is essential to a successful economy and society. Land is used to support all dimensions of life – agricultural, business, social and personal. Its financial value may fluctuate, but its vital role in life remains the same.

We provide that necessary clarity and security in property ownership and interests. We do this by maintaining a land register of more than 25 million land and property titles in England and Wales estimated to be worth around £7 trillion. The records are state guaranteed. This supports secured lending on £1-1.5 trillion of property. We enable property transactions to be registered accurately, efficiently and safely. This provides trust and confidence in the property market and thereby in the economy generally.

Our values

• We give assurance
• We have integrity
• We drive innovation
• We are professional

Our statutory duties

HM Land Registry is a non-ministerial government department established in 1862.

The Land Registration Act 2002 empowers us to deal with “the business of registration” and is our primary governing statute. Our income from fees covers all of our costs under normal operating conditions.

The head of HM Land Registry is the Chief Land Registrar, appointed under statute by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) who has Parliamentary responsibility for HM Land Registry and for the legislation under which we operate.

The Infrastructure Act 2015 enabled HM Land Registry to start to compile a national register of local land charges.

Our culture

At HM Land Registry:

• we have a proud history and rich heritage – for more than 150 years we have protected property ownership and underpinned the modern economy
• our people are important – we want to be the most inclusive employer in government, ensuring fair and equal opportunities for all
• we are open, honest and treat everyone with respect – we trust each other and celebrate our people because we are proud of who they are
• we have a shared sense of belonging and help each other – we connect with each other to feel supported, comfortable and appreciated
• everyone’s voice matters – we encourage respectful challenge and value all opinions and contributions
• we focus on being highly skilled and knowledgeable – we are empowered, accountable and responsible for our own work
• we provide a brilliant service to our customers – we aim for excellence, balancing efficiency and productivity with quality and integrity
• we create confidence by being resilient and responsive but also calm and relaxed – we are adaptable, flexible and able to work at pace
• we encourage our people to be innovative and continuously improve what we do and how we do it
• we make tackling challenges fun and exciting through collaborative teams, new technology and new ways of working
• our leaders are supportive – we focus on coaching and developing ourselves and others to achieve our best with confidence – positive and energised leaders involve others to achieve better outcomes and help us grow stronger

Our services

HM Land Registry provides an extraordinary breadth of services whose simple purpose is to maintain clarity and security in property ownership and secured lending and to support swift transactions. We have provided the trust and confidence the market and economy need through being expert and having integrity in all we do.

HM Land Registry at a glance

35.6 million service requests

£305.9 million total income

94.8% applications received through electronic channels

Proportion of applications received electronically, excluding bulk register updates. Bulk register updates accounted for around 2.7% of all applications in 2019/20, and are excluded because the numbers of such applications are very variable.

25.8 million registered titles

90% customers surveyed who rate our services as good, very good or excellent

£88,116 raised for charity

5,787 employees (5,189 full-time equivalent)

Gender	Percentage of employees
Female	60.5%
Male	39.5%

33.9% part time employees

80 apprentices

Our role in the property market

What our customers ask

Looking for a property:

• what’s available close to home?
• how big is the garden?
• how big is the car park?

Arranging a mortgage:

• how much can I borrow?
• what’s the property worth?
• are there other loans secured against the property?

Before the exchange:

• is the land registered?
• who owns the property?
• is there an outstanding mortgage?

Exchange of contract:

• is the offer protected?
• has the seller’s conveyancer searched the register?

Completion:

• has my loan been secured?
• has the sale of the property been completed?

Living and working in the property:

• are my details up to date?
• how can I stop myself being a victim of property fraud?
• I need to remortgage

Examples of our services that can help at every stage

Looking for a property:

• register view
• Price Paid Data

Arranging a mortgage:

• land charges search
• house price index
• bankruptcy search
• guaranteed queries

Before the exchange:

• search of the index map (search of the national map)
• official copy of a register entry

Exchange of contract:

• official search (completion priority protection)

Completion:

• register updates
• registering new titles

Living and working in the property:

• Property Alert (free property monitoring service)
• digital mortgage

Our services

Register change services

When things change, the register needs to be updated accurately. Properties are sold, homes and office buildings are remortgaged and owners get married or property is transferred when owners pass away. When buildings are split into flats, portions of land are sold on and new developments completed, new titles need to be created. Changing the register can be complex so this is where our expert caseworkers focus their technical knowledge and experience.

Register change services	Register updates	Transfers of part	New leases	First registrations	Total
Service requests	5.4 million	0.2 million	0.2 million	0.1 million	5.9 million

Register change services	Register updates	Transfers of part	New leases	First registrations	Total
Income	£138.6 million	£37.1 million	£24 million	£14.2 million	£213.9 million

Guaranteed queries

Our search of the index map, official copies and official searches services provide protection and assurance to property professionals and citizens by protecting transactions while the transfer is completed. These services are largely automated so customers can get their results instantly, making conveyancing faster.

Guaranteed queries	Official copies	Official searches	Searches of the index map (SIMs)	Total
Service requests	17.3 million	2.6 million	0.8 million	20.7 million

Guaranteed queries	Official copies	Official searches	Searches of the index map (SIMs)	Total
Income	£52.1 million	£7.8 million	£1.1 million	£61 million

Information services

We hold one of the largest transactional geospatial property databases in Europe and since 1990 our register has been open to the public. Our online services let people check whether a property is registered (without the specific details), check the progress of their request and receive notifications to protect their property against fraud for free. For a small fee anyone can get an instant snapshot of the details for any registered property.

Information services	Views of the register	MapSearch	Total
Service requests	6.6 million	1.2 million	7.8 million

Information services	Views of the register	MapSearch	Total
Income	£19.5 million	£0 (free)	£19.5 million

Other services

Our Local Land Charges service can reveal whether a property has restrictions on its use. Our Land Charges service protects certain interests in unregistered land and we maintain the bankruptcy index for England and Wales. Our Agricultural Credits Department maintains a register of short-term loans secured on agricultural assets.

The information in our register is valuable to a wide range of users. Our data supports entrepreneurs, informs buyers and lenders and facilitates transparency to combat fraud and corruption.

Other services	Land and Agricultural Credits	Non-statutory and commercial income	Total
Income	£7 million	£4.5 million	£11.5 million

Foreword

Chair’s interview by Michael Mire

How has HM Land Registry performed this year in terms of delivering against its strategic aims?

Our strategy runs through until 2022 with an ambition for HM Land Registry to be a world leader for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data. While we may not have met all our key performance indicators this year our transformation is well underway and as Chair I am pleased to see the organisation continuing to move closer to that ambition.

We have invested in new digital tools and systems introducing artificial intelligence and robotic automation to work alongside our registration experts. Their input and ideas are driving improvements to existing processes but also the new systems they will use in the future. We are developing a strong culture of inclusiveness and innovation which has seen employee engagement continue to rise year on year.

Our Digital Street programme continues to capture the imagination of lawyers, bankers and companies as we explore the use of tokenisation in future property transactions and the creation of a 3D digital register to enhance further the benefits a fully digital conveyancing process can bring. This report contains details of how we have continued to transform despite a year of significant uncertainty.

How did HM Land Registry respond to the coronavirus crisis?

I believe the organisation has responded well. Our investments in our underpinning digital systems over the years not only enabled many transactions to continue uninterrupted but also underpinned a significant internal transformation as more than 5,000 colleagues were enabled to work from home for the first time. While some delays for customers were inevitable, it meant the critical role of land registration in property transactions continued through the national crisis. HM Land Registry has ensured the UK is in the best possible position to respond to the needs of the property market as any built-up demand is released.

What do you think will be the greatest differences that we will see in property market in the coming year?

Globally real estate markets will be looking to recover their previous positions and will be looking to learn lessons from the global pandemic. For the UK I believe we will see a greater desire to make property transactions more digital. There are still too many paper-based processes in conveyancing compared with other markets. This has been tolerated by consumers up until now but the potential threat of a future outbreak will change those expectations. I think those not yet embracing digital technology in the sector will change the way they work and the current early adopters will want greater adoption, integration and a greater reduction in physical steps.

How should HM Land Registry respond to this new demand for digital conveyancing?

Customers and stakeholders need key government institutions such as ourselves to provide leadership and direction. I believe we are well positioned to take on that role for them. Our strategy has always focused on the creation of wider economic benefit, not just by transforming ourselves but also in how we can enable digital conveyancing and how location intelligence can drive an even broader digital revolution. I believe those aims are more important now than ever before. We are now poised to help drive those changes in the property market.

Overview

Simon Hayes, Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar

This has been a remarkable year in many ways. As the UK continued to prepare for its exit from the European Union, the political landscape was marked above all by unpredictability, with significant shifts in direction and mood on a regular basis. This led to an economic uncertainty which appeared to create a level of stagnation in the property market, as house prices stayed relatively flat, and even fell unexpectedly in some areas. Finally, just as a degree of stability seemed imminent following the General Election in December, the world was faced with the unprecedented challenge of the coronavirus, which has curtailed vast amounts of day-to-day human activity, effectively shut down large parts of the global economy, and is set to reshape the way in which we live and work.

As a result of this, and other major changes at an organisational level, HM Land Registry and its staff have needed to display flexibility, resilience and creativity to continue to deliver our vital function in support of the property market, and the wider economy. I am pleased to be able to report here on our success in doing so.

In the course of this year we responded to more than 35 million requests for service, including 5.9m changes to the register, 20.7m guaranteed queries and 7.8m information services requests. I was honoured to join the organisation in November 2019 as its 17th Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar since 1862. I took over from Mike Harlow, who had done an outstanding job as Acting Chief Executive for the previous 10 months. I would like to pay tribute to him, and the rest of the Executive team, for their leadership.

I spent much of my first few months travelling across England and Wales, talking to as many of our staff, our customers and our partners as possible. Visiting all 14 of our offices gave me an excellent insight into the challenges we face every day, the importance of our task, and the remarkable expertise and commitment shown by our nearly 6,000 colleagues. My understanding has also been deepened through office visits with HM Land Registry Board members, which include ‘town hall’ sessions for colleagues to ask questions. The conversations I have had with customers and the wider industry have also been extremely helpful in providing insight into what they need from HM Land Registry, what we do well at the moment, and what they would like to see us improve or do differently in the future. Six months into the job, I am both proud to be involved with an organisation which delivers high-quality services with such care and commitment, but also excited by the opportunities which lie ahead truly to become a world-leading land registry. I see my mission as building on the foundation laid over the last 157 years, and taking HM Land Registry forward into the future with confidence, and with a commitment to excellence in all that we do.

Key achievements

This report summarises our key achievements over the course of 2019/20, and also looks forward to our most important future priorities. The events of March onwards have of course necessitated a major change in the way in which we are working, but also in our plans for the future. Our ambitions for our transformation remain undimmed, and our destination is in many ways unchanged. But our journey will be different, and we need to recognise and adapt to that. I am determined however that we approach this in a way which not only mitigates the threats to our service delivery, and the difficulties faced by everyone involved in the property market at the moment, but also seizes the opportunities presented to do things differently, to work in different ways, and to continue to improve what we do. We have already taken significant steps in that direction, and we will continue to do so.

The UK economy is underpinned by one of the leading real estate markets in the world. It is a market made possible because property rights worth more than £7 trillion and secured lending worth more than £1 trillion are guaranteed and protected in the Land Register. Annual housing market transactions worth £244.7 billion* were able to take place because those rights can change hands swiftly and securely.

The headline figures suggest this was not our strongest year of performance, with only six of the 15 key performance indicators being met. However, this figure tells a somewhat superficial story, and I do not believe it is reflective of the true health of the organisation. In several instances we just fell short of meeting our overall targets, for example missing our quality and speed of service targets by less than one percentage point.

While our ability to fully automate the process was delayed, which impacted on the target, our new digital mortgage service saw a huge increase in demand as HSBC and Santander became our biggest customers. We saw record high results in our culture and engagement scores, and while we missed our customer target we still take in pride in a 90% customer satisfaction score.

*The total housing market value in England and Wales was £244.7 billion in the year ending September 2019, source Office for National Statistics.

Dramatic change

The coronavirus pandemic required us to change our practices and processes very dramatically almost overnight. Within the first month of lockdown, more than 1,500 staff had full access to work remotely and we had delivered more than a million service requests, including 100,000 changes to the register. Alongside that we were rapidly deploying new communication channels to our customers while increasing our capacity daily through new technology solutions. The feat was even more impressive as land registration had never previously been attempted from outside our offices, and the vast majority of our colleagues had never worked from home before. At the time of writing, we have 97% of our staff equipped and working in this way.

At the same time we made a number of changes to our practices to help our customers, relaxing submission deadlines and enabling the use of new technology for verifying identity and submitting documents to us.

Alongside this emergency response we are maintaining, and indeed in many ways increasing, our focus on the future and the opportunity we have to modernise the organisation. Our current Business Strategy broadly sets out the aim to become a global leader through operational and cultural excellence, digitising conveyancing processes and enabling geospatial data to drive further innovations across the wider property market and the economy. Those aims are now even more pressing and we must accelerate the pace of change.

Most of our registration queries are already fully automated but next year we intend to create a digital end-to-end process for one of our most common register updates: a typical residential sale with a mortgage. This will bring together all the strands of our digital programmes and will demonstrate the scale of our ambition and be a catalyst for transformation across all our services. Our digital Local Land Charges service is a prime example of us improving another part of the wider conveyancing process as we industrialise the rollout of local authority migration across England and Wales.

Working in partnership

So there is much we can and will do to overhaul our processes and make HM Land Registry, as a non-ministerial department, fit for the current era. But we cannot change the conditions to enable digital conveyancing alone, or even just with other parts of government. That is why we want to work more closely in partnership with the market. We have set up a new industry forum to guide this activity. Building on the work of our Digital Street research and development programme, we are focusing on the role we can play to lead the market towards truly digital conveyancing.

As a newcomer to the world of land registration and conveyancing, I have been struck by the number of opportunities there are to make more use of new technology, better data, and different ways of working to improve the experience for everyone and enable the market to work more efficiently. At the same time, it has also been equally clear how much appetite there is to work in partnership across the sector to make this happen. I am very optimistic we can build on the promising foundations which have been laid, and help to lead the process of modernisation and transformation.

In November we brought continuous improvement leaders from across government to our Leicester Office for the CI (Continuous Improvement) in Leadership conference. The event was opened by Sir John Manzoni, then Chief Executive of the Civil Service, who said: “I was impressed at the progress the CI network is making on developing CI capability across government. I was delighted to see this first hand.”

Interview with Michelle Andrews, HSBC UK’s Head of Buying A Home

25% of all digital deeds are registered by HSBC

What is HSBC UK looking to do in the future in regards to digital homebuying and selling?

Our digital initiatives focus on customers, brokers and conveyancers as key stakeholders. For our customers and brokers, it is about making the application process streamlined and accessible, to fit in with their lives so they can engage with us when and how they want, and we get that “yes” decision to them as quickly as possible. For the conveyancer, the focus is on streamlining and automation, such as Certificate of Title and redemption statement requests which are critical to the homebuying and selling process. We are also looking at conveyancing query processes, both automation and self-serve options.

As the potential for digital homebuying and selling grows, what do you think the biggest challenges are for the industry? What do you think could be improved now?

The key industry challenge is cooperation, working together to make switching mortgage provider, whether through moving home or a remortgage, as simple as moving a current account. Research suggests that the average homeowner now only moves house every 20 years. Many mortgage borrowers remain on standard variable rates and don’t actively look at moving to a lower mortgage rate, which may save them thousands of pounds depending on the term and amount of their mortgage. Working together to make the process simpler may benefit thousands of homeowners.

In terms of what could be improved now, the redemption statement process is a key challenge. Every lender seems to have a different request process, timeline to provide and also different validity periods. These are key to completions and can directly impact the customer journey. We need to simplify and coordinate, and this will make a big difference.

How have you found collaborating with HM Land Registry on our digital mortgage service? HSBC UK is one of the leading lenders using our service. How would you like to see this service evolve?

HSBC UK has worked with HM Land Registry and supported the digital deed implementation from the outset. We know our remortgage customers have responded positively to using the digital deed and we are proud to be leading the way in take up of this option. We are committed to this and keen to see the scope of the service broadened as quickly as possible for remortgages, as we know the demand is there. We are also keen to see this extended to house purchase.

Where do you think the UK sits in the global context of digital homebuying and selling?

Our experience is that more and more customers and brokers expect the speed and efficiency of digital services, so they can engage with us how and when it suits them for their mortgage journey, through a wide array of channels. That is only to be expected considering the benefits of digital are being seen in every part of our lives. In terms of the wider industry, the same challenges are being faced but overall this is the start of the journey, with scope for land registries, lenders, surveyors, estate agents and conveyancers to collaborate to deliver a simplified and digital homebuying and selling experience. We only need to look at the recent lockdown challenges posed to our industry to see that more change is needed. There were some fast-paced digital responses and changes to process to keep the market moving. We need to look at what has worked and build on that.

Making transformation our strength

Karina Singh, Director of Transformation

We have been on a transformation journey for the last few years and it touches on every aspect of our work.

We are addressing a decade’s worth of underinvestment in our people. Over the past year we have systematically reorganised the way teams are structured and led in Operations and in both the Digital, Data and Technology and Legal and Assurance directorates we have also started moving to a new delivery model and ways of working.

We are also investing in our customers. Over the past year, we have invested heavily in the three primary channels through which customers contact us, to make their interaction with us faster and simpler. We have centralised our telephony service, to give a quicker and more consistent service for close to a million enquiries per year.

We are transforming to deliver excellence, simplifying processes and embedding a continuous improvement mindset into how we work. Our refreshed culture statement and aspiration sets the framework for the future we are moving to.

These changes have been underpinned by a significant investment in our digital tools, services and supporting infrastructure. We have started to roll out the new application processing system, which replaces the 20-plus caseworking systems our people use on a day-to-day basis, with significant changes planned for next financial year. The shared technology platform replaces our legacy systems, making new services more flexible and resilient.

These changes are delivered by our programme and project experts supported by a portfolio office delivering to best practice standards. Our changes are focused towards the same outcome – to make dealing with HM Land Registry simpler and faster for customers and to support the conveyancing sector.

Underpinning our ongoing transformation has been a strengthening of our ability to deliver and track change with our people and our customers.

Our corporate culture actively encourages innovation and collaboration through the involvement of registration experts and customers in designing and piloting changes. A comprehensive and multi-layered communications approach across the organisation means colleagues understand and can shape the changes coming and are prepared for what they need to do differently as a result.

We have also strengthened our local management teams who have undergone a series of workshops to equip them with the skills to lead and manage change. Our change manager network supports local leaders to understand and embed changes using our refreshed people change framework and our benefits management teams ensure the desired benefits are tracked and realised on the ground.

Our people change framework

1. Make it essential - Involve our people. Understand case for change. 2. Make it ready - Understand success measures and plan. Understand people impact. 3. Make it happen - Implement your plans. Review and refine plans. 4. Make it stick - Evaluate outcomes and embed change. Identify enhancements and lessons learned.

The cumulative impact of these investments was already having a positive impact, as evidenced by our October 2019 people survey scores, where we had a 6 percentage point uplift in ‘change is managed well’ perceptions. This was two percentage points higher than the Civil Service average and a record high level at the time.

Managing change, results from Pulse surveys

Leadership and managing change

Leadership and managing change	October 2018	October 2019	May 2020
Postive response	45	48	60

I feel that change is managed well in Land Registry

I feel that change is managed well in Land Registry	October 2018	October 2019	May 2020
Postive response	30	37	61

Land Registry keeps me informed about the matters that affect me

Land Registry keeps me informed about the matters that affect me	October 2018	October 2019	May 2020
Postive response	55	60	76

Transformation portfolio delivery 2019/20 – key milestones

Customer

1. Customer Support Centre improvements – customer interactions with us are simpler and faster through improved technology and process in our Customer Support Centre.

2. Digital Registration Service – the Digital Registration Service has been available in beta with 23 conveyancing firms in 2019/20 and will soon be made available to all portal users, eventually replacing the existing electronic document registration service. It is helping to reduce errors, requisitions and rework for customers, with multi-transactional applications available.

3. View My Applications – currently 25m applications are submitted via the portal each year. View My Applications allows customers to find and view the latest updates on all of their applications submitted this way, in one place. The service opened to over 200,000 portal users in June 2020.

4. Sign your mortgage deed – our digital mortgage service has been trialled with nine high street banks, making obtaining a remortgage simpler, faster and more secure. Nearly 10,000 remortgages have been registered.

5. Search for land and property information – we launched Search for land and property information on GOV.UK in February, replacing Find property information. A total of 61,318 searches were made using this new service by 31 March 2020.

6. Channel Strategy signed off – our new Channel Strategy will help us become more customer focused, ensure that we are meeting the needs of our customers and provide customers with the right services via the right channels.

Colleagues

1. Brilliant by Design – we have systematically reorganised the way teams are structured and led in Operations, creating greater flexibility. Fostering a culture where productivity improves through collaboration, inclusiveness and innovation has provided development opportunities for colleagues.

2. Process improvements through Model Office – we are working more consistently across all 14 offices, trialling and implementing processes to improve ways of working for our colleagues, including routinely triaging register create and register update applications.

3. Change management – we revised and relaunched the People Change Framework, increasing consistency and use of the People Change Framework, assigning change management resource to all projects affecting our people.

4. LearnHub – a new learning system was implemented for colleagues to support personal learning and development more effectively and provide access to options for career development. So far 21,698 courses have been completed.

5. Culture and engagement action plan – in line with our culture and values, we are now working in a continuously improving way, with empowered colleagues and strong leadership.

6. Triage and casework allocation – the triage and casework allocation project ensured the right casework made it to the right people. The findings from the project were adopted as a crucial part of our everyday working.

Data and digital

1. Application processing including Workflow – we have continued to develop the new automated casework system. This year we began with simple applications, such as severance of joint tenancy – of which we process about 250 a day – and have been building up the complexity of applications this can handle.

2. Digital registers – we continue to work on the creation of land registers that meet the needs of our digital transformation, enabling newer, faster services for customers and application processing systems for caseworkers, while maintaining the integrity of the register.

3. Robotic process automation – we have started to automate simple, repetitive tasks, freeing up resources for more complex work. Issuing C90A reminder letters was a manual task, from identifying the applications that needed them to drafting and sending 1,300 every day. Using robotic process automation we are now issuing up to 27,000 reminder letters each month and have enabled three full-time equivalent caseworkers to be deployed onto more meaningful work.

4. Digital Street – working with our Digital Street community we have delivered three research themes (tokenisation, 3D land register and application programming interfaces (APIs) of the future).

5. Implement new data publication platform – five existing datasets have been migrated onto the data publication platform.

6. Shared technology platform – we have built a new technology platform to host our new digital services, enabling us to decommission our legacy systems.

7. Local Land Charges legislation implemented and first tranche of local authorities live – a further four local authorities were migrated to the new Local Land Charges service in 2019/20, bringing the number of charges transferred to the central register to 358,935 at the end of March. For the local authorities migrated thus far, the average time to access information has fallen from 39 days to a few minutes and the average cost to the buyer has been cut from £23.75 to £15.

8. Welsh land transaction tax data sharing system – we have delivered a data sharing system with the Welsh Revenue Authority to support the effective collection of land transaction tax in Wales.

9. Data centre rationalisation – we are continuing to rationalise our data centre estate in line with wider government strategies, building in extra resilience and creating financial and technological efficiencies.

Enablers and ways of working

1. Fusion – we rolled out a new cloud-based integrated human resources and finance system to reduce duplication and provide a single source of data.

2. Windows 10 rollout – we began to roll out Windows 10 across the organisation. So far more than 5,000 machines have been upgraded to Windows 10 and the deployment is 95% complete.

The new £1 billion London Bridge Station in central London is designed to accommodate more than 90 million passengers per year in an expansive street-level concourse larger than the pitch at Wembley Stadium. The station was nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ 2019 Stirling Prize for the UK’s best new building and station owner Network Rail was named as the institute’s Client of the Year. We are working in partnership with Network Rail on a pilot project for the registration of the whole of its infrastructure and estate, including stations and track.

Photo: Shutterstock/TK Kurikawa

Local land charges

Along with land registration-focused transformation, we are also investing heavily to help the wider transformation of the conveyancing process by transforming the local land charges search process. Local land charges contain vital information on the use of land such as planning consents or tree preservation orders so the ability to easily search for them is a critical component of any commercial or residential property transaction.

The Local Land Charges Programme is transforming a currently fragmented service delivered by more than 300 local authorities into a single online register of local land charges across England and Wales to give results in seconds.

Phase 1, which was approved in January 2018, focused on digitising and migrating paper records to the service first. As a pathfinder, Phase 1 has been a success with nine local authorities and almost 400,000 charges migrated to the new register from its launch in July 2018 to 31 March 2020. The new service proves that a national service is feasible, providing immediate and lasting benefits for customers.

Phase 1 has also given us lots of learning, including that the time and effort to transform the data to the desired quality is greater than originally assumed, and that there are significant economic benefits of the local land charges dataset.

Our customers are convinced of the wider benefits for homebuyers and property investors of simplifying and transforming the service. However, to unlock these benefits faster we need to industrialise migration across many local authorities in tandem. During 2020/21, we will build and test an industrialised delivery model with local authorities and our partners to increase the pace of the migration of the data.

Peterborough Cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of Peterborough. Founded in the Anglo-Saxon period, its architecture is mostly Norman. It is one of the most significant buildings from this period in England to have remained largely intact. Peterborough City Council’s local land charges data was transferred to our central register in January 2020.

Photo: Shutterstock/chrisdorney

For the local authorities migrated thus far, the average time to access information needed has fallen from 39 days to a few minutes and the average cost to the buyer has been cut from £23.75 to £15. During 2019/20 we delivered another four local authorities onto our pioneering, central Local Land Charges Register, including Watford Borough Council in February 2020.

Ben Martin, Interim Head of Planning and Building Control at Watford Borough Council, said:

Joining the Local Land Charges Register has meant that we no longer have to provide search results ourselves as the information is available from the central, digital register and easily accessible to our customers whenever they require the information.

Having migrated also makes it a lot easier for us to update the central register when required. We can even do this from home and registering charges is actually quicker than it has ever been.

Vicarage Road stadium, home to Watford Football Club since 1922, seats more than 21,500 fans. Over the years the grounds have also played host to greyhound racing and rugby union side Saracens. After a short-lived purchase of the stadium’s freehold in 2002, the fan-led ‘Let’s Buy Back the Vic’ campaign with support from former owner Elton John saw the club once again purchase the freehold in 2004. Plans are currently in motion to expand the ground’s capacity to around 30,000 fans. Watford Borough Council joined our Local Land Charges Register in February 2020, transferring its local land charges records to our central digital service.

Photo: Shutterstock/Peter Fleming

Changing at pace

Our investment in making organisational change habitual was put to the test when we found ourselves having to make sudden changes to our entire delivery model as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The organisation responded rapidly. Experts from across all functions came together under new business continuity structures to demonstrate the culture of innovation, collaboration and inclusiveness we foster. Pulse surveys in May 2020 showed a significant rise in scores for managing change. Collectively they delivered change at a pace and scale unseen in HM Land Registry’s long history.

Every single organisation is thinking about change, whether as an immediate response to the coronavirus pandemic, in how they will recover their position or in predicting what their future may look like. It is almost certain things will not be the same again. The most obvious need is for a more rapid adoption of digital technology so conveyancing can be more contactless and thus frictionless in the future.

While HM Land Registry will face challenges, we have been able to manage, adapt and deliver through a year of uncertainty because we are well into our own transformation journey.

The key for us in 2020/21 will be to use what we have learned to enable greater focus and hasten our efforts. The scale and pace of our ambition will be encapsulated next year within our refreshed Business Strategy, but we are already seeking to capitalise on the opportunities and drivers that can take our transformation into a new accelerated phase.

Rising to the challenge

Interview with Chris Pope, Chief Operations Officer

How would you describe this year for HM Land Registry’s operations?

Despite speculation over the property market in the face of political uncertainty and EU exit planning, our activity remained buoyant. We delivered 5.9m register change services, 20.7m guaranteed queries and 7.8m information service requests. This meant the resource and capability issues we faced in previous years would continue to present challenges to operational delivery this year too. But we did not stand still.

We took a decision to increase our capacity on more complex work to rebalance our operational position, recognising this meant we were at risk with regards to speed of service targets for other work types.

That felt the right thing to do for our customers. However, we did miss out on three service standard targets by less than 1%, which feels tough, but reflects the operational refocus on reducing outstanding complex applications. That can feel like a difficult assessment for our operational registration experts who once again worked tirelessly to deliver our statutory duty. And then of course, right at the end of the year, we also had the impact of the coronavirus to contend with too.

How have customers felt about the service you have provided them this year?

In the discussions we’ve had with customers we know they most value our expert colleagues and being easy to do business with. They also value consistency, an area that has significantly improved this year, but also getting things done in a reasonable timeframe. We know they have been frustrated by delays to their complex register create requests.

The overall customer satisfaction rating was 90% for this year. Against a backdrop of historically high scores, customers recognised we still provided them with a really good service even though we are in the process of transforming and overcoming some operational challenges. I believe they still appreciated our efforts to deliver the vast majority of the millions of vital searches and register changes they submitted as quickly as possible and to an impressively high standard. Although we missed our key performance indicator by 2% that is still a score we take pride in achieving and which demonstrates our excellence in public service delivery.

But we know we need to do more. I believe the changes we made this year along with some exciting changes in 2020/21 will visibly improve the customer experience as our transformation begins to deliver real benefits for our customers.

Customer satisfaction scores

Year	Excellent	Very good	Good	Total
2017/2018	33	41	18	92%
2018/2019	33	37	22	92%
2019/2020	27	38	25	90%

What have you been doing to improve the service you provide to them?

Our Customer Support Centre handled close to a million calls and processed 196,055 emails in 2019/20. Its transformation is now complete with improved technology and a dedicated training team for our advisers. In August we launched new clearer interactive voice response (IVR) options, making it faster and simpler to get through to us. These improvements have seen call abandon rates fall by 20% and call wait times reduce by five minutes.

Nearly 95% of our services are delivered via our online business portals. This year we have been testing new features, developed with customers, which enable them to input data which can be verified and checked before their application is submitted – reducing error and preventing unnecessary delays and further enquiries.

View My Applications will also allow customers to view all their previous requests and manage all their applications, alongside an estimated date and any related correspondence, together in one place. Improving the experience for making and managing their applications is a huge leap forward and a key building block of our overall transformation. Our early adopters are excited about these new features, which will be made available more widely in summer 2020.

While digital technology rightly dominates the discussions in the market, it is important we meet the unique and varied needs of property professionals who deliver complex commercial and major infrastructure projects. We launched a range of bespoke services which this year have helped customers with more than 3,000 interests involving multi-layered multi-party transactions across more than 180 projects.

What measures did you take to tackle the backlog?

In the last year alone, we recruited 340 Registration Officers, 225 colleagues into Executive Registration Officer (ERO) or ERO Line Manager roles, 151 colleagues into Higher Registration Officer (HRO) or HRO Line Manager roles, and 18 colleagues into senior registration roles.

However, the right amount of registration experts available is only one aspect of our ambitions. We want to restructure and reshape our operations to become a more flexible, national function that can better deal with market fluctuations. One that can intelligently divert energies according to needs – we call this programme Brilliant by Design, a key strand of our Business Strategy.

We developed and validated a plan to ensure operational experts are equipped with the rights tools and skills. Where they are motivated by a culture in which productivity improvements are made through collaboration, inclusiveness and innovation. This holistic approach to getting the best from our land registration experts is called Enabling Team Potential. We had nearly completed a national restructure of our operational teams and we were just in the process of rolling out Enabling Team Potential across our operations before the coronavirus situation.

Our decision to refocus our operational capacity on complex work was an early test of the Brilliant by Design structure and whether our collective efforts could achieve early benefits. In February, we initiated a short-term shift onto one clear goal – reducing outstanding complex applications.

With the momentum we achieved, we were on track to clear approximately 11,000 applications from our backlog by end of the year and, in doing so, improve speed of service by 17 days. The coronavirus situation restricted this to approximately 6,000 applications from our backlog with an improvement of 10 days. I believe these promising results showed we were turning the corner on those previous challenges just when the public health crisis began to take hold.

How did coronavirus impact HM Land Registry’s operations?

We are proud that our 157-year-old organisation stood firm through the worst public health crisis in more than a century. We went from an entirely office-based and historically localised operation to a remote-working national function in a matter of weeks. Our experts are now fully equipped to deliver land registration remotely. Even during the first few weeks we still delivered thousands of changes to the register while rapidly building our remote capacity.

The challenge we face now is how we can maximise operational excellence in a completely new environment. But this was something we were already carefully examining as part of our Brilliant by Design programme. The forced change to our operating model creates a catalyst to accelerate our plans, as suddenly we have already become a national function operating out of nearly 4,000 different locations.

Many of the Enabling Team Potential principles of empowering leadership, collaborative problem solving, joint learning through digital tools and a commitment to wellbeing have been rapidly embedded in the way we responded and adapted to the situation we faced. We are now refreshing and revalidating our plan to account for the new ways of working. This includes examining how we can capitalise on this experience to create operational excellence by getting the best out of remotely based colleagues and those working in offices, not just for now but also in the future.

How are you responding to the new needs of the market?

In the short term we are carefully tracking customer sentiment across all channels and actively exploring ways we can help our customers to manage the current situation and also reduce their risks for the future.

While the property market recovers, and our capacity and productivity increases, our focus is to clear all outstanding applications and address any issues for our customers.

A new component in our customer intelligence is a new industry forum which, for the first time, brings together our key stakeholders alongside a cross-section of our customers to discuss practical solutions to improve how we interact with the market.

Some have estimated that as many as 370,000 property transactions were suspended but we know from experience the great majority will eventually resume, as property transactions themselves reflect life events and the changing circumstances of individuals and businesses.

We intend to use this unexpected opportunity to change the way we deliver our services in the future, focusing on operational excellence and creating a world-class experience for our customers.

Registering the NHS Wales estate

Photo: Shutterstock/Jax10289

Clive Ball, Head of Property at NHS Wales:

The NHS Wales estate includes a range of properties ranging from large acute hospitals to smaller community hospitals, health centres and small ambulance stations.

Although a significant proportion of the NHS Wales estate was already registered, in accordance with prudent estate management we decided to ensure that all NHS Wales property and land assets were registered with HM Land Registry.

We registered 365 freehold land assets with HM Land Registry’s help. This has assisted in subsequent disposals of sites as well as boundary disputes and encroachment claims. It also supports government’s commitment to transparency.

By working closely with HM Land Registry, we were able to complete the registration exercise efficiently and cost effectively. In 2019 HM Land Registry confirmed that the NHS Wales estate had completed registration of its freehold assets, becoming the first public body in England and Wales to be so recognised.

Providing confidence and results

Mike Harlow, General Counsel, Deputy Chief Executive and Deputy Chief Land Registrar

For each parcel of land HM Land Registry has to understand who owns it, its extent and the often complicated rights that go with it and the rights that may be held by others over it. In the Land Register there are more than 25 million individual parcels of land worth more than £7 trillion. Last year we dealt with almost 6 million applications to change the register. Each time we must ensure we are dealing with the owners themselves and not a fraudster, and we must accurately reflect the true new picture of property law rights that the parties have agreed.

Getting that task right each time requires the highest degree of expertise in property and land registration law, excellent fraud resilience and risk management. The security and accuracy of all of our registers is vital to trust and confidence in the property market, which is in turn vital to the economy generally.

At the end of the reporting year and since, HM Land Registry, and those in the conveyancing industry, have been adapting to the new ways of working necessary in response to the coronavirus pandemic. We made some immediate adjustments in practice that would enable the market to continue functioning, while keeping close control over risks to the integrity of the registers.

That work has continued into the next year, as we strive to ensure that all property transactions can proceed at pace. By accelerating our plans for the adoption of digital ways of working – notably in relation to identity and digital signatures – we are supporting the market now and developing its efficiency and resilience for the future.

It has never been more important to maintain a clear view and management of the risks to the registers so innovation can be piloted and adopted with confidence that it does not impair the core responsibility of maintaining trust and confidence.

The Government Actuary’s Department assesses the long-term trends for us. Its advice is that compensation for inaccuracy is broadly steady while fraud is falling. Based on that advice we reduced our provision against incurred but not reported claims (in other words, errors already in the register which we are not aware of yet) by £17.5m to £66.7m.

It is a whole organisation effort that delivers that control over errors and fraud. The Legal and Assurance Directorate is responsible for ensuring we understand and are following every nuance of property and land registration law, controlling fraud risk, delivering assurance and supporting the organisation to manage risk. We achieve those objectives principally through the expertise of our staff and the use of best practice systems and processes.

Claims against the guarantee

2019/2020	Fraud	Error	Total
Paid	£2,095,295	£3,199,764	£5,295,059

Last year we received 18 (13 in 18/19) claims for fraud and 1,055 (1,159 in 18/19) claims for inaccuracy in the register. We pay appropriate compensation for fair claims. Last year we paid £2.1m (£0.4m in 18/19) in compensation for fraud and £3.2m (£2.2m in 18/19) in compensation for inaccuracy. The total compensation was just 0.00008% of the total value of property in the register.

Developing our expertise

This year we established a discrete risk and assurance function and brought in expertise to enable us to embed a three-lines-of-defence risk management model, develop assurance capability and follow best practice for security, business continuity and data management and protection. We will continue to invest more into this area to ensure we can transform the organisation’s services at pace, and yet with confidence that we are not undermining our core purpose of maintaining secure and accurate registers.

We continued our legal apprentice scheme, with 12 apprentices completing their training up to the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives (CILEx) level 3 and four colleagues becoming Fellows of CILEx having completed the graduate members scheme, one of whom has subsequently achieved promotion to lawyer. We have taken on a further 14 apprentices and four distance learners at level 3 and added eight more apprentices and one distance learner training up to CILEx level 6 to the original six who are due to complete their training during 2020/21. The opportunities for our distance learners were introduced in our Swansea office due to the apprentice schemes not being available via CILEx in Wales. We also recruited nine lawyers from outside the organisation, helping to maintain a healthy perspective on current practice in the marketplace.

We have brought together our lawyers who give strategic and project advice to provide one centre of excellence. This will ensure that service transformation is supported by the best legal know-how at the time and pace agile projects require.

Among other things, this newly formed team has been responsible for ensuring the smooth legal transition out of a trading fund and the renewal of our data licensing terms.

Developing our systems

Last year we introduced a new state-of-the art fraud management system to enhance our fraud resilience. We also took a step back and looked at how land registration could work generally in a digital world, starting from first principles. We believe there are significant advantages to the sector that can be achieved if we reconsider the degree of assurance given by conveyancers to HM Land Registry on each transaction. Alongside our urgent work to support business continuity during the coronavirus crisis, we have started to talk to stakeholders about how we can most effectively release this potential.

Becoming an HM Land Registry lawyer

This year we celebrated the first of our experienced caseworker apprentices graduating as a Fellow of CILEx and taking up a role as an HM Land Registry lawyer. Assistant Land Registrar Alken Brookes joined HM Land Registry in 1997 as a registration officer, dealing with straightforward registration applications, at a time when we were still mapping some title plans using paintbrushes on linen-backed paper!

During his career, Alken developed his knowledge of land registration law and practice; however, without a recognised legal professional qualification he was ineligible to work as an HM Land Registry lawyer. Becoming a Fellow of CILEx changed this. Alken was successful in an open recruitment competition, beating off other high quality external applicants to become our very first in-house trained lawyer.

Alken said:

I’m delighted to be taking up this new role and repaying the support and investment that HM Land Registry has made in my career.

Digitally refocused

Interview with Andrew Trigg, Acting Director of Digital, Data and Technology

What type of year has it been for the directorate?

Overall I think it has been a good year for the Digital, Data and Technology Directorate. Our teams always want to deliver more but I believe we have still demonstrated how much our digital capability has grown over the last few years. For me it is an honour to be able to report on our activities and I must pay credit to John Abbott, who led our directorate during 2019/20.

What have been the main highlights?

Early in the year it was great to be recognised by the industry as we were awarded the EG Tech Big Picture Award, we won twice in the Real IT Awards and we were finalists in the public sector category of the Financial Times’ Intelligent Business Awards. The awards recognised our ambitious approach to digital transformation and our commitment to work with the market to bring them the data and services to make their lives easier.

We were thrilled to have got close to our take-up target of 10,000 digital remortgage deeds by the end of the year. A delay in fully automating some final elements of the HM Land Registry system contributed to the key performance indicator itself not being met. However it demonstrated our ability to create an innovative service that leading market providers such as HSBC and Santander want to promote as part of the digital offering to their customers.

We met our key performance indicator for e-service availability. We often take that as a given because of the high levels of service we offer but in the current context I think it is important we do recognise the achievement. This high level of availability has allowed our customers to continue submitting requests through our online services and receive instant results for most time-sensitive requests during the coronavirus crisis.

That brings me onto a final highlight just as the year closed. Our teams suddenly had to make an almost entirely office-based organisation of nearly 6,000 people, spread right across the country, into a remote working one in a matter of weeks. The way our teams came together to overcome the technological and logistical challenges, alongside the sheer scale of the task, was absolutely remarkable.

What has HM Land Registry been focusing on in terms of its digital transformation?

The research undertaken over the last two years through our Digital Street programme demonstrated that frictionless digital conveyancing will need structured data to automate fully the transfer of property ownership without the need for manual information retrieval or verification.

Therefore our digital transformation focuses on receiving verified digital data from our customers, which can enable their request to be processed in a way that eliminates manual administrative tasks and can then be stored as structured data to be retrieved easily and reused for a variety of purposes.

This year we have been trialling our new Digital Registration Service with some of our customers. Ready for launch in the summer, it will enable customers to submit forms using digital fields that will validate the information they enter before it is submitted to us. Not only does this reduce the need for paper, speeding up the process for our customers, but it also ensures data quality standards are applied up front.

While more than 83.6% of customer requests are already fully automated, complex changes to the register will always require registration experts. We introduced robotic processing last year, using it initially to send reminder letters to customers. We are now using it to speed up casework. Our robots now examine more than 25,000 applications per week to check whether any other corresponding applications for the same land or property already exist in the system. This saves valuable time for our registration experts. We are testing how artificial intelligence can further reduce time-consuming manual tasks, with some promising early results. These steps all form part of a completely new application processing system to replace the outdated systems our registration experts currently use, enabling them to be more productive.

At the heart of this are our plans to build a truly digital register that can support structured data. We have already designed the new model for the storage and use of HM Land Registry data which draws on global best practice and standards.

How are you enabling digital conveyancing and unlocking the greater use of geospatial beyond just land registration?

Our research and development project Digital Street has continued to look at the potential benefits that emerging technology might bring. Each of the team’s three research projects were conducted alongside the Digital Street community. Representatives from all areas of the property market discussed what would be needed to adopt new technology successfully and ensure it benefits all parties in the property buying and selling process. The results from this research feed directly into the planning for the future direction of the digital transformation.

We are already transforming other parts of the conveyancing process, specifically local authority searches, making them more digital through the rollout of our national Local Land Charges Register. With nine local authorities migrated by 31 March 2020, the service has already delivered more than 11,000 searches in a high-quality digital format and for a consistent price. There have also been more than 45,000 digital personal searches.

We are now looking to industrialise the migration of data into the register so we not only create a national digital service but also increase the location intelligence of the nation. Next year we will continue our programme of data releases with three new datasets supported by a new platform that will bring all our data together in one place.

As a founding member of the Geospatial Commission we provided input and direction into its new strategy, which outlines how the UK can become a world leader in geospatial data and work toward unlocking the estimated £6bn to £11bn annual wider economic benefit. The potential of this contribution to economic recovery is why geospatial thinking remains at the core of our plans.

This year will be our fifth year of investment in our incubator programme called Geovation, run jointly with Ordnance Survey, which has seen 117 British-based startups graduate, creating 484 jobs and attracting more than £77m in third-party investment.

What are your plans for next year?

I think the coronavirus situation will force every sector to re-look at their digital plans to see if they are up to the challenges that an uncertain future may bring. Globally I think countries with valuable real estate markets will pay closer attention to the risks of their vital land and property services being unable to function.

Digital adoption in the UK conveyancing sector has been led largely by the sector itself. It has been slow to change its processes, which still rely on paper far too much. I believe consumer demand will change. Where people may have tolerated homebuying and selling being a paper-heavy process before, I think those attitudes will now quickly shift.

Having spent the last couple of years creating the necessary building blocks, I believe we can bring those strands together to demonstrate digital land registration’s potential.

Next year we are aiming to make submission and processing of our most common transaction types digital, maximising automation wherever we can. We will initially focus on applications to remove a mortgage, transfer ownership and add a new charge. The frequency of these requests reflects the way most people buy and sell residential property. We have already tested the first application to transfer ownership of a property, working closely with a select group of customers to build the best service possible.

Digital Street Year 3

Digital Street continues to be led by insights from our Digital Street community. The community proposed all of the topics we explored this year and our research fed directly into the wider digital transformation of HM Land Registry.

Whereas last year the Digital Street project focused on how blockchain could improve the land registration process, this year the project explored three themes.

Tokenisation of land and property

The team created a prototype of the concept of HM Land Registry creating and issuing digital tokens to represent title ownership. These tokens would be stored on a database underpinned by blockchain technology. Using security tokens linked to the title token, property owners would be able to securely record fractional ownership of property – where more than one person holds a legal interest in a property – with greater flexibility than currently possible. The team worked with a member of the Digital Street community to demonstrate how these security tokens could be traded on a digital marketplace. This opens up a series of potential benefits, including providing more opportunity for investment in property. We were due to present our work on tokenisation at the World Bank Land and Poverty Conference in March but the event was cancelled due to coronavirus.

Enhanced application programming interfaces (APIs)

The team investigated how enhanced APIs – software which allows the casework systems of our customers to read HM Land Registry’s data – could speed up applications by providing more data up front, reducing errors and enabling the Land Register to be updated automatically. The outcome of this research will feed directly into the review of our Business Gateway channel.

A 3D land register

The team built a prototype to demonstrate how HM Land Registry data could be visualised in simple 3D. The team overlaid the text with the geospatial data held in the register to better visualise the register as a whole. By capturing floor numbers it could display the position of different titles within a multi-storey building. The Digital Street community reviewed the work and told us it had the potential to improve many of the day-to-day tasks within the land and property industry. These findings will inform our work on the digital register.

Dataset releases

Registered leases

The planned publication of our leasehold information will drive innovation and create greater transparency in the homebuying and selling process. Statute obliges we register data on granted leases over seven years in length. In opening up this data we hope to assist estate agents in calculating property valuations more accurately, and support government departments in their understanding of the property market. This dataset has approximately 5 million rows of data, including the property description and the date and term of the lease.

Restrictive covenants

We believe early awareness of covenants could help to speed up the property-buying process by revealing and addressing issues much earlier in conveyancing proceedings. And for other property professionals, such as developers, it is essential to know whether there are any restrictions on land identified for potential development. That’s why we’re planning to release the data we hold on restrictive covenants for wider use. This information, equating to around 17 million rows of data, will catalogue covenants which are usually raised when the seller of a property wants to restrict what a buyer can do with the land. Examples include guaranteeing a right of access and prohibiting the use of the property for business.

Meet the new Geovation cohorts

Veya

Veya is making important information available to homebuyers earlier in the conveyancing process. Aspiring to reduce the average time to buy and sell, Veya aims to ensure vital details about a property are available to prospective buyers before they make an offer.

Crowdhaus

Crowdhaus is modernising the property search market by providing the 21st century with smart ‘For Sale’ signs that send notifications to users who are in the area. By repackaging data and making it available on the go, the Crowdhaus system will present that data in an easily digestible format to help users access important information when they need it.

SociAbility

SociAbility’s mobile app and crowdsourced data collection platform allows users to find detailed and reliable accessibility information for local social venues and shops quickly and easily. By combining HM Land Registry data with a host of other data sources the app is able to get the information disabled people need but don’t currently have access to.

Lairvue

Lairvue is a property viewing company providing a comprehensive seven-day-a-week viewing service to make sure property viewings do not get cancelled, postponed or missed.

Building Passport

Building Passport uses geospatial data to map buildings’ floor plans, to create a safer environment for first responders from the emergency services.

OneStay

OneStay is creating a transparent and trusted marketplace where guests can connect with hosts to bid for holiday rental properties and combat wasted and unused space, while providing value.

Occubly

Occubly is working with large UK landlords to provide insights through advanced data analysis and automate the resolution of some of the complex issues associated with leasehold property.

Unified through our culture

Simon Morris, Director of Human Resources

I am delighted that one of my first tasks since joining in June 2020 is to be able to report on a great year for HM Land Registry. Expert people – making complex land registration judgements, supporting critical systems or delivering best practice in corporate roles – are HM Land Registry’s most valuable asset. We want to ensure we get the best from them.

Thanks to Jon Cocking, who so ably led as acting Director during 2019/20, HM Land Registry explored its future culture with colleagues from across the organisation and launched new culture statements in May 2019, defining what we require from every colleague to become a world-leading land registry. Throughout the year various workstreams embedded our new culture into our working practices, our people-related policies and the way we lead and support our people. This fulfils an important commitment in year three of our People Strategy.

It is clear health and wellbeing has been a continuous focus for HM Land Registry with a range of campaigns, initiatives and support for both the mental and physical wellbeing of our colleagues. An important feature has been our LR Leisure and charity committees with Jon Cocking providing chairship to both.

The efforts from our network of volunteers who coordinate sports and social activities and charity endeavours has seen £88,116 raised for good causes and nearly a quarter of all colleagues participating in some organised activities. Our network of sustainability champions has planted trees to support biodiversity and set up milk clubs and a shopping bag loan scheme to reduce our impact on the environment. The commitment, energy and enthusiasm of our volunteers demonstrate HM Land Registry values in practice and the best of our culture.

The 2019 People Survey in October produced record high results yet again. Our Engagement Index score of 63% placed us in the top quartile for the Civil Service for organisations of equivalent size and nature. Our leadership and managing change score of 48% also placed us in that same bracket and meant we achieved our 2022 Business Strategy target earlier than planned. In our latest pulse survey in May 2020, a year after our culture launch, those scores have risen considerably to 73% and 60% respectively, benchmarking us against some of the best scores across the Civil Service. I am hugely excited to be joining HM Land Registry at such an exciting time for its colleagues.

Employee engagement index score

Year	Civil Service	HM Land Registry
2011	56%	45%
2012	58%	48%
2013	58%	48%
2014	59%	48%
2015	59%	53%
2016	59%	56%
2017	61%	60%
2018	62%	61%
2019	63%	63%

Releasing and supporting our talent

A key aspect of the new culture launch was the commitment to improving leadership capability and that only leader-led change would truly embed a new culture within the organisation.

The focus for the Leadership Development Programme has been leading change and developing a coaching style of leadership. This more progressive coaching style focuses on empowering colleagues, encouraging innovation and enabling decision making at the right levels. The programme includes externally and internally facilitated workshops, guest speakers, online learning, 360 feedback and executive coaching and mentoring.

Leaders are expected to role model the aspirations set out in our new culture statements, with more than 20 internal blogs published and 16 senior leadership teams taking part in change leadership sessions to ensure they undertake the actions needed to support our aspirations. Board members have been undertaking a regular programme of office visits with new virtual formats being trialled to maximise impact with remote colleagues. New approaches to performance management are being trialled which are part of our efforts to encourage collaborative innovation, improve our collective performance and support colleagues to develop and succeed.

HM Land Registry has created strong foundations to build and maintain the talented workforce we need. This year we recruited 464 new colleagues and also expanded the award-winning apprenticeship programme to include a wider variety of schemes which are increasing our home-grown specialist and managerial talent while helping to span the gap between senior technical roles and lawyers.

We have continued to develop our workforce planning capability at tactical, operational and strategic levels, working collaboratively with colleagues across the organisation. A medium-term resourcing plan is in place for registration experts that can be flexed as circumstances change. The Brilliant by Design programme has established specific requirements for different types of registrations in each office and a new call handling and resourcing system has been implemented in the customer contact centres.

The work the Digital, Data and Technology Directorate is doing on implementing communities of practice, and using this as the vehicle for workforce planning in terms of both capacity and capability, has developed significantly this year and this has led to a different approach in using contractors to supplement our own workforce.

A new project has been established to build a new forecasting, planning and budgeting system that will encompass strategic workforce planning, leading to a more data-driven approach for workforce planning in time for the agreement of a new business plan.

The Learning and Development Framework that underpins our People Strategy has directed our efforts on developing skills and capability. We have introduced a new comprehensive online learning management system with significant increases in colleagues’ interactions with learning and development initiatives.

Alongside leadership the priority area for skills development has been technical registration skills and we have created development models and widely used optimum training paths for most of our caseworker roles.

We have also invested in other key skills areas including digital, commercial, financial and project management and legal and communications continuing professional development.

An average of 4.8 days per employee (including apprentices) have been spent on training, with 83% of staff indicating they had the skills needed to do their job in the annual Civil Service People Survey.

Alongside clear training paths, we have provided more opportunities for our colleagues to progress, increasing our capacity to complete more complex casework. We exceeded our key performance indicator to develop and promote at least 275 colleagues to and within the executive caseworker grades, with a final figure of 399 colleagues.

This pipeline of talent must continue to ensure HM Land Registry secures the workforce needed to meet ongoing and future needs. Over the past year our focus has been to encourage people from under-represented groups into management and leadership roles.

Collectively our six colleague-led diversity networks, each with an Executive Board sponsor, have more than 1,200 members and work collectively to achieve the organisation’s aims. Although we were unable to reach our target for increasing black, Asian and minority ethnic colleagues in management grades, we exceeded our key performance indicator to increase female representation in middle and senior management grades by 50%. I want our networks to provide valuable insight and challenge to drive our ambition to become the most inclusive employer in government.

An introduction to communications

Olivia Frost joined the Corporate Communications Team at HM Land Registry as a Government Communication Service Apprentice, working towards NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) level 4 Public Relations and Communications. In her first months with the team, Olivia was involved in projects ranging from storyboarding and filming a video for our Sign your mortgage deed service, updating our social media policy and working with our Graphic Design Team to assemble our newsletter for colleagues who have left the organisation.

Olivia said:

My introduction into corporate communications couldn’t have been better and I am excited to carry on learning so much more!

Our staff networks

Our staff networks play an important role in helping us to develop the best policies to support and drive our people ambitions. They empower our people and help to make HM Land Registry a great place to work.

Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Network

The Black History Month Pop-Up Museum in Croydon, organised by BAME Network members and volunteers

The Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Network promotes the HM Land Registry belief that whatever your ethnicity or background, you should have the means and opportunity to fulfil your potential.

For Black History Month 2019 the network organised several talks and events. One colleague wrote a personal account of growing up with a mixed heritage in Malaysia and England, and the instances of racism he encountered along the way. Published on the intranet, this prompted open discussion about race and racism.

A working group has also driven increased BAME representation in interview panels and created recruitment ambassadors to engage local communities and increase BAME application numbers.

Assured Network

Assured Network members demonstrating HM Land Registry’s inclusive culture and hoping to attract diverse new talent at the Plymouth Respect Festival, June 2019

Assured, our network for sexual orientation and gender identity, is open to anybody who wants to raise awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)+ issues and support our people by helping to ensure that our work environment allows LGBT+ colleagues to feel safe, comfortable and able to be themselves.

LGBT+ History Month was marked in February 2020 with a personal account about why one member feels safe being ‘out’ at HM Land Registry. One commenter said:

Wonderful blog […] I’m really glad you are happy here in our LR family. It really is a great place to work and I’m proud to be an ally to all the equality networks.

The Age Network

The Age Network held a session for colleagues at Fylde Office during Learning at Work Week in 2019

The Age Network provides a place for colleagues of all ages to discuss age-related issues and promote understanding and fair treatment of all based on who they are, not the year on their birth certificate.

Throughout 2019/20 the network has organised events available to many people. These included coffee mornings, Dementia Friend training and Skype chats.

In January 2020 they celebrated Age Awareness Week with events based on priorities for people of all ages – being confident with digital skills, dementia awareness and understanding your pension.

Mike Harlow, Board Sponsor, said:

People’s perception of what being young, old or in the middle means affects all of us. It is a prejudice that, like all others, is unkind and unwelcome here. I am delighted we have established the network and seen it grow in support this year. I want to support its efforts to see everyone respected and understood as extraordinary and unique individuals, whatever their age.

Women’s Network

In March 2020 the network hosted a cross-governmental International Women’s Day event

The Women’s Network is a secure and supportive community offering guidance and support in areas such as career development, parental leave, and physical and mental wellbeing.

The Network uses Yammer as a safe space for members to discuss personal and work-related concerns. During the coronavirus lockdown a complementary Facebook group was created to reach those people who could not access HM Land Registry systems from home.

Disabled Employee (and carers) Network

The Disabled Employee (and carers) Network (DEN) gives support and care when colleagues need it most. The network helps several directorates in HM Land Registry ensure their systems and processes are compatible with assisted technology users, both staff and customer, and is consulted on protocols and policies that are fully inclusive.

In 2019 the network’s Board Sponsor shared his experience of being a carer. He described the challenges and joys of his child’s condition and raised awareness of the support available for carers from HM Land Registry, DEN and the Charity for Civil Servants.

Faith and Belief Network

June 2019 celebrations in Fylde Office for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr. More than 125 people shared home-cooked food and had their names written in Arabic calligraphy

The primary aim of the Faith and Belief Network is to promote a stronger faith literacy among staff, because by understanding one another we can more easily relate to each other.

In November 2019 the network celebrated Inter Faith Week by welcoming colleagues from across the Civil Service and local government in the south west to a Q&A session where colleagues representing Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism shared their views and experiences.

Karina Singh, Board Sponsor, said:

As Board Sponsor for the BAME and Faith and Belief networks, I am incredibly pleased to work with a group of committed individuals who care deeply about addressing inequalities and creating an inclusive culture throughout the organisation. This year we have seen membership of the networks increase significantly. The Faith and Belief Network have relished the opportunity to be involved in the corporate decision about the wording in our seasonal greeting card. The series of events organised for Black History Month were awesome and well attended. The Pathways development programme for junior colleagues, with a focus on diversity, has been really well received as reflective, insightful and inspiring.

Performance analysis and financial review

Iain Banfield, Chief Financial Officer

2019/20 financial review

Our financial objective in 2019/20 has been to balance the needs of the organisation today with our ambitions for the future. We have invested in the skills and capacity we need now without jeopardising the investment in our transformation programme, which will help deliver the world-leading registry we want to become. We have also focused on ensuring we have the financial resilience we need to navigate the increased volatility in the housing market that has come with coronavirus.

In 2019/20, we invested a total of £31.7m in our transformation programme. We also returned a dividend to the Government of £24.7m and retained an annual surplus of £3.6m*.

From 1 April 2020, HM Land Registry will operate under a new financial framework as it moves away from being a trading fund and solely becomes a non-ministerial department. Because of this transition, there is a one-off adjustment in 2019/20 as we released a special dividend payment of £483.5m to HM Treasury (HMT). This reflects the movement of reserves from ourselves to HMT.

The property market in England and Wales remained robust for the first 11 months of the year with activity levels similar to 2018/19 prior to the outbreak of coronavirus. In 2019/20 HM Land Registry recognised income of £308.6m from customers. This excludes the cash received for applications that had not been completed by year-end.

*The £3.6m is stated prior to the payment of the special dividend.

	2019/20 £m	2018/19 £m
Operating income	308.6	323.2
Operating costs (including administrative expenses)	(284.5)	(292.2)
Operating surplus	24.1	31
Other income/(costs)	4.2	1.3
Dividend	(24.7)	-27.3
Retained surplus prior to special dividend	3.6	5
Special dividend	(483.5)	-
Capital expenditure	22.7	16.8

Operating income

Operating income	Creation of new register entries	Updating the register	Guaranteed queries	Information services	Commercial services	Other services	Miscellaneous income	-
Operating income	24	45	20	6	1	2	1

As at 31 March 2020 the fees received in advance balance was £40.5m, an increase of £16.8m from 31 March 2019. The key drivers for this change were the impact that coronavirus had on our ability to process applications in the last two weeks of March and a more general increase in our stock of uncompleted complex transfers of part and new lease applications. HM Land Registry continues to invest in caseworkers to meet this excess demand, though there is inevitably a time lag between recruitment and full productivity given the expert nature of the role.

As in previous years, almost half our operating income was driven by updates to existing titles in the register, which accounted for £138.6m. The creation of new register entries (such as first registrations, transfers of part and new leases) generated income of £75.3m.

Our other major income came from guaranteed query services. These are critical steps in every property transaction and where we see our largest volume of service demand. However, since they are largely automated, they do not carry as high a fee as our register change services (which require input from our expert professionals). In 2019/20, guaranteed query services accounted for £61.0m.

Information services enable users to go online to get a snapshot of any registered plot of land or property and generated £19.5m in 2019/20. Together, the three core registration services above generated £294.3m in 2019/20 (96% of operating income).

We also provide other land and property services. Our digital Land Charges service protects interests in unregistered land and we maintain the bankruptcy index for England and Wales. Our Agricultural Credits Department maintains a register of short-term loans secured on farming stock and other agricultural assets. Together these generated £7.0m.

We also offer commercial data services for customers in the property market and elsewhere in the economy. Income from the commercial release of our data generated £4.5m in 2019/20. Aside from income from our services, we received miscellaneous income of £2.8m, the vast majority of which comes through the investment property we hold, which we let on a commercial basis.

Operating costs

Operating costs	Business as usual - staff	Business as usual - non-staff	Transformation	Commercial	-
Operating costs	74	19	6	1

2019/20 has seen a 2.7% decrease in our operating costs. This was driven by a £22.2m reduction in our indemnity provision following the annual calculation by the Government Actuary’s Department. Outside of this adjustment, increase in costs were due to planned investment in transformation in line with the profile in the Business Strategy and our commitment to expand caseworker capacity to address historic under-resourcing and to meet levels of demand.

There was also a number of unavoidable pressures such as the cross-government increase in employer superannuation contribution. The reduction in indemnity provision means that no funding from reserves was required to meet these pressures as originally agreed with HMT.

Business as usual costs

We recruited more expert colleagues and funded increased overtime to help manage demand and deliver the vast majority of our applications within our speed of service targets. This contributed to an increase in staff costs for our business-as-usual activity, rising from £195.4m in 2018/19 to £210.4m in 2019/20 (£11m of this relates to higher rates of superannuation than 2018/19).

Non-staff business-as-usual costs totalled £55.4m (2018/19: £60.4m), including spend on: property and facilities management; IT services, including maintenance of equipment and licences; and various contracts with third-party suppliers relating to document storage and retrieval, document scanning and mapping services from Ordnance Survey. Impairment and depreciation costs included within the non-staff costs of £7.9m were broadly consistent with 2018/19 (£7.8m).

Guaranteeing the integrity of the register

These non-staff costs also include the impact of our state-backed guarantee of title, which helps to underpin the integrity of the register. It provides protection for victims of fraud or unforeseen errors. In 2019/20, £5.3m was paid out against 845 claims.

A £22.2m reduction in the claims and “incurred but not reported” (IBNR) provision was driven by a review by HM Land Registry of the underlying assumptions used in the forecasting model by the actuary, the Government Actuary’s Department. HM Land Registry has reviewed the key assumptions used, and the model has been updated to incorporate the most-recent 20 years of data. The risks of any potential significant one-off claims are disclosed as a contingent liability within note 17.1.

Further information on outstanding claims and IBNR provisions – including sensitivity analysis that reflect the estimated nature of the IBNR liability and susceptibility of the provision to fluctuation – can be found in note 15.

Improving our services – transformation

Our strategy depends on investment in transforming the services we provide and how we provide them. In 2019/20, we invested £17.4m of resource in our ambitious change programme.

The majority of this spend relates to the continuation of our digital and data programmes. The overall aim of these is to modernise HM Land Registry services and improve the range of, and access to, our data. It will enable us to provide better, faster and more efficient services, at lower cost.

We also invested in improving our existing services, systems and casework processes as part of our Service Improvement Programme and in our Customer Programme. The latter is improving critical elements of how we manage customer contact. These include refreshing our online business portal and improving our customer relationship management system. In addition, we invested in our IT infrastructure, including consolidating our data centres from three sites into two.

Commercial services

Finally, operating costs included £2.6m to support our commercial services.

Local Land Charges

These operating costs include £6.0m of resource used to support the Local Land Charges programme as it continues to expand. As at 31 March 2020 nine local authorities were part of the programme and HM Land Registry is working with 20 for 2020/21.

Other income and costs

The major component of our other income is investment income on bank deposits totalling £3.3m and release of historic provisions of £3.1m. This is offset by other miscellaneous costs of £2.2m.

Capital and reserves

Total capital expenditure was £22.7m, including £14.4m on the transformation programme. This was mainly on IT, software and capitalisation of Local Land Charges development costs. Of the total spend, £14.8m related to tangible assets and £8.0m to intangible assets.

2020/21 onwards

In October 2018, the Office for National Statistics reclassified HM Land Registry into the central government subsector for national accounts’ statistical purposes, in accordance with the provisions of the European System of Accounts 2010. As a result, trading fund status will be revoked from April 2020 and HM Land Registry will enter the parliamentary vote-funding regime with our accounts forming part of the financial statistics relating to central government.

As part of the budget settlement agreed on 11 March 2020 HM Land Registry has been delegated a budget set out in the table below with revenue returning directly to HMT. See Main Supply Estimates 2020 to 2021 for further information.

Spending total

Amounts sought this year:

• Resource DEL £361.3 million
• Resource AME £12 million
• Capital DEL £40.2 million

The overall settlement allows HM Land Registry to continue the delivery of its business plan by increasing the investment in our people, infrastructure and future capability. Importantly, it also gives us security of budget in light of the volatility in the housing market caused by coronavirus.

Our key performance indicators

We monitored 15 key performance indicators (KPIs) against our strategic priorities in 2019/20. Our KPIs presented a broad set of challenges, with a high degree of stretch for the organisation. In many areas that ambition has been met in full. In others progress has been considerable but there is more to be done.

See Appendix F for an explanation of our key performance indicators and our performance against them.

KPI Name	% of target at end of year 2019/20	KPI achieved
KPI 1 - Customer satisfaction	98	Not achieved
KPI 2 - Requisition rate	82	Not achieved
KPI 4a - Register queries	103	Achieved
KPI 4b - Register updates	99	Not achieved
KPI 5 - Complex register creation	99	Not achieved
KPI 6 - Decrease backlog of complex transfer of part and new lease applications	58	Not achieved
KPI 7 - Quality	99	Not achieved
KPI 8 - E-services availability	100	Achieved
KPI 9 - Digital mortgages	97.69	Not achieved
KPI 10 - Transformation full-time equivalent saving	33	Not achieved
KPI 11 - Staff engagement	100	Achieved
KPI 12 - Leadership and managing change	100	Achieved
KPI 13 - Senior casework promotions	145	Achieved
KPI 14 - Diverse gender workforce	150	Achieved
KPI 15 - Diverse black, Asian and minority ethnic workforce	40	Not achieved

Our focus on people and culture

Five of our 15 KPIs this year supported our People Strategy (KPIs 11-15, inclusive), spanning a range of objectives to ensure the organisation has the right capacity and culture to be as effective as possible. We are pleased to report the strongest staff engagement results in our organisation’s history, continuing the trend of year-on-year improvement over recent times. Our commitment to leadership and managing change has produced similarly positive results, delivering both an improvement on last year and a ranking within the top quartile for Civil Service organisations of similar size and nature. We have successfully increased our operational capacity and offered promotion opportunities to many of experienced caseworkers, providing a positive impact on organisational culture after more than a decade of limited career progression opportunities for our colleagues. There has been a more varied performance in the diversity KPIs (KPIs 14 and 15), with extremely positive progress in our gender targets but less impact against our ambitions for black and ethnic minority colleagues. This is something we take very seriously, and the causes of this differential impact on diversity ambitions is something we will continue to focus on in the year ahead.

Our transformation

We missed the KPI monitoring the savings delivered through transformation activities this year (KPI 10). However, the volume of transformation activity planned over this year was considerable and delays naturally arose in projects. We also took pragmatic decisions both to prioritise improving the customer service experience for our most complex applications where demand had outstripped our capacity to process, and also to ensure change was not delivered into the organisation all at the same time, which would have negatively impacted the delivery of critical services. The impact of coronavirus was a minor contributing factor to these delays. One such impact included turning on the automation of our digital mortgage service this year, which was ready to go live in March after careful testing with our customers. Some 9,767 deeds were registered through this service over the course of the year, but these did not contribute to the KPI as it was focused on automated registrations (KPI 9). We are grateful for the significant engagement and support from mortgage lenders in the market who have been instrumental in getting us ready to roll out end-to-end automation of digital mortgages in the year ahead.

Our focus on the customer

Delivering a timely service to our customers remains an important aspect of our Business Strategy. We delivered 96% of total applications within service standards this year. We did not, however, meet all of our KPIs in this area (KPI 4a was met but 4b, 5, and 6 were not). Feedback from our customer base throughout the year suggested a need to revisit how we prioritise among the applications we receive, such that we increased the number of caseworkers processing our most complicated applications. Progress was being made in reducing the number of uncompleted applications of this product type before coronavirus restrictions came into effect.

Our research partner, Ipsos Mori, surveys our customers every quarter to ask them how they rate our overall service. A total of 1,195 customers were surveyed over the course of the year, with 90% rating our service as excellent, very good or good (KPI 1). This is a slight reduction on last year, however, it is worth noting that over a quarter of customers rated ‘overall service’ as excellent, while under 3% gave a poor rating. Understanding how our services are received by our customers is very important to us and we have worked with Ipsos Mori throughout the year to develop a more granular view of customer satisfaction.

A new survey, which we have run in parallel with the approach monitored by this year’s KPI, will form the basis of the target for the year ahead.

Providing trust and confidence in land ownership

This year, HM Land Registry refined its indicator of quality of register changes with a risk-informed metric showing where changes have the greatest impact on register integrity (KPI 7). Our targets were ambitious, in keeping with our corporate belief in register integrity as a cornerstone of property rights. We narrowly missed the overall quality KPI target by 0.5 percentage points, and performance among the basket of measures demonstrated improvements in many areas.

Our key deliverables

Our business plan for 2019/20 outlined 19 deliverables covering all areas of our business strategy. At the end of the year we had met 15 of these, and partially met a further two. These were a combination of business as usual and transformation objectives. Some of our key successes include:

• implementing changes through the Brilliant by Design programme, with improvements to the way casework is managed
• continued improvements to make our services faster and easier, this year we received the first application through our new online lodging service (Front End Validation)
• centralising our customer service centres to improve the consistency of the information we provide;
• developing our cultural aspirations to enable us to manage the development and ambitions of our people
• managing the transition into central government through the passing of relevant legislation and negotiating our first Spending Round settlement with HM Treasury

The evolution of performance in HM Land Registry

Over recent years, we have had KPIs that have centred around output measures, each with varying levels of ambition. We are changing our approach to performance reporting next year and have worked with leaders across HM Land Registry to consider what it is most important for us to measure, with specific focus on the behaviours we want to drive, and ultimately, the outcomes we wish to achieve. Our performance will be measured against the following outcome statements:

• There is trust and confidence in land ownership
• The conveyancing process is quick, easy and secure
• Property data support a stable and innovative UK economy

In delivering this change, we will be refocusing our KPIs to show a clear line of sight to these outcome statements. Change does not mean losing sight of performance indicators we have used in the past, but rather contextualising them to ensure they are being used for maximum effect. For example, efficiency of application processing (the indicator under development over 2019/20) is a critical success factor for a new KPI focused on overall application output. This KPI maps into the first two outcome statements. It is about ensuring there is trust and confidence in land ownership by maintaining an accurate register and ensuring the conveyancing process is quick, easy and secure to support the economy. Reframing our performance indicators this way will support outcome-focused decision making, ensuring we are delivering maximum impact for the UK.

Humberside Police took part in a comprehensive registration pilot with us resulting in the registration of its freehold land assets. Since then Leicestershire, West Yorkshire and Cumbria police forces have also registered their property and we are working with several more. Fiona Rendell, a solicitor working on behalf of West Midlands Police, said: “We had started to register our land and property assets on an ad hoc basis so when I heard that HM Land Registry could help us register everything in one project, I knew this would be the most cost-effective way to progress.”

Photo: Alamy Stock Photo/Les Gibbon

Sustainability performance

This year we have worked on delivering some major projects to help with the reduction of our utility use. LED (light-emitting diode) lighting has been installed on one floor at Birkenhead, and across all three floors occupied by HM Land Registry at the Peterborough office and throughout the Swansea office. The estimated saving of LED lighting is likely to be in the region of 52 tonnes of carbon. The installation of a new boiler at the Fylde office will look to deliver an estimated 12% reduction in gas consumption over the next year and beyond. The start of a refurbishment of the washroom facilities in our Leicester office will eventually result in an estimated 96,000 litres of water reduction.

A major change to our property portfolio has resulted in a net reduction in electricity of 1,000,000KWh and 68,000KWh of gas reducing carbon by 292 tonnes for this activity alone.

HM Land Registry also commenced a biodiversity improvement programme along with assistance from our facilities management service provider ISS and their supply chain, with works completed at our Hull and Fylde offices and further plans to deliver similar improvements at Plymouth, Telford and Weymouth already agreed.

Other initiatives

Crisp packet recycling through a third-party provider has generated 439kg of material.

Many offices have taken advantage of the coffee cup recycling schemes run by the major coffee shop chains, resulting in 287kg of waste being removed from landfill.

We supported the Natural England campaign to plant 1 million trees in conjunction with ISS and its grounds contractors. We planted trees at all our suitable locations and are looking to continue this as part of the biodiversity improvements already mentioned above.

Our offices have been offering the use of reusable bags in reception areas for staff to borrow if they need to go out to the shops during their breaks.

Our performance

We manage the delivery of land registration in an environmentally responsible way. We utilise our Environmental Management System to ensure we are continually improving and working towards the required targets set as part of the Greening Government Commitments (GGC) and the Greening Government ICT requirements.

This report is delivered in line with the current guidelines supplied by HM Treasury.

We have continued our accreditation to the environmental ISO14001 standard which independently ratifies our performance across the full range of sustainability activities within the organisation.

Current performance against the 2009/10 sustainability baseline data is as follows against the GGC targets.

	Achieved	Target for 2020	On target/achieved?
Carbon	66% reduction	40% reduction	Yes
Waste arising	60% reduction in waste generated 82% recycled 3% landfill 15% Waste to Energy process	Reduce the amount of waste generated by at least 25% Recycle or compost at least 70% of waste and landfill less than 10% of waste	Yes
Water consumption	27% reduction	25% reduction (self-imposed)	Yes
Paper consumption	70% reduction	Reduce our paper use by 50% from 2009/10 baseline	Yes

In addition the following requirement within the GGC continues to be delivered.

Continue to pursue public procurement practices that are sustainable, so that the government buys more sustainable and efficient products with the aim of achieving the best overall value for money for society.

Departments will report on the systems they have in place and the action taken to support this commitment, including:

• to embed compliance with the Government Buying Standards in departmental and centralised procurement contracts, within the context of government’s overarching priorities of value for money and streamlining procurement processes
• to understand and reduce supply chain impacts

Area		Performance
		Actual (£’000)	2020 reduction target
Energy: greenhouse gas emissions, all areas within scope	carbon emissions (tonnes)	4,545	9,776
	expenditure (£)	3,325
Waste	consumption (tonnes)	794	1,484
	expenditure (£)	138
Water	consumption (m³)	41,829	38,346
	expenditure (£)	201

Sustainability governance

Compliance with environmental legislation is managed through the Sustainability Governance Framework and compliance meetings with the facilities management provider. This is managed by the Sustainability Manager in conjunction with our Senior Facilities Business Partners and Total Facilities Management provider.

Overall delivery of additional requirements of GGC

The targets continue to drive central Government to be more sustainable and ensure the requirements of the Climate Change Act (2008) of a reduction of 31% by 2020 in greenhouse gas emissions is delivered.

Climate change adaptation

Climate change impacts are considered during the delivery of building works and projects. We utilise information delivered in building condition surveys and forward maintenance plans as part of our sustainability reduction strategy while carrying out major refurbishments, relocations or when delivering significant building plant replacement. The climate change adaptation plan is under continuous review.

The delivery of the Governments Net Zero Carbon requirements is being included in building maintenance and wider property management decisions. Funding for major change will need to be planned for in future budget allocations.

Biodiversity and the natural environment

Improvements continue to be introduced where financially viable through the facilities management provider. Biodiversity improvement plans have been created and are being delivered at Fylde, Hull, Plymouth, Weymouth and Telford. This improvement process will continue at sites that have been identified as benefitting from future improvements such as Swansea.

Carbon

Consumption of electricity has reduced by more than 1.5m KWh. This reflects the infrastructure works delivered as detailed above. Gas consumption has increased slightly by 2%. This was as a result of a colder winter in 2019/20 than the previous year.

The cost of the Carbon Reduction Commitment to the organisation was a credit of -£45,000 as we had pre-purchased credits in previous years and were able to sell on some excess credits. This was the final year of the commitment and the provision is now covered within utility bills for gas and electricity.

Our overall reduction in carbon emissions since 2009/10 is 66%. See Appendix C for historic trend data.

Note: data includes other government departments in occupation of our estate, but excludes data relating to non-government tenants.

Area		Performance
		Actual (£’000)	2020 reduction target
Energy: greenhouse gas emissions, all areas within scope	carbon emissions (tonnes)	4,545	9,776
	expenditure (£)	3,325
Waste	consumption (tonnes)	794	1,484
	expenditure (£)	138
Water	consumption (tonnes)	41,829	38,346
	expenditure (£)	201

Sustainability governance

Compliance with environmental legislation is managed through the Sustainability Governance Framework and compliance meetings with the facilities management provider. This is managed by the Sustainability Manager in conjunction with our Senior Facilities Business Partners and Total Facilities Management provider.

Overall delivery of additional requirements of GGC

The targets continue to drive central Government to be more sustainable and ensure the requirements of the Climate Change Act (2008) of a reduction of 31% by 2020 in greenhouse gas emissions is delivered.

Climate change adaptation

Climate change impacts are considered during the delivery of building works and projects. We utilise information delivered in building condition surveys and forward maintenance plans as part of our sustainability reduction strategy while carrying out major refurbishments, relocations or when delivering significant building plant replacement. The climate change adaptation plan is under continuous review.

The delivery of the Governments Net Zero Carbon requirements is being included in building maintenance and wider property management decisions. Funding for major change will need to be planned for in future budget allocations.

Biodiversity and the natural environment

Improvements continue to be introduced where financially viable through the facilities management provider. Biodiversity improvement plans have been created and are being delivered at Fylde, Hull, Plymouth, Weymouth and Telford. This improvement process will continue at sites that have been identified as benefitting from future improvements such as Swansea.

Carbon

Consumption of electricity has reduced by more than 1.5m KWh. This reflects the infrastructure works delivered as detailed above. Gas consumption has increased slightly by 2%. This was as a result of a colder winter in 2019/20 than the previous year.

The cost of the Carbon Reduction Commitment to the organisation was a credit of -£45,000 as we had pre-purchased credits in previous years and were able to sell on some excess credits. This was the final year of the commitment and the provision is now covered within utility bills for gas and electricity. Our overall reduction in carbon emissions since 2009/10 is 66%. See Appendix C for historic trend data.

Note: data includes other government departments in occupation of our estate, but excludes data relating to non-government tenants.

Note: Ordnance Survey and the NHS, who use HM Land Registry data centre services, report their carbon consumption directly to government.

The greenhouse gas draft target set for all BEIS agencies and public bodies is to reduce emissions by 40% by March 2020 over the baseline data for 2009/10.

Waste

The waste target set is to reduce the amount of waste generated by at least 25% from a 2009/10 baseline, and strive to reduce it further, recycle or compost at least 70% of waste, and landfill less than 10% of waste.

In partnership with our waste providers through our facilities management contract we are working towards zero to landfill. We are currently meeting all of the targets with performance as follows: the amount of waste generated reduced by 60%, the amount of waste recycled is at 82%, waste incinerated for energy conversion 15%, all waste not going to landfill is 97%.

Waste management is delivered through two routes. Paper waste is managed through a confidential waste disposal contract outside of the facilities management contract. In the last year the contractor has changed. The new contractor operates a different average waste weight per bin which is about half of the previous contractor’s calculation. All other waste management is delivered through the facilities management contract.

Of the waste arising 505 tonnes is paper sent for recycling. Paper equates to 64% of our total waste arising.

Our overall reduction in waste generated since 2009/10 is 60%. See Appendix C for historic trend data.

Water consumption

The water target is to continue to further reduce water consumption from a 2009/10 baseline. This allows departments to set their own internal targets for water reduction and report on their progress against these. Additionally, departments will continue to report on office water use (m³ per full-time equivalent).

A 27% reduction in water consumption has been achieved against a target of 25%.

Consumption per full-time equivalent, including estimated number of colleagues on HM Land Registry sites from other government departments, is 6.5m³.

Paper usage

The GGC reduction target to reduce our paper use by 50% from an HM Land Registry baseline year of 2011/12 shows a current improvement of 70% of A4 equivalent paper use. Our digital services programme and our continued move to on-request printing are continuing to have a significant impact.

Sustainable procurement

The Corporate Procurement Team continue to work to maintain and, we hope, improve on Level 3 (Practice) across all categories in the Sustainable Procurement Flexible Framework maturity model. By working with our business stakeholders and key suppliers, the Cabinet Office’s Government Buying Standards are now embedded into our procurement processes.

Key suppliers are to identify and progress opportunities for making social and environmental improvements. We have continued to work on sustainability issues as highlighted by:

• Enterprise, our vehicle hire provider, working closely with us to help identify which category of vehicle will provide the best value for money while at the same time reducing our carbon footprint
• Procurement & Commercial Group undertaking an exercise to obtain sustainability information on suppliers

Work is also being done to implement the use of contract sustainability action plans.

The Corporate Procurement Team has appointed two sustainability champions from within the team to help add emphasis and focus in achieving our sustainability objectives. As a team we are continually searching for methods to leverage our position and promote benefits that help tackle economic, social and environmental issues. We continue to maintain and improve on Level 3 (Practice) across all categories in the Sustainable Procurement Flexible Framework maturity model.

Some initiatives we’ve completed over the last few months include:

• creating a sustainability project management board to help coordinate works
• revising sustainability action plans to add simplicity and focus on HM Land Registry contract-specific benefits, as opposed to generic business achievements
• completing a Modern Slavery checklist to ensure all suppliers are meeting Cabinet Office’s Government Buying Standards
• working with sustainability colleagues to dovetail efforts

Our current procurement documents are being reviewed to ensure sustainability plays a bigger role in pre and post procurement activity.

We communicated to all suppliers a piece of work aimed in achieving BEIS’ target that by 2022 one £1 in every £3 will be spent with a small or medium-sized enterprise.

Other corporate information

We fulfil our role as a public sector information holder, which we take very seriously, through adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Freedom of Information Act. HM Land Registry is exempt from the application of some individual data protection rights where the application of legislation would conflict with the Land Registration Act and Rules. We are in the process of recruiting a new Information Rights Team, headed by its Data Protection Officer. The Information Rights Team will help to ensure we continue to meet our legal obligations under relevant legislation.

We have completed a comprehensive review of our information assets. A new Information Asset Register has been implemented and new asset owners, at director level, have been appointed in line with Cabinet Office guidance. Work has commenced on a new Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) strategy following the appointment of a new Head of KIM.

We received 431 Freedom of Information requests, of which 406 were answered within 20 working days.

In the provision of our data services, HM Land Registry complies with the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015 and has been reviewing the new Directive on the Reuse of Public Sector Information which, if implemented in the UK, would lead to a change in the regulations.

Business impact target

The business impact target score comprises the economic impact of regulatory activity where the burden or benefit will impact on businesses above a £5m threshold. HM Land Registry regularly reviews its activities to assess the impact on its business customers in complying with its regulatory processes and requirements. We are continuing to develop our electronic lodgement of applications to make it easier and cheaper to deal with us.

Health and safety

We have continued to develop our health and safety management system to ensure compliance with legislative and regulatory requirements, monitor the adequacy of health and safety policies and promote continual improvement.

In January 2020, we successfully migrated from the British Standard for health and safety management, OHSAS18001, to the European Standard, ISO 45001. The achievement and retention of this standard provides assurance of the maturity of our health and safety management system, alignment with best practice and promotes our continual improvement.

We have maintained a good level of compliance via our facilities management provider, who deliver health and safety services on our behalf. We continue to focus on awareness and improvement of workplace assessment processes, including display screen assessments, working out of the office and workplace inspections. Following coronavirus, these processes will be, in 2020, rolled out to home working and will reflect our changing workplace practices.

During the financial year 2019/20, we recorded a total of 145 accidents. This is broken down as:

• 135 accidents relating to HM Land Registry staff
• 7 accidents relating to contractors
• 3 accidents relating to visitors

Three of the above accidents were required to be reported to the Health and Safety Executive under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations.

Complaints

We recorded 5,678 complaints in 2019/20 compared with 3,193 in 2018/19.

We anticipated a higher number of recorded complaints this year as a result of changes we made in 2019/20 to the way we recognise, record and action complaints. These were the result of a review of our customer feedback processes aimed at ensuring that complaints are recognised and dealt with more consistently and with greater customer focus. Changes made included simplifying our definition of a complaint, revising our speed of service standards and process stages and widening the channels by which customers can complain. The review is continuing into 2020/21 looking at the insights we capture as a result of complaints and doing more with that information to improve what we do for the benefit of all of our customers.

As part of the review, we carried new training for key staff to raise awareness and understanding of the changes and also to highlight the importance of being consistent and effective in the recognition and recording of customer feedback, particularly complaints.

A total of 45% of recorded complaints were upheld or partially upheld. Customer feedback about delays on registration applications and associated customer enquiries was the most common area of upheld complaint, comprising 25% of the upheld total. This reflects that we are taking longer to complete some more complex applications involving the creation of a new register.

The other main areas of complaint related to our cancellation of applications (comprising 16% of the upheld total), the requests we raise for information from customers when their applications are not in order (12%) and the results we send when we complete applications (10%).

We conduct analysis of all complaints received throughout the year, both individually and in their overall categories, to capture and act on learning points. For example, our customers said:

1. They require more detailed information about speed of service on the different types of application which require the creation of a new register as completion times can vary. We revised our service standard information published on GOV.UK to give separate average completion times for register create applications which involve a developing estate of five or more plots and those which do not.

2. They would like the current facility to view their variable direct debit information for a period of three months in the Business e-services portal extended. Customers can now view this information for a 12-month period

3. They would like to be informed when the point(s) raised in an HM Land Registry preliminary request for information (requisition) has been resolved. We now send out a communication to inform customers that a preliminary requisition has been fully addressed and to alert customers to the possibility that further points might arise as the application moves forward to completion.

4. We are sometimes inconsistent in applying our requirements for plans lodged with deeds and applications forms and for the execution of deeds by private individuals. In response, we updated and clarified our internal and external guidance.

5. They sometimes receive unexpected requests for information (requisitions) and would like our suite of free webinars extended to support them in lodging their applications in order and to get the best out of our services. Further webinars were introduced covering additional topics, including guidance on applications to register a lease and on our Pre-submission Enquiry and Application Management services. A link to our webinars was added to the electronic services home page used by our business customers.

Our Independent Complaints Reviewer provides a free and impartial review and resolution service for any customer dissatisfied with how we have handled their complaint.

Modern slavery

We support measures to ensure that modern slavery, including slavery and human trafficking, has no place in our organisation or supply chains. We continue to use robust procedures, including in our contracts and in our recruitment processes, and facilitate the raising of any concerns by colleagues, including any relating to modern slavery concerns in our supply chains.

Land Registration Rule Committee Annual Summary of Activities

The Land Registration Rule Committee was constituted under the Land Registration Act 2002 to provide advice and assistance, originally to the Lord Chancellor but now to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, in making land registration rules and fee orders under the Act.

In April 2020, the committee provided advice and assistance in relation to the drafting of emergency rules amending the Land Registration Rules 2003 in the light of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. In view of the urgency and the restrictions on movement, the committee’s business was conducted by email. The amendment rules came into force on 16 April 2020.

During the year, Greville Healey was nominated to serve on the committee, as nominee of the Bar Council, and the following members were renominated:

• Ian Kirkaldy, as nominee of UK Finance
• Kim Caley, as nominee of the Council for Licensed Conveyancers

Service standards

See HM Land Registry service standards for details of the service that customers can expect from us.

Welsh Language Scheme

We remain commitment to our obligations under the Welsh Language Scheme to treat the English and Welsh languages equally when dealing with the public in Wales. Chris Pope, Chief Operations Officer, is the senior responsible owner for the scheme. Our revised scheme, which contains our Action Plan for the next four years, was approved by the Welsh Language Commissioner on 27 September 2019. We have a dedicated Welsh language team in our Swansea Office and a Welsh language telephone line for general enquiries – 0300 006 0422.

See Welsh language scheme for further information on our Welsh language services.

Comprehensive registration

In 2019/20 we completed 77,997 first registrations, which equates to an estimated 120,000 hectares of land with a value estimated at more than £10 billion.

Policy and stakeholder coordination

The Chief Land Registrar’s Office fulfils a range of functions to uphold the reputation of HM Land Registry with government and key stakeholders. It coordinates our representation globally and our contribution to the development of government policies by maintaining strong relationships at a working level. This enables HM Land Registry both to remain in step with and seek to influence wider government policy. HM Land Registry takes a proactive approach to policy horizon scanning that ensures it responds appropriately to formal consultations. The Office is responsible for HM Land Registry’s relationship with its sponsor department as well as corporate governance that includes the Board Secretariat. The Office also supports the executive and non-executive senior teams.

During the year, HM Land Registry has provided its expert views to several key government and stakeholder policy initiatives. These include the joint Cabinet Office and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s consultation on digital identity, and the latter’s call for evidence on a national data strategy. HM Land Registry has contributed to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s consultations on making home ownership affordable and right to manage and is part of the industry-led House Buying and Selling Initiative that is taking forward a number of ideas to improve the way the conveyancing process works. HM Land Registry has contributed to the Geospatial Commission’s national geospatial strategy (https://www.gov.uk/government/ publications/unlocking-the-power-of-locationthe-uks-geospatial-strategy) and has responded to the Law Commission consultation on electronic execution of documents. In relation to corporate good practice, HM Land Registry has responded to the Information Commissioner’s Office consultation on their draft code of practice and the BEIS consultation on Corporate Transparency and Register Reform. The office has led the organisation’s preparations for leaving the EU and continues to coordinate its contribution to the future arrangements.

The Chief Land Registrar’s Office works closely with UK Government Investments who act as the agent of BEIS in representing the Government’s interest in the governance and performance of HM Land Registry as an organisation. We responded to three Parliamentary Questions, and worked with other departments as needed as well.

The office coordinates HM Land Registry’s key stakeholder relationships to optimise opportunities to engage and to track sentiment. The Land Registry Advisory Council brings together key representative organisations involved in the conveyancing process and has met four times to share views and contribute to HM Land Registry’s policy development. HM Land Registry met with other land registries from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland and the Isle of Man three times and hosted the forum in March 2020. We have brought together a cross-section of stakeholders and customers in a discussion forum intended to address both the immediate challenges of coronavirus as well as longer term. We are using this to build a shared understanding and vision of what measures HM Land Registry can take to provide support to stakeholders, our customers and the property market as a whole to enable the conveyancing process to operate and to enable wider benefits to the property market and economy.

HM Land Registry has a global presence. We submit the annual response to the World Bank Ease of Doing Business report on behalf of the UK. Our ranking for registering property has increased one place to 41st. HM Land Registry supports policy commitments of the Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. We have contributed advisory support to the British High Commission in India under the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Prosperity Fund. We have also provided support through hosting educational study visits for representatives from many jurisdictions including Bangladesh, Mongolia, Ukraine, China, Indonesia and Greece.

We attended the international Registrar of Titles conference in September, presented on Transforming Land Administration at the 11th Session of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Working Party on Land Administration in February and we co-hosted the EuroGeographics General Assembly with Ordnance Survey and Registers of Scotland in October. We established an emerging technologies forum for land administration authorities in October which gives us the combined opportunities to demonstrate our expertise globally and to learn from a global community.

Simon Hayes
Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar
8 July 2020

Glossary

Term	Definition
Agile	A method of project management that uses collaborative efforts to evolve solutions which achieve its goals.
Annually Managed Expenditure Resource (Resource AME)	Items of an uncontrollable or unpredictable nature. For HM Land Registry, the most significant element is the annual movement in the Indemnity Fund provision, which is utilised to underwrite the accuracy of the Land Register.
Application	Applying for the registration of unregistered land, updating registered land or property titles, or applying for information from HM Land Registry.
Artificial intelligence (AI)	Intelligence and learning demonstrated by machines.
Blockchain	A distributed, decentralised public ledger.
Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (Capital DEL, CDEL)	Investment in internally-generated software, IT equipment and estates.
Continuous improvement	An ongoing effort to improve products, systems, services and knowledge.
Core registration services	The registration of ownership, interests and mortgages against land and property.
Dividend	The sum we pay to HM Treasury annually out of our surplus.
Document view	View a document as a PDF and print or save it.
Geospatial	Data and information that is associated with a particular location.
Guaranteed queries	Services that provide information and results which come with a state guarantee.
Land Charges	Interests in unregistered land that are capable of being protected by entry in the Land Charges Register.
Local land charges	Local land charges are generally financial charges or restrictions on the use of land which are governmental in character and imposed by public authorities under statutory powers.
Official copy	Copies of deeds and documents filed with us, including title registers and title plans, which are guaranteed as being accurate and are admissible as evidence as if they were the original.
Official search	Allows people such as homebuyers or mortgage lenders to protect their interest before the actual purchase or mortgage is recorded in the register.
Register create application	An application that requires new entries to be created in the Land Register.
Register update	Updating the register of a title that is already registered.
Register view	Viewing the current version of the register.
Request for information	Where HM Land Registry has to make enquiries to the applicant on an application because information or evidence is missing or incorrect and so cannot be processed.
Requisition	See ‘Request for information’.
Resource Departmental Expenditure Limit (Resource DEL, RDEL)	A net ceiling comprising day-to-day organisational running costs. This total is typically analysed into ringfenced amounts (depreciation and amortisation charges) and non-ringfenced sums.
Restriction	An entry that limits HM Land Registry from updating the register unless specified conditions are met.
Restrictive covenant	An agreement, usually contained in a deed, creating an obligation on the owner of land affected, such as limiting the uses of the land.
Robotic process automation	An emerging form of business process automation technology.
Sustainable Procurement Flexible Framework	A self-assessment mechanism that allows organisations to measure and monitor their progress on sustainable procurement over time.
Title	The evidence of a person’s right to property.
Title plan	A plan showing the area of a registered property on a map, usually Ordnance Survey.
Transfer of part	The transfer of part of a registered title, such as where a house and garden are registered under one title and the owner sells part of the garden.