Corporate report

Performance report

Published 14 July 2022

Applies to England and Wales

Overview – HM Land Registry at a glance

A summary of HM Land Registry, our objectives and values.

Our purpose

We protect your land ownership and provide services and data that support an efficient and informed property market.

Our vision

A world-leading property market as part of a thriving economy and sustainable future.

Our strategic objectives

• Providing secure and efficient land registration
• Enabling property to be bought and sold digitally
• Providing near real-time property information
• Providing accessible digital register data
• Leading research and accelerating change with property market partners

Our values

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

Our primary role

Land is our nation’s greatest asset and the physical foundation of our lives. The value of land in England and Wales is estimated at around £8 trillion – more than half the wealth of the nation. In the 2020-21 financial year alone, £260 billion worth of property transactions took place in the UK and HM Land Registry is at the heart of the conveyancing process.

Keeping a definitive and guaranteed record of land ownership is essential to a functioning property market and allows transactions to take place securely and with confidence.

For 160 years we have played a key role in the UK’s economic stability and growth.

Our register, a piece of Critical National Infrastructure, contains more than 26 million titles, providing ownership guarantees for 88% of land in England and Wales, and has lending in the region of £1-1.5 trillion secured against it. Access to information about land enables individuals, businesses and the Government to make plans for the future, while meeting the many challenges of today including housing need, climate change and a thriving economy.

Millions of people and businesses rely on HM Land Registry every year for guaranteed information on property ownership and other elements affecting land use, such as planning conditions and listed building status.

HM Land Registry is a non-ministerial department and is a partner body of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

HM Land Registry in numbers

1. 39.4 million service requests
2. £318.9m – total recognised revenue
3. 36.7 million digital applications
4. 26,125,710 registered titles
5. 300,000 – total number of Local Land Charges searches (free and paid).
6. 20% increase in demands for our services (compares with previous year)
7. 100,000 daily searches for land and property data
8. 71% engagement index score on the 2021 People Survey
9. 216,062 Property Alert accounts created
10. 6,677 employees
11. 63% customer satisfaction. Rated good/excellent in Q4.
12. 14 office locations

Our role in the property market

Market interest

£8 trillion worth of land and property held

100,000 daily requests to view the register, plans and associated documents

We hold one of the largest transactional geospatial property databases in Europe, including all secured loans and other property rights in England and Wales. Since 1990 our register has been open to the public. We receive around 100,000 requests daily to search the register, with the majority answered instantly via our digital business e-services.

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

Property transaction

87,000 daily guaranteed queries

Before you can buy or sell any property, it is critical to check the Land Register for all the information relating to it. Our search of the index map (SIM), official copies and official searches services provide assurance to property professionals and citizens by protecting transactions while they are completed.

After purchase

446 fraudulent registrations prevented since 2009

25,000 daily requests to change the register

We receive around 25,000 requests per day to change the register to reflect accurately the ownership of property. This usually happens at the very end of the transaction – after items such as stamp duty land tax have been paid and the property has changed hands. Only then do we update the register with new owners and details such as mortgages or other interests. This information is also used by organisations such as the Bank of England to calculate interest rates.

Property Alert is one of our most effective fraud prevention measures, sending email alerts to subscribers whenever there is significant activity on a property they are monitoring, such as a new mortgage being taken out. In addition, our data is regularly used by police agencies to combat fraud.

Service requests

38.4million service requests

Guaranteed queries

Guaranteed queries	Service requests
Official copies	18.3m
Official searches	2.9m
Searches of the index map (SIMs)	0.8m

Information services

Information services	Service requests
Views of the register	7.0m
MapSearch	3.0m

Register change services

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

Statutory revenue

Register change services

Register change services	Total revenue
Register updates	£173.9m
Transfers of part	£22.9m
New leases	£14.7m
First registrations	£9.8m

Guaranteed queries

Guaranteed queries	Total revenue
Official copies	£54.9m
Official searches	£8.7m
SIMs	£1.2m

Information services

Guaranteed queries	Total revenue
Views of the register	£21m
Local Land Charges	£0.4m

Other

Guaranteed queries	Total revenue
Land Charges and Agricultural Credits	£7.3m
Commercial services	£4.2m

318.9million total revenue

Note: Revenue is no longer retained by HM Land Registry, but passes through the Trust Statement and is then surrendered to HM Treasury.

Foreword

Interview with Michael Mire, Chair

Michael Mire was appointed as Chair of the HM Land Registry Board in 2016, bringing his knowledge and experience as Senior Partner at management consultants McKinsey and Non-executive Director at the Care Quality Commission. After six years and a second term in post, he leaves us in August 2022. As Non-executive Chair, Michael has worked closely with the Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar in leading the organisation’s development at a critical and exciting time in its 160-year history. As well as taking responsibility for governance and performance, his role as a Board Member has also seen Michael provide independent guidance, support, and constructive challenge to the Executive Board.

During Michael’s tenure, HM Land Registry has focused on and developed its commitment to digital and operational transformation, service delivery and customer care. It has transitioned from paper-based processes to a 21st-century organisation at the cutting edge of new technology. As we accelerate our transition and embrace automation, digitisation and data, our broad-based leadership team, including Non-executive Board Members from FTSE 100 companies, sits alongside and maximises our own expertise from across government and the wider public sector.

As Chair of this exceptional group, Michael has played an extremely valuable part in furthering HM Land Registry’s aims, objectives and future trajectory. He leaves our organisation poised and ready to deliver an ambitious strategy and plan that will see us take our place as the world’s leading land registry. We took the opportunity to ask Michael about his highlights over the last six years at HM Land Registry.

How do you look back on your time as HM Land Registry’s Chair?

It’s been a huge privilege to serve as HM Land Registry’s Chair. All of us at HM Land Registry, and this is also true at the highest levels of government, realise its importance. This is why we are often described as a crucial component of national infrastructure. Citizens, developers, landowners and businesses depend on HM Land Registry and our thousands of expert colleagues to enable them to buy and sell property, often the most important investment they will ever make, and ensure that ownership is recorded accurately. Banks could not take the risk of lending against property without HM Land Registry. We are the ultimate arbiter of who owns what and where. So being the HM Land Registry Chair brings with it this national responsibility and makes the role so fulfilling.

What have been the biggest challenges?

It’s no surprise to say that the pandemic challenge was a unique time for HM Land Registry. Almost overnight we went from an office-based institution to one where nearly everyone worked from home. Other organisations faced a similar challenge but they did not have the same duty to keep the property market functioning and maintain the accuracy of our ownership register. HM Land Registry colleagues rose to the challenge magnificently. Where others struggled, our people ensured that HM Land Registry stayed as responsive to customer needs and maintained our reputation for the highest standards of accuracy. This really was “brilliant teams”, as HM Land Registry calls our frontline colleagues, in action every day.

What have been HM Land Registry’s most significant achievements?

First, being able to recruit what many would say is one of the best boards in the public sector, is itself a tribute to the national importance of HM Land Registry. What other organisation has managed to attract, for example, the Head of Amazon in the UK, the General Counsel at Aviva, the Chief People Officers at both Land Securities and British Land (the UK’s largest property companies), and the Chief Digital Officer at M&S, to name only a few of our outstanding non-executive directors, to its board? This has given HM Land Registry unrivalled corporate governance and a daily source of wise expertise for our executives and for me as well.

Second, it must be our digital migration. When I started as Chair, ‘Digital Street’, the programme to make HM Land Registry a world-leading land registry, was simply an aspiration. We were a paper and PDF-based organisation, almost unchanged since the day HM Land Registry was founded. Now almost everything we do is at the cutting edge of digital. And not just for our customers but also for our colleagues who are finally being given the systems that allow them to maximise their skills and minimise the mundane elements that used to be a daily part of their work. HM Land Registry used to visit other land registries to see best practice; now other land registries come to us.

What has been most difficult about the transformation?

Any transformation on the scale of HM Land Registry’s has difficulties along the way. Not everything works the first time. And our transformation was not simply an internal one. We were asking an entire industry to change the way it handled property transactions and the way it lent against property. Yet despite these challenges, HM Land Registry’s transformation has proceeded much more smoothly than anyone could have envisaged, a testament to everyone involved and especially our people on the frontline who were living in the old world and the digital world at the same time.

What do you see as the future of HM Land Registry?

Some of the future is already with us. Our work with local authorities means that HM Land Registry has now become the source of virtually all important data on property from planning permissions, to restrictions on how property can be used, to small but crucial data for individual homeowners like tree preservation orders in their gardens. But in my mind – this is just the beginning. My vision is that HM Land Registry will become the place to go for all data about property, with a register that is not only digital but 3D as well, has almost real-time information on property values and is also the fastest anywhere at enabling and recording changes in ownership. Our ambition to be the world’s leading land registry will no longer be our ambition but will have become the reality.

Overview

Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar’s foreword by Simon Hayes

This has been another year of record demand in the property market, which has continued unabated since before the pandemic. The central role of the property market in supporting the economy puts particular demands on both HM Land Registry and the property sector as a whole.

Supporting a thriving property sector

It has been a strong year for HM Land Registry. We have seen a 20% increase in demand for our services compared to the previous year, but still met our key performance indicators for customer satisfaction, colleague engagement and protecting the integrity of our registers.

While we aren’t quite where we want to be on other key performance indicators, particularly overall speed of service, our deliverables this year have put us well on course to be able to address these issues sustainably moving forward.

This year, we processed around 156,000 service requests from our customers every single day, providing a fast and efficient customer experience for those essential services that enable properties to change hands without delay. Of the applications we receive each day, 130,000 are what we call information services requests – such as an official search, where customers need to see what data is currently held on the register. Over 90% of these requests are automated and available instantly. The remainder require some manual intervention, and we deliver 95% of these within our three-day service standard.

Changes to the register usually take place after a transaction has been completed and each application is protected from the moment it is submitted to us. These can be fast-tracked at no extra charge where there is an urgent need for the registration to be completed. We process around 1,000 of these expedited applications each day, with 96% completed in ten working days.

Together, this has ensured the property market continued to thrive.

Key challenges in a volatile market

Other non-urgent post-completion requests (around 19,000 applications a day) are taking longer than our customers would like. Today, our overall output is higher than it was three years ago, before the pandemic hit, but it has still not been able to keep pace at all times with the rapid increase in applications that we have received.

In the longer term, the challenge we face is to become more flexible, resilient and responsive to a market which will always be volatile. Land registration skills and expertise take time to build, so we cannot easily flex our capacity to meet the fluctuating activity in the property market. Only digitisation and automation of the simpler parts of our processes can meet that challenge. This will be more reliable and predictable, deliver much faster turnaround times and drive down the cost to us all of avoidable requisitions (or requests for information).

Our aim, therefore, is to automate most of the simple applications. We will then be able to refocus our caseworkers on to those applications that require their expert input and judgement, further bringing down service times.

Our new Digital Registration Service on the HM Land Registry portal will be completed in early 2023. To support this, we have developed a new internal casework system and restructured much of the Land Register to make it machine readable.

We’re already seeing that the new caseworker system simplifies processing, reducing time taken to process an application by around 30%. We have also seen a 30% reduction on the most simple errors, such as variations in name, on applications submitted using the Digital Registration Service.

Tackling productivity, performance and processes

Alongside our significant progress in digitising and automating our services, we also completed our largest recruitment exercise in over a decade, bringing in 390 new colleagues into our casework teams, supported by our Land Registration Academy, to build more capacity and capability to meet customer needs.

We have strengthened our management information to support operational and strategic decision-making across the organisation. New tools now enable colleagues to self-serve with real-time data that can be used to aid smarter and quicker decision-making.

We have also completed a significant programme of investment to equip our caseworking teams and leaders with the data, tools, skills and support to lead coaching discussions that drive better operational performance. Early results are already showing a 15% improvement in productivity, with more expected as the programme fully embeds into all teams.

In order to continue our transformation toward a more digital land registration process and ultimately improving our customer experience, we have restructured our portfolio of ‘change programmes’. We have also begun to explore a wider reorganisation of how we work, reviewing our structure and functions to maximise collaboration and ensure we can continue to deliver our strategic goals.

We have also continued to modernise our organisational culture and ways of working. We introduced a fully hybrid approach to working so that colleagues can work in a way that maximises their productivity, wellbeing and wider contribution to the organisation.

You can read more details about these initiatives within this report.

Connection, collaboration and capacity in a digital world

The current system of homebuying and selling lacks the basic digital experiences that people expect from professional services in the 21st century. Property transactions are complex, there are many stakeholders and diverse sectors involved, and people find the process confusing and stressful. Many of the inefficiencies in buying and selling residential property are also present when commercial property is traded.

Our previous strategy set us on a course to open up our data and reconstruct our systems to modernise our services. We also began a period of significant investment in our people, rebuilding capacity and capability to keep pace with changing service demand.

More data and new digital services have opened the door to the adoption of digital ID checking and electronic signatures, removing the last strict requirements for paper in a property transaction.

The potential customer and organisational benefits of automation, alongside the wider benefits of property data to the economy, are now much closer to realisation.

What is emerging is a vision of connected digital platforms and services that enable buyers and sellers, their banks, lawyers and others to join together each time a property is bought and sold – all interacting entirely digitally. Customers tell us the system would be most effective if fed by standardised information – data on the property concerned, the parties involved and the progress of the transaction – that is available to all.

Digital leadership – a change of focus

We believe HM Land Registry has a clear leadership role to play, given its expertise, central function and data. We also want to support improvements in the sector as a whole. For example, we can set practice and policy requirements that will influence the adoption of digital technology. We have already had success in this area in relation to digital identification and e-signature standards.

In collaboration with others, we want to improve dramatically the experience for all those involved in the property market, including homebuyers and sellers, and unlock value in a way that has never happened before. Digital technology presents the opportunity to do this, in way that goes well beyond just the property market.

The focus of the organisation and the balance of its effort are changing. Traditionally, HM Land Registry has concentrated on transactional services. While those will remain vital, digitisation of much more information will bring great benefits to a whole range of activities and industries. Property data directly supports land-use planning, environmental policymaking, the national effort to achieve Net Zero and the fast-growing PropTech sector. We will continue to energise innovation in property data usage, in particular through our Digital Street research and development programme, and our Geovation accelerator.

Transforming land registration in England and Wales

We are preparing to publish our new Strategy 2022+, which will clearly set out our vision and purpose for the future. We want this next phase of our strategy to transform the process of land registration in England and Wales. It has strong support from key stakeholders across the property sector and beyond.

Alongside our Strategy, we will also publish our Business Plan 2022-25, which will outline our investment plan to tackle the current backlog while making the organisation more resilient to market volatility in the longer term.

More broadly, it sets out to do three things:

• deliver an improved speed of service for our customers through investment in digital transformation and caseworker capacity. This will enable us to keep pace with the market and make our service delivery more resilient to future demand. By the end of three years, we will have eradicated the backlog of applications we hold today and significantly increased the speed of our services.

• lay the foundations for our future role in a digital property market and maximise our impact on the wider economy. The digital registers of the future – including the Local Land Charges Register – will help support a more efficient and transparent property market. We are also investing in the accessibility and interoperability of our data to help support wider economic activity and innovation.

• modernise our organisational culture and ways of working so that HM Land Registry remains a great place to work for our current and future workforce.

Our budget settlement from the 2021 Comprehensive Spending Review ensures we have the fnancial backing from HM Treasury to invest in our people and digital transformation. That investment means we are creating a long-term solution to the challenges created by a cyclical market, making our service provision more consistent and sustainable than it is today.

A vision of the future

A world-leading property market as part of a thriving economy and a sustainable future.

Land registration

Providing secure and efficient land registration - trust and confidence in property ownership is maintained at all times.

Conveyancing

Enabling property to be bought and sold digitally - customers receive an outstanding, fully digital service and property transactions are near frictionless, more user-friendly and secure.

Property market

Providing near real-time property information - the property market is fully informed by digital data, driving better and quicker decisions.

Wider economy

Providing accessible digital register data - Our digital property data supports a stable, healthy economy and sustainable future.

Leading research and accelerating change with property market partners - We co-create successful and lasting change in the property market through ground-breaking programmes such as Digital Street.

Providing secure and efficient land registration

Chris Pope, Chief Operations Officer

Keeping accurate and fraud-free registers, that maintain trust and confidence in the property market, remains an objective of utmost importance for us both now and in the future.

Capacity to improve speed of service for our customers

With nearly 40 million requests for service in 2021-22, meeting the demand of customers in a market that has remained buoyant has required both organisational resilience and flexibility.

Every day we receive about 14,500 searches and around 25,000 requests for our experts to change the register. We’re a vital part of every property transaction and the increased demand we’ve seen in recent years shows no sign of abating.

While we have continued to optimise and develop our capacity, waiting times are too long for some applications to change the register, and we need to do more to support customers.

In the interim, however, we’ve been responding to meet customer needs through our fast-track (expedite) service which has seen demand more than double over the year and by 335% since we launched the service in 2020. We have increased our casework capacity with 390 new caseworkers joining over this last year. This continued our five-year programme of recruitment, bringing in well over 1,000 caseworkers in that period. These actions have enabled the property market to thrive and flourish.

Service requests – financial year

Customer satisfaction scores

Building a truly outstanding customer service

We want to build a truly outstanding customer service which is resilient to the volatility in property market transactions. Complete automation of simpler cases and partial automation of others will enable us to maintain service speeds through fluctuations in market activity.

The portal, our primary business channel for more than 85% of customers making applications to change the register, has been substantially overhauled. The channel improvements make it much simpler and more intuitive to use, with new services and features.

Following a successful testing period, in April 2021 we made our Digital Registration Service (DRS) available to all customers who submit applications through the portal. This major enhancement allows customers to make digital applications to change the register. While we are continually improving the platform, the use of DRS has increased steadily throughout the year with nearly 17% of register update applications currently submitted via this service. The ability to validate and check information upfront has also resulted in higher quality applications that can be processed quicker – with basic errors reduced by 30%. DRS impressed the judges in the 2022 Real IT Awards, winning the Delivering Excellent Customer Experience category. As all applications will need to be submitted digitally in the future, either through DRS or a Business Gateway enabled system, we are working to ensure all customers are aware of the options available to them.

We’ve also added further features to the portal that enable customers to manage their applications. View My Applications, View Colleagues’ Applications and Save and Resume services have all been enhanced to make it easier and quicker for customers to access and manage information about a portal-lodged application. The addition of an Estimated Completion Date also gives conveyancers an indication of when they can expect the application to be completed.

Many of our customers, especially those who are submitting high volumes of applications to update the register and information requests, integrate their case management systems directly with our services. We enable this through investment in our Application Programming Interface (API) channel, Business Gateway. Based on customer feedback, we’ve added both official copy availability and registered proprietor name services, which help our customers in reducing avoidable errors and using easier to integrate APIs. We’ve also redesigned the developer pack, making it easier to understand how to integrate our services, and launched a Business Gateway Community, where customers can provide their input into our strategy and influence what we work on next. We’ve had great feedback on how easy our new services have been to use, with examples of customers taking just hours to start accessing our new APIs. We continue to work with the sector to innovate and facilitate, thus ensuring our customers get the services they value most.

Alongside this, we have begun to introduce our new casework processing system, which is already starting to bring efficiency improvements. In March 2022 alone, 88,000 applications were processed, with cases completed roughly 30% more efficiently. This is just a small indication of the benefits the investment in our technology systems will bring, the foundations for which have been laid over recent years. It also gives us confidence we will be able to see real improvements in our customer service levels as set out in our new three-year Business Plan.

Since publishing our strategy in 2017, we now stand poised at the beginning of a new era of near instantaneous processing through end-to-end automation. Not only will this enable us to speed up the overall service we provide to our customers, but it will also offer more holistic and personalised transaction services that work in step with the property transaction, which you can read about in our forthcoming Strategy 2022+.

The expertise, integrity and professionalism of our people is core to the accuracy and security of our registers. Alongside our ambitious digital transformation programme, we have continued to invest in our registration experts.

We have had significant training requirements as a result of increasing the size of the workforce. Our new Land Registration Academy has allowed us to develop our expert colleagues and increase their know-how, while giving recruitment, training and progression the first-class support they require and deserve.

Despite the heavy demand this has placed on our resources, we have maintained output and, in the year’s final quarter, we have reaped the benefits of our investment, seeing an almost 15% increase in output compared with the previous quarter. Through our Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders programme, we have made a significant investment in our people, empowering colleagues to problem-solve and have data-driven performance conversations.

By building leadership and continuous improvement skills into our teams at all levels, our aim is to support everyone to improve performance and engagement to deliver more for our customers. Our colleagues have completed the initial investment, with ongoing activity to improve continuously, and build maturity and capability. We are already starting to see the impact with year-end data showing our productivity was 15% higher than the same period last year.

Maintaining trust and confidence

It is more important than ever in the current economic climate for our customers and registered owners to trust the accuracy and integrity of our registers. The data held in our registers is guaranteed with HM Land Registry forming part of the critical national infrastructure and underpinning the buoyant and sometimes volatile property market.

Registered title fraud causes far reaching and sometimes irreparable damage to those who fall victim to it. We are committed to identifying, preventing and detecting the registration of fraudulent applications and continue to invest in this area.

Through the skilful use of extensive knowledge and detection methods we prevented the registration of 44 fraudulent applications in 2021-2022. These affected properties across England and Wales worth an estimated value of just over £31m.

We continued to work with government departments including the Cabinet Office, law enforcement and other external counter-fraud agencies to protect the register and property owners from the ever-evolving threat of registered title fraud.

Security is essential to maintain the accuracy and availability of the register. In order to keep our services and data safe from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks we have invested in solutions that protect the organisation, including updating and improving our anti-virus, malware and Microsoft Office 365 protection across almost 10,000 devices.

We have also extended the use of our Security and Event Monitoring capability and tools to prevent malicious attempts to disrupt our services across our technology estate, as well as improving our vulnerability management process. This has meant we have been able to block a significant number of threats. We have also instigated improvements in more modern authentication techniques and Privileged Access Management (PAM) in order to further enhance our defences.

Claims received against the guarantee

Claim against the guarantee 2021-22
Fraud	£3,608,698
Error	£1,950,018

Expedite service

HM Land Registry’s expedite – or fast-track – process is available for applications, either residential or commercial, where a delay would put a property transaction at risk. By the end of the year we processed around 1,000 expedited applications daily, 96% of which we completed or processed as far as they can within 10 working days.

Requests for expedites come to us from individuals as well as conveyancing firms, solicitors and property development companies, and for a wide range of reasons. Our Customer Support colleagues are skilled at steering stressful situations towards a successful resolution and this was very much the case for Dave Smith (not his real name), who recently got in touch.

Dave was trying to move home with his two small children but having sold his own house, complications with the property he wanted to purchase left him with a stark choice: allow his sale to collapse or sell and risk his family becoming homeless. He contacted our Customer Support Centre for help and was delighted when, after requesting an expedite, he was finally able to complete his purchase.

“I couldn’t cope with any more time in a 1 bed granny annex with two kids … thank you so much!!” he said.

Jane Jones (not her real name) had twice been forced to cancel her move across country with an 86-year-old. We were able to tell her the application holding hers up had been expedited and completed, along with her own. “If I could send you chocolates I would,” she said. “You’ve made a very challenging day sunny and bright. Thank you.”

Enabling property to be bought and sold digitally

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

The property market is sometimes volatile and always complex. It encompasses diverse economic and social needs, from housing to commercial premises and national infrastructure. It involves many professions and service industries.

In England and Wales more than 1 million residential and around 100,000 commercial property transactions are completed each year. Whilst many sectors, such as finance, have embraced digital technology, property transactions are yet to do so to anything like the same extent. The time it takes to move home has actually increased in recent decades. Creating a digital property market will not only enable transactions to become faster, but unlock the potential for all segments of the market to radically transform for the benefit of businesses and the consumer.

A shared vision

The most rapid and successful transformation of the market will only occur if the various stakeholders come together to all work towards the same agreed goals. Our unique role brings us into contact with almost every facet of the property market. That enables us to see the opportunities and support the sector in a collaborative approach to market development.

We are leading discussions to build a collective vision of a digitally connected sector where estate agents, lenders, lawyers, surveyors, developers, brokers and their various clients are all interacting digitally – sharing the same information about the properties and the transactions.

This promises a much-improved experience for the ultimate consumers – the people and businesses who want to move in or out.

In partnership with all the key organisation, we are exploring options for a potential series of events to bring key players from across the market together to explore and capitalise on the opportunities that will emerge from a shared vision of how the property market can become much more efficient and better informed.

Standard setter

Obviously, we have several ways in which we can directly contribute to positive market development. We have been investing heavily in the digitisation and machine readability of core property information – the land ownership and local land charges registers, in particular. We have set standards for digital ID checking and electronic signatures and have been working collaboratively on the concept of digital deeds – secure, machine-readable, electronically signed property transfers and mortgages.

In a further move to take paper out of the process, we have introduced an entirely digital way of applying to HM Land Registry, which will be complete later this year.

There have been a growing number of customers using electronic signatures throughout the year. We have adapted our guidance in conversation with our customers and are now running a pilot on how conveyancers could use qualified electronic signatures. Using this type of signature effectively eliminates the need for a witness while providing even greater levels of security. As it is new technology, we are working with conveyancers and technology developers to ensure that property buyers can feel the benefits of a quicker, safer document signing process.

Playing our part

Of course, to make a digital property market a reality we have to ensure that we deliver all the components necessary to ensure that land registration can contribute to a vision of a connected market.

This means that all applications we receive need to be digital. Through our new digital registration service customers can choose to use our services through our free online portal, or to connect via APIs with our services via third party software suppliers.

This means the information we receive can be more easily validated against a machine-readable, digital register and then processed more effectively with a new digital casework system.

We structured 58% of the information within the Land Register, making it machine readable for our digital services and as a provisional step towards the creation of a digital register equating to over 158 million register entries. Between November 2021 and March 2022, when volume applications were enabled and significant users were deployed each day, 272,264 applications were processed through our new processing engine, which is capable of automated processing in the future. We are well underway on our digital journey.

We cannot fully unlock automation, though, without full trust in the information provided to us. We spend time checking applications that come from conveyancers at the moment and that can create a bit of unnecessary to-and-fro. To automate our services we need legal professionals to give us reliable assurance as to what they know about the transaction.

As more applications are received digitally, this assurance becomes the final key in unlocking a truly digital and automated form of land registration – changing the way we deal with our customers and how we interact with them in the future.

One small step for signatures, one giant leap for conveyancing

In August 2021, Hugh James became the first conveyancing firm to complete a transaction with HM Land Registry using a qualified electronic signature (QES). According to DocuSign, whose technology facilitated the transaction, using a QES meant the transfer of title process took just 24 hours instead of the usual six to eight weeks.

Nicola Evered, who led the digital transformation project for Hugh James, said:

This was an opportunity we grasped immediately, and we welcome the chance to be at the forefront of such an innovative step-change for the entire industry.

This has the potential to dramatically speed up transactions and make the whole process more streamlined. It’s exciting for us, our clients and future customers.

Doug Luftman, Deputy General Counsel at DocuSign, said:

Our partnership with HM Land Registry and Hugh James demonstrates how an innovative government agency has embraced electronic signatures and can positively impact an entire industry in its digital transformation journey.

The keys to automating land registration

Digital applications

We received over 225,000 digital applications through the HM Land Registry portal.

Legally Assured Information

This year we ran a trial to test the concept of Legally Assured Information with regulated legal professionals.

The digital register

It contains 60% of our migrated register data with over 158 million data points.

Digital casework systems

Over 30,000 applications processed by our new casework systems.

How we receive applications to change the register

	Electronic/scanned - requires manual checking and process	Digital data - enables machine learning and automation
Virtual post room	8%
Portal (proprietary web interface for property professionals)	40%	27% (DRS, Network Services, E-DS1)
Electronic Discharges (Mortgage discharge sent direct from the lender)		8%
Business Gateway (Direct API access to services by third party providers)		16%

Providing near real-time property information

Karina Singh, Director of Transformation

Information is the life blood of the property market. Having access to the right data about a property at the right time is essential for homebuyers in making what is often the most significant purchase of their lifetime. We know that a lack of upfront information can cause up to 8% of property transactions to fall through, which can cost the buyer up to £2,700 per transaction.

Information for property transactions

Our guaranteed information is an essential component of the conveyancing process. Guaranteed queries provide results that can be used as evidence in court and carry an HM Government unlimited guarantee. These services are usually some of the first formal steps in buying or selling land or property. Guaranteed queries include official copies (of the register, plan or a document), official searches (of whole and of part), and searches of the index map. We’ve delivered almost 87,000 guaranteed queries per day in the last financial year, and around 90% are automated. The vast majority of those that require manual intervention are processed within three days, due to the impact this has on ensuring the smooth running of the property market in understanding specific information relating to a property.

Transparent property ownership information for people and businesses

The Land Register has been open to public inspection since 1996. This year we replaced our legacy digital ‘Find a property’ online service with our new ‘Search for land and property information’ service.

Our house price data has continued to drive national conversations and support the housing market. Our UK House Prince Index (UK HPI) and Price Paid Data (PPD) datasets have been featured in over 2,000 different articles across online, print and broadcast media with a reach of over 100,000,000 readers (a rise of 17%). A range of users have searched these datasets for information using our tools.

Interest in foreign-owned properties saw a three-fold increase in the total number of downloads of our data on overseas companies that own property in England and Wales, from just over 5,000 in 2020-21 to nearly 15,000 in 2021-22. Downloads of our data on companies that own property in England and Wales also increased, rising from just over 10,000 in 2020-21 to nearly 20,000 in 2021-22.

Search for land and property information

Our flagship service for citizens, Search for Land and property information, meets government accessibility standards and provides a one-stop place for most of the information occasional users need, including access to purchasing title plans and registers. Users can search by ID or by map features. Since going live in February 2020, users have made more than 3 million free register views and nearly 22,000 instant, easy purchases of plans and register copies.

Register of Overseas Entities case study

HM Land Registry quickly took action as part of the UK Government’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As sanctions against particular Russian individuals were announced, our legal teams worked with colleagues across government to ensure the appropriate restrictions were applied to relevant properties. Reference to data held by HM Land Registry was cited across the media as discussions over sanctions dominated the headlines.

We have continued to work closely with our government partners, such as Companies House, to build the new Register of Overseas Entities. The data held in our registers, and our experience of working with registered property lawyers across England and Wales, meant we were able to guide and support the development of this critical element of transparency on property ownership at a time of significant national interest.

Instant local land charges information

Almost a million homebuyers rely on local land charges (LLC) information annually, to highlight any restrictions or obligations that affect land or property. This includes tree preservation orders, listed building status and planning consents. Through the LLC Programme, HM Land Registry continues to collaborate with all local authorities in England and Wales to digitise and centralise their LLC services. This is providing customers with a single source to access crucial pieces of property information instantly.

The programme is the most ambitious geospatial data transformation in UK government history. In the financial year 2021-22 , 21 local authorities were transferred to the national register, bringing the total number of charges transferred to over two million. Since the service launched in 2018, customer satisfaction remains high, with over 300,000 searches made (both paid for and free). Customers are saving on average 9 days and £9 per search.

Transforming textual data into geospatial records with digital maps of the land makes the charge information more transparent. The standard format makes the information easier to digest, search, compare and merge with other datasets, enabling decision-makers to make faster, more informed judgements about their projects.

We have been continuously refining how we work with local authorities to assess, correct, standardise and transform their data. This is allowing us to transfer LLC services in an efficient and repeatable way. The more local authorities we work with the more we learn and can share best practice with others. This year we have held seven webinars and training events with local authorities to help them prepare for the data cleansing and migration process. Local authority advocates continue to work with the programme and support neighbouring councils to anticipate and tackle issues.

Overall, a modernised LLC service will drive transparency and innovation in the UK property sector through earlier access to high quality geospatial data. The future benefits are untold, with LLC data providing a platform from which innovators will create solutions which we haven’t imagined yet.

Geospatial award winner

The Digital Leaders 100 awards celebrate those who demonstrate a pioneering and sustainable approach to UK digital transformation.

The Local Land Charges (LLC) Programme won the Digital Leaders 100 Geospatial Innovation of the Year award 2021.

Collaborative engagement with our stakeholders has united central and local government with the private sector. By harnessing resource across the programme, we have created several bespoke analytical tools to analyse, evaluate and fix data. This is providing significant time savings per local authority migration and accelerating our delivery capacity. We’ve also conducted user research to improve the service, for example by incorporating accessibility functionality for visual and mobile impaired users.

These factors and more enabled the judges to recognise the programme as cutting-edge. We are incredibly proud that industry has recognised the importance and long-term benefits of the programme and the national register.

Christina Varidel, InfoTrack’s Alliances Analyst, said:

Over the last two years, we have witnessed a gradual shift in the processing of conveyancing searches. HM Land Registry’s digital LLC Register enables InfoTrack’s software to validate, electronically request and get results within seconds of the conveyancer selecting ‘order’. It’s a secure, accurate, and instantaneous exchange of property information.

Councillor Ged Cooney, Tameside Council Executive Member, said:

Tameside now has a truly digital service, helping streamline local conveyancing and homebuying processes. This places us at the forefront of change within the city, region, and country.

Anyone can now access LLC records immediately online through a digital search by map. This is allowing for earlier, important investment decisions, benefitting Tameside’s 225,000+ citizens, our local economy and housing market.

It’s a brilliant example of how technology can transform and deliver better services, reduce costs and support economic ambitions.

Providing accessible digital register data

Jon Parry, Interim Director of Digital, Data and Technology

Digital data underpins our ability to make digital and automated land registration services possible. From our early ventures into digital mortgages, the work undertaken by our Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) teams is making the vision of near instant land registration services available to our customers within the next year. The data we hold about places, known as geospatial data, is a crucial part of our nation’s infrastructure, We are committed to providing open access to as much of our data as possible in order to contribute to a world-leading, data-driven economy.

Releasing the value of our data

More accessible geospatial data has many potential and important uses – as a key foundation of a data-driven economy it is vital information in land use planning and the response to Net Zero targets.

We’ve always instinctively known that the reuse of our data creates significant economic value but haven’t previously been able to measure objectively how much. In response to this challenge, our data team and economists have developed an innovative methodology to estimate the economic value created by our data, which has attracted attention and praise across government from those trying to solve the same problem. An initial valuation of just four of our 12 published datasets estimated that they add around £300 million to the economy each year.

We must also remember that we form part of a much more comprehensive data landscape. The National Data Strategy and National Geospatial Strategy set out the Government’s ambition to build a world-leading data economy across all sectors. The strategies are focused on ensuring that government can deliver products, services and technologies which generate economic, social and environmental value. They also set out the Government’s intention to unlock the value of the data that it holds, making it open, transparent and easy to use. HM Land Registry has been in the vanguard of open data publication in the public sector and our forthcoming Strategy 2022+ will ensure we remain there.

More accessible and easier to use

Our published datasets are available via our groundbreaking publication platform ‘Use land and property data’ service. Between the launch of the platform in March 2020 and March 2022, there have been more than 420,000 downloads of the data.

Following the publication of the UK Geospatial Strategy in 2020, we have been investigating how we can improve the quality of our geospatial data. By evaluating the Quality, Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (QFAIR) of our published data and engaging with stakeholders and customers to understand their needs, we have considered what improvements we could make. We have now set out an ambitious commitment to making enhancements to our data over the next three years in our business plan.

Finding the next generation of data uses

We continue to promote innovation in the data arena through the Geovation Accelerator Programme, in collaboration with Ordnance Survey. Since its inception, Geovation has advocated the value of open innovation in the public sector, working with a community of more than 1,500 entrepreneurs, investors, developers, academics, students and corporate innovators.

For the past five years we have welcomed new cohorts of start-ups, encouraging and supporting PropTech companies that are revolutionising the property industry with new products and services. Start-ups receive up to £20,000 grant funding and the equivalent of over £100,000 in benefits on the programme.

To date, HM Land Registry has provided grant funding of £483,000 to 30 new PropTech start-ups. These have gone on to raise more than £39 million in additional funding and created 140 jobs.

Several of our sponsored companies are now used by law firms, lenders, property companies and local authorities, such as HomeFinder and Skyroom (see case studies).

We look forward to seeing what further creative and beneficial ways the PropTech sector can use our data to benefit the property market and beyond.

Knight Frank

Adem Certel, Partner, Data Engineering Lead, Knight Frank, said:

Having these kinds of datasets available provides us with real time insight on current market conditions, helping us to make better, data-driven decisions and provide intelligence-led advice to our clients and customers.

Knight Frank is a global independent property agency, providing professional advice on anything from country homes to city offices, retail, public sector, planning and development. It has clients and customers across the commercial, residential and rural sectors, and currently comprises an international network of 384 offices in 51 countries and territories.

They use several HM Land Registry datasets including the National Polygon Service, UK companies that own property in England and Wales, overseas companies that own property in England and Wales, Price Paid Data, Registered Leases and UK House Price Index.

Using these datasets separately and in combination with third party datasets, they can analyse market trends such as sales volumes, average prices, price trends, average lease lengths, corporate ownership types and geospatial analysis of properties.

Knight Frank recently used our data when approached by the Church of England to help it lead by example in solving the housing crisis.

Using HM Land Registry’s National Spatial Dataset and Commercial and Corporate Ownership Data, Knight Frank mapped out all land owned by the Church of England. The ability to identify the land they own means the Church is able to bring forward a clear vision of how these assets support housing, education and community need.

Search Acumen

Christian Woodhouse, Strategic Projects Manager, said:

“We work closely with HM Land Registry and other forward-thinking organisations to revolutionise the experience of buying and selling property.”

Search Acumen is a property data insight and technology provider to conveyancers and commercial property lawyers across England and Wales. Their vision is to transform the property market through upfront digitised data and get people ready for the next generation of property law.

Three of HM Land Registry’s datasets that we use are the National Polygon Service, UK companies that own properties in England and Wales and overseas companies that own properties in England and Wales. By linking these three datasets together, we are able to provide an initial appraisal of a site or title before the purchasing process has even begun. This provides early warning indicators and upfront risks as well as offering an overview of ownership structure of any title, including how titles are spatially located in relation to other titles around them.

Having access to HM Land Registry datasets allows us to create innovative products, such as our Illustrative Map, a digital colour coded fully interactive map highlighting individual titles by Proprietor or Class, and our Interactive Data Snapshot, an instant property report allowing client collaboration on matters of land and property risk before a search has even been ordered. In 2021, approximately 95,000 unique visits were recorded on our technology platform, specifically accessing National Polygon Service data via our mapping solutions. This indicates an industry desire for such developments.

Our partnership with HM Land Registry is a highly regarded and longstanding relationship, with a vision for digitisation and future thinking innovation.

Next generation of data uses

Autumn 2021 cohort

HomeFinder

An online marketplace which makes it easy to find new homes and developments for sale. HomeFinder searches for the best new homes and developments in London including off-market properties. Using algorithms, they tailor searches according to clients’ likes and dislikes.

Urban R+D

A development management platform that helps landowners of small urban sites develop that land for development. Urban R+D offers a complete package-deal from inception to completion to enable landowners to deliver quality homes on underutilised land. Their devolved property development™ process is the only market access route for un-financed landowners with no property development experience.

Propalt

By combining over 200 datapoints on the UK’s 27 million homes into one place, Propalt helps buyers, sellers and investors. They are able to help movers and investors make smarter property searches by using machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence) to understand values and opportunity, then overlaying this with which properties are on the market in real time.

Meet the new Geovation cohort

Spring 2022 cohort

Pluto

Providing the technology to allow any real estate company to offer part rent, part buy solutions, Pluto paves the way for millions more people around the world to call themselves a homeowner years earlier.

Zero Down Lease

Offering the only guaranteed price lease extension, Zero Down Lease handle the process from end-to-end. From valuation to negotiation they give customers a fixed price for the whole process, and even lend them the money to pay for it.

Collaborative Conveyancing

Making the complex simple, to improve the conveyancing process for all involved. Through the innovative use of AI and workflow automation, Collaborative Conveyancing seeks to facilitate better collaboration between legal representatives involved in the enquiries stage of the conveyancing process to improve efficiency, compliance and customer service.

Geovation success stories

HomeFinder

James Nightingall, founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of HomeFinder, said:

The benefits of the Geovation programme are endless – the contacts, reputation, equity-free funding and workshops are invaluable.

My favourite part is ultimately the people – everyone wants you to create an amazing company and goes the extra mile to help make this happen. HM Land Registry has been invaluable with their support.

HomeFinder is an online service which makes it easy to find new homes and developments for sale in London. Buyers receive personalised suggestions from experts who have access to an extensive database of properties.

James previously worked as a buyer’s agent for celebrities, including Chelsea football players, actors and a few billionaires to cite a few.

To help James start his business he joined the PropTech track of the Geovation Accelerator Programme in autumn 2021. Being part of the programme allowed James to kickstart his business with equity-free grant funding and access to industry experts, which was invaluable at such an early stage.

Skyroom

Skyroom CEO Arthur Kay said:

Participating in the Geovation Accelerator Programme meant we benefitted from funding and six months of intensive support which allowed us to fast-track our growth.

Skyroom is a technology, design and airspace development company whose mission is to deliver affordable, sustainable homes for London’s key workers. They participated in the Geovation Accelerator Programme in 2018.

Working in partnership with London’s major landlords, Skyroom aims to provide key workers with 10,000 homes by 2030.

Arthur said:

HM Land Registry data helps us identify buildings in a landowner’s portfolio which are suitable for airspace development.

We then help landowners originate, design and deliver homes in that space. By building upwards rather than outwards, we achieve a more sustainable model of urban development and prevent urban sprawl.

Research, development and accelerating change

Over the last five years, collaboration and partnerships have been a vital ingredient in our continued progress, alongside developing and improving our services thanks to insight from thousands of customers. We have also partnered with hundreds of local authorities, property and technology experts, and with other government departments, in matters relating to property.

In addition, supporting and collaborating with innovation leaders, entrepreneurs and creative disruptors has helped us to push the boundaries of property market expectations.

We are central to all property transactions and our engagement across the market and beyond has provided us with unique insight and influence. Our new strategy empowers us to be a key role in leading, influencing and driving innovation and change in the property market, taking action where HM Land Registry is best placed to deliver positive change.

Convening industry experts to meet a new generation of customer needs

Our upcoming strategy reflects significant collaboration with customers and stakeholders, including those in the property market and across government organisations. We consulted widely with industry voices, including Land Registry Industry Forum members and our Land Registry Advisory Council. We have worked closely with colleagues across government, including the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) and the Geospatial Commission, to ensure alignment with broader government policies.

A shared understanding of sector practices, expectations and challenges is allowing HM Land Registry to implement measures that support customers, stakeholders and the wider property market. Together, we have explored different solutions such as e-signatures, digital deed technology and automation to make conveyancing simpler, faster and cheaper longer term.

Not all digital transformation requires the development of new HM Land Registry services, and we have continued to work with technology providers, the industry forum and our e-signatures working group on developments to our practice that enable the wider use of digital signatures and encourage the adoption of digital identity checks that meet our standard.

Land Registry Advisory Council

The 13 members of our advisory council represent a cross-section of industry voices who act as a key forum for representative organisations involved in the property market. The advisory council works together to identify opportunities to align strategies and policies across their membership to ensure the interests of stakeholders are considered in the development of HM Land Registry’s policies, services and channels.

The council met three times during 2021-2022. The most recent discussion focused on the forthcoming strategy and views on HM Land Registry’s interactions with the property market, open data, the move to digital applications, automation and removing obstacles to innovation.

The council members are:

• Building Societies Association
• Chartered Institute of Legal Executives
• CILEx Regulation
• The Conveyancing Association
• Council for Licensed Conveyancers
• Council of Property Search Organisations
• The Law Society
• Local Government Association
• Propertymark
• The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
• The Society of Licensed Conveyancers
• Solicitors Regulation Authority
• UK Finance

Partnering across government

We have worked closely and collaboratively with DLUHC to investigate what could be done to improve the homebuying and selling process. This work has provided a strategic analysis of the entirety of today’s home buying and selling socio-economic system, setting out potential roadmaps for government action, based on extensive engagement with a wide range of stakeholders.

We collaborated as a strategic partner of the Geospatial Commission on several initiatives. These included the development of a standardised methodology for valuing geospatial data across government, and evaluating our data against Quality, Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (QFAIR) standards. We continue to work together to explore how geospatial data captured by government bodies might most effectively be made available to help unlock opportunities and potential value.

We continued to align closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s National Data Strategy Unlocking the value of data across the economy, exploring the potential opportunities for the property market that use of digital identity verification and qualified electronic signatures might bring.

Building a community of customers to share ideas

Access Group, member of the Business Gateway Community, said:

The style and level of engagement that HM Land Registry have started with Business Gateway is something that a lot of organisations should aspire to.

We have created a Business Gateway Community for the companies and software developers who use our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to access HM Land Registry services and data. Almost 300 customers are part of the community. It meets virtually every two months as an open forum where HM Land Registry shares updates relevant to Business Gateway users. Customers can share their issues and ideas for service improvements.

As part of the community, customers are able to suggest and vote for new service ideas to inform our planning and prioritisation of work. More than ever before, HM Land Registry is able to give advance notice of planned changes and new service development and elicit early customer involvement in research and testing of service and schema designs. This means we are more likely to deliver services that meet customer needs and they can plan and schedule their own development work.

A good illustration of the community’s success is our switch to new technology for our latest APIs. Customers told us that the technology we had been using in Business Gateway was becoming difficult to build with and putting some of them off using our APIs. After implementing the new tech, however, our first new service saw one customer learn about the new service, perform some initial testing, and make their first request against our live service in just three hours!

Fuelling innovation through Digital Street

Over the last five years we have continued to support the PropTech industry through our Geovation Accelerator Programme, welcoming new startups onto the programme each year.

In 2017, we launched Digital Street, our pioneering research and development programme. We have engaged with over 250 market participants to explore the use of Blockchain technologies and tokenisation in property ownership, the response and interest across the world was astonishing (details in Annual Report 2018-19).

We intend to build upon and reinvigorate Digital Street. This will help us explore how market participants might continue to exploit emerging technologies and propose truly disruptive solutions and business models that can deliver transformational, personalised experiences for customers and the communities we serve.

Digital Street

Digital Street is HM Land Registry’s research and development project, exploring what land registration might look like in the future.The Digital Street community is made up of people from across the land and property sectors, discussing how emerging technologies might impact their and our work.

Our people

Simon Morris, HR Director

We’ve made real progress in creating a great place to work by focusing on an ambitious and healthy culture where all our people can thrive and develop. Our new people strategy builds on our successes and helps lay the foundation for our forthcoming Business Strategy. Enabling our people to progress and develop has maximised and improved our organisational performance, within a supportive and flexible environment. Our approach has been to empower teams and individuals to deliver an exceptional service for our customers.

Organisational agility and flexibility

To focus on performance and the needs of our customers, we need to ensure our colleagues have the tools and skills they need to adapt to changing customer requirements and are able to move at pace.

We have fully embraced hybrid working through collaborative team discussions and using a clear framework to support decision making. The framework emphasises effective team and individual contribution to meet business need with a focus on performance and customer outcomes.

Our approach blends the best elements of working in the office and remotely and aims to transform our workspaces, technology and practices, putting our customers, our people and our culture at its heart.

We continue to focus on building digital skills capability, supporting colleagues with a comprehensive learning package to reach the organisation’s goal of becoming a digitally fluent workforce.

Our Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders programme has seen a wholesale transformation of how our casework teams operate and are led. It is the largest and most significant investment in Operations for over a decade, and puts us in a good place to ensure we have the skills and capability to deliver secure and efficient land registration well into the future. The emphasis is on local problem solving and collaboration, data-driven performance conversations and creating a healthy culture in line with our aspirations, and this high-performing, customer-driven mindset is at the centre of our approach to managing and developing our people.

Operational productivity from January to March 2022 is 15% higher than for the same period last year and engagement levels have shown an uplift in those offices that have completed and embedded the programme’s principles.

Attracting and retaining talent

Our national centre of excellence, the Land Registration Academy, teaches the fundamentals of what we do, and it is those skills which form the foundation of the expert services we deliver. It was launched in 2021 and we now have a nationwide network of trainers and a comprehensive suite of learning interventions which will ensure that expert knowledge is secured and passed on to future generations. We’re focusing on accreditation for our trainers, offering casework progression courses, developing career and development pathways, and expanding our operational approach to lawyer technical training as well.

We have a strong cultural focus on diversity and inclusion. In April 2021, we published our Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Strategy based around three themes: improving representation, creating an inclusive culture and embedding D&I.

Our highly active inclusion networks provide support for those who wish to join them, as well as providing a way for allies and supporters to engage on inclusion topics. Together they support HM Land Registry’s objective to be a fully inclusive employer of choice and drive a wide range of organisational activities. For example, the disability network has been supporting user testing for assistive technology as new business systems are developed as part of digitisation and transformation programmes and projects. We raise awareness of inclusion through stories and blogs on topics ranging from menopause, grief and autism. The networks are developing a digital inclusion hub to encourage more collaborative campaigns and provide support for all colleagues and line managers. They have all supported our campaign to collate accurate and comprehensive diversity data to ensure we have the right information to plan effective inclusion policies and actions

We continue to push to improve representation through our recruitment practices. We recruit as widely as possible to attract the most talented people for the job and use standard methods to reduce bias, such as the removing of candidate names and any other identifying factors at the shortlisting and selection for interview stages. We offer the Disability Confident guaranteed interview scheme and ensure all our panel members are trained on supporting disabled and neurodiverse colleagues. A recruitment video has been produced to supplement the employee blogs along with candidate packs that highlight the networks and Disability Confident scheme.

We have an ongoing programme of work to reduce the gender pay gap. Measures include the use of inclusive language in our vacancies, offering flexibility of working hours and patterns as standard, and responding positively to the challenge of COVID-19 through policies supporting home-schooling parents. In 2021 our median gender pay gap (the middle point between our highest and lowest paid) reduced from 13.7% to 0% while our mean gender pay gap (or our average pay overall) reduced from 8.5% to 7.5%. While more work is needed on diversifying our workforce, our indicative ethnicity pay gap is encouraging, with a median gap of 0% and a mean gap of 2.1%.

Our commitment to fairness and inclusion was recognised in our latest People Survey with an 88% positive score in inclusion measures, a 2% increase on the year before. We also maintained our Disability Confident leader status.

Making HM Land Registry a great place to work

We maintained our highest-ever engagement scores in the 2021 Civil Service People Survey which ran throughout October 2021. Overall, our Engagement Index score of 71% meant we rose from 20th to 17th out of the 101 Civil Service organisations that took part, and were the highest performing operationally focused Civil Service organisation of a similar size.

Our approach to visible leadership and championing the employee voice, wellbeing and development, strong employee relations and building a healthy culture have all contributed to our robust position.

We have regularly exceeded the ambitious engagement targets we set ourselves over the period of our previous People Strategy 2017-2022, and for Leadership and Managing Change we have seen our scores double from 33% in 2016 to 62% in 2021.

PERMA Index Score 74%

(Civil Service Average: 74%)

Land Registration Academy – passing on expertise to future generations

The launch of the Land Registration Academy last year has provided a new national technical training framework and infrastructure to secure the expert knowledge of our caseworkers for future generations. This year 950 colleagues have received training.

Becky Davis joined HM Land Registry as an Apprentice in 2016 and has also recently become an academy trainer based in Swansea. She says:

I want to help deliver the same level of high-quality training that I have received since I started here in 2016. The academy is now delivering consistent training across the department using standardised syllabus and support material, but also encouraging continuous improvement by the trainers in order to deliver effective training for our new colleagues.

Tracey Cutler is one of our new academy trainers. She says:

As an experienced caseworker for 30 years it’s important to pass on what I have learned. This is why I have loved being involved in training, coaching and mentoring. I was recently asked to review some training material and enjoyed it so much I successfully applied for the role of Training Instructor. I now contribute material to support future courses.

Accelerated Development Programmes

We launched two pilot leadership talent programmes in 2021: ‘Step into Team Leadership’ for our team leaders of the future and ‘Step Up to Senior Leadership’ for our senior leaders. Thirty-five colleagues were successful at gaining places on these programmes and both will equip participants with the knowledge, skills and behaviours to become great leaders. They offer participants a unique opportunity to step outside their comfort zones as part of their learning and encourage them to understand better themselves, others and the collaboration required to be part of a successful team.

Award-winning mental health support

Supporting mental health and wellbeing remains a cornerstone of our healthy HM Land Registry culture and this year we gained a Gold award in the 2020-2021 MIND Workplace Wellbeing Index. It was recognition of our long-term commitment to mental health and the strength of our policies and practices – from our thriving network of mental health first aiders to the holistic approach we take to supporting our people to perform and stay healthy. We were 14th out of the 114 organisations that took part and one of only three Civil Service organisations to be recognised.

LR Leisure: fostering a sense of community

Paul Hayden, Secretary of LR Leisure, said:

We have an amazing group of people here and an incredibly supportive leadership at HM Land Registry. Together we have been able to tackle an unprecedented time, kept everyone connected and hopefully steered our way through to an exciting future.

Our sports and social organisers, LR Leisure, have played an important role in fostering a sense of community both online and in person, with dozens of events taking place to join people together from football tournaments to online talent contests. These events have only taken place thanks to a network of volunteers who have helped organise them.

Supporting our HM Land Registry family and wider community

Our move to hybrid working has been mirrored by our inspirational social and sports network, LR Leisure. They have supported our community through a mix of virtual and real-life events ensuring that no-one feels left out.

This year the LR Leisure Council introduced lapel pin awards to recognise outstanding achievement by our unflagging volunteers. This is in addition to our annual People Awards, which celebrate the work our people do to develop and encourage our community spirit. The awards ceremony too became a hybrid affair, the live event being complemented by virtual streaming. In fact, it’s been a bumper year for such activities, with the continuation of virtual events introduced during the pandemic being supplemented with the return of our live sports competitions.

A small number of colleagues received short-term financial assistance from the HM Land Registry Benevolent Fund, which has been entirely reliant on employee contributions for the last 83 years. Twelve requests for grants or loans supported individuals with personal debt, and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on household incomes and living arrangements.

Our local office committees have continued to support and entertain everyone through their range of charity and social events, sports and arts competitions, and the work of volunteers and charity committees. In 2021, £21,571 was raised for good causes, and we introduced a new national tier to our charity efforts this year running virtual national fundraising events for causes such as Comic Relief and Macmillan. We are proud of the work our people do to ensure everyone feels supported to be a member of our family.

POD working is reaping rewards in Leicester

The Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders programme is changing the way our teams of caseworkers are organised and led. Teams are called PODS and with a focus on local problem solving, there is a greater emphasis on effective daily conversations around tasks, performance and support.

Sarah MacLeod, Registration Officer OS1 Searches Team, Leicester Office, says:

We have regular discussions about resourcing and performance but blended with celebrating our achievements and our wellbeing. We take time to ask people how they are and to celebrate team and individual successes. It is a lovely surprise to see a ‘star’ added to our success board from a colleague.

700 apprentices in 7 years

Over the past seven years, HM Land Registry has offered over 32 different apprenticeships. Now our award-winning apprenticeship programme has reached another milestone. Caroline Walters, our 700th apprentice, is completing a Level 5 Coaching Professional Apprenticeship. She says:

With the encouragement and support of colleagues I applied and was accepted on the programme. When I complete it, I will have achieved a recognised qualification, improved my coaching practice and will now be able to offer coaching to others within the organisation.

Unity and strength through inclusion

Our Disabled Employee Network has continued to support us through user testing of our systems to ensure they are accessible for all, and exploring the needs of neurodiverse colleagues. Members have worked with the Women’s Network to consider how neurodiversity affects women in particular. The Women’s Network has also been active in ensuring we have made good progress with our actions to close our gender pay gap.

Our Pride Network created events and information for LGBTI+ History Month around the theme of history of LGBTI+ art, including a collaborative art timeline, a music playlist and a roundtable discussion. Its members also joined together with our Faith and Belief Network to explore the complex relationship of sexuality and religion. The Faith and Belief Network has held a range of events with prominent outside speakers to develop understanding between people of all faiths and none.

Our network for colleagues from minority ethnic backgrounds has continued its campaign to improve workforce diversity. Colleagues have been supported to attend both external and internal workshops to increase awareness of ways to make recruitment and internal progression open and fair for all.

The age and carers networks have joined their counterparts in working to ensure all colleagues feel supported in holding proactive conversations with their line managers to remove barriers, allowing everyone to reach their full potential at HM Land Registry.

HM Land Registry has supported national campaigns celebrating diversity such as Autism Awareness Month and International Women’s Day, plus featured personal stories to bring to life and celebrate difference.

Performance analysis and financial review

Iain Banfield, Chief Financial Officer

Financial review

HM Land Registry has been funded through the Parliamentary Estimates process since the revocation of trading fund status on 1 April 2020. HM Land Registry’s costs are set out in the Statement of Consolidated Net Expenditure (SoCNE) and our Statement of Financial Position (SoFP) sets out our balance sheet position as at 31 March 2022. All fees, charges and commercial income are captured through our Trust Statement and surrendered to HM Treasury (HMT). Detailed financial statements for both can be found on pages 98 to 101 and pages 125 to 127.

Although this is the second year of our new reporting framework, 2021-22 still saw some significant accounting changes following the introduction of a new technical international financial reporting standard (IFRS 16). The new standard means all leases are, essentially, recognised as financial leases and as such recognised on HM Land Registry’s Statement SoFP. This accounting treatment has resulted in a one-off Capital departmental expenditure limit (CDEL) expenditure of £67.7m in 2021-22, which primarily related to freehold and long-leasehold properties transferred to the Government Property Agency (GPA) in 2020-21.

Financial summary

Our main financial objective going into 2021-22 remained that of continued investment in the short-term capacity and capabilities we need to service the day-to-day demand for our services in a buoyant housing market, alongside the longer-term transformation required to make sure those services become more resilient to market volatility.

The year saw a significant increase in demand for our services with 5m applications submitted to update or change the register, a 24% increase on last financial year. We have invested significantly in our capacity and capability to try to keep up with this demand. We have increased our casework capacity by 390 over this last year. We have improved the effectiveness of our systems through innovations such as the Digital Registration Service (DRS) £4m and Application Processing (AP) £9.7m. These systems will improve the accuracy of applications coming into HM Land Registry, increase the efficiency with which they can be processed, and lay the foundations for greater end-to-end automation of our services. We have also continued to invest in the training and development of our people through programmes such as Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders and the progression of 180 caseworkers to enable them to tackle more complex cases.

This investment has been managed within our overall parliamentary control totals with underspends against both Resource departmental expenditure limits (RDEL) and CDEL. The primary reasons for this are some recruitment delays, underspends driven by the adoption of the new technical accounting standard IFRS 16, changes in the useful economic lives of some fixed assets and some changes to the schedule of local authorities migrating to the Local Land Charges Register (LCC). This meant we underspent against RDEL and CDEL control totals by £14.2m and £19.4m respectively. However, our RDEL cash outturn, our largest budget which accounts for our day-to-day operational expenditure, was within 1% of our budget.

Summary table 2021-22	Outturn	Estimate
In £000	Total	Total
Departmental expenditure limit (DEL)
Resource - cash	352,819	356,044
Resource - non-cash	11,774	22,710
Total resource - non-cash	364,593	378,754
Capital	109,507	128,868
Total	474,100	507,622
Annually managed expenditure (AME)
Resource	(307)	12,000
Capital	-	-
Total	(307)	12,000

Resource Accounts (RDEL) financial review

	2021/22 (£ million)	Restated 2020/21 (£ million)
Staff costs	269.2	243.7
Purchase of goods and services	76.6	70.5
Depreciation and amortisation charges*	11.8	11.8
Indemnity payments for indemnity including legal costs**	5.8	5.6
Total operating expenditure	363.8	331.6
Finance income/ expense	1.2	0.6
(Profit)/Loss on disposal of noncurrent assets	-	-
Net resource expenditure for the year	364.6	332.2
Other provisions utilised		0.5
Total resource DEL	364.6	332.7

*Excludes impairment charged to Annually Managed Expenditure (AME).

**Excludes movements in the indemnity provision (classified as AME).

Staff costs

We recruited more expert colleagues and funded increased overtime to help manage demand for our services. Our average full-time equivalent headcount increased from 5,503 to 6,072 at 31 March 2022. This contributed to an increase in staff costs for our business-as-usual activity, rising from £243.7m in 2020-21 to £269.2m in 2021-22.

Purchases of goods and services

The key areas of spend and their movements from 2021- 22 were:

• IT services, including maintenance of equipment and licences, increased from £16.1m to £19.9m in 2021- 22, which reflected the additional costs associated with delivering our transformation programme and ensuring our back office systems would support our frontline colleagues;

• professional services, which have increased from £10.2m to £11.5m in 2021-22 in line with additional transformation activities. This largely relates to spend through our digital delivery partners; and

• a reduction in accommodation costs of £3.5m from £17.3m which relates to the change in IFRS 16 and the recognition of all leases as finance leases, as opposed to operating leases.

Depreciation, amortisation, finance costs and indemnity payments

Depreciation increased by £3.3m as a result of new Government Property Agency leases alongside continued investment in our systems and fixed assets. Amortisation decreased by £3.3m as a result of the net effect of reviewing the Useful Economic Lives of our intangible assets. We also incurred £1.3m of costs relating to interest on finance leases as part of the adoption of IFRS16. Finally, our 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 error. In 2021-22, £5.7m (including HM Land Registry legal costs) was paid out against 598 claims, a small increase of £0.2m when compared with 2020-21.

IFRS16 Finance Leases Implementation

HM Land Registry adopted the new leases accounting standard IFRS16 from 1 April 2021. This standard requires that all leases which meet the recognition criteria be brought onto the balance sheet, alongside the associated lease liability.

The impacts on our financial statements this year are as follows.

• Four of our existing operating leases have been recognised as finance leases, bringing £4.6m of lease assets onto our Statement of Financial Position. This balance is shown as a restatement to our financial statements using the ‘cumulative catch-up method’. This means that prior year comparatives are not restated, and the change is shown by adjusting opening balances. This has no budgetary impact as per the HM Treasury IFRS 16 implementation guidance.

• On 31 March 2021, HM Land Registry entered into an agreement with the GPA to transfer our freehold and leasehold properties at nil consideration but with a resulting removal of assets valued at £52.7m from HM Land Registry’s Statement of Financial Position (SoFP). These properties are now leased from the GPA with rent payments commencing on 1 April 2021. The new leases are recognised as finance leases bringing ‘right to use’ assets of £67.7m onto the SoFP. The capitalisation of these leases is shown as an addition in year and the capital funding for this was provided by HMT.

• There is a corresponding lease liability of £74.2m recognised which relates to both the existing leases and the new GPA leases outlined above.

The expenditure recognised under IFRS16 for these leases includes a £6.1m depreciation charge relating to the right to use assets and a £1.3m finance charge.

Capital expenditure (CDEL)

Total capital expenditure in 2021-22 was £109.5 million. A total of £67.7m of this relates to new leases for the properties transferred to the GPA in March 2021. The remaining capital expenditure was £41.8m, including £35.9m on our transformation programme. This mainly related to IT, software and capitalisation of Local Land Charges (LLC) development costs.

Annually managed expenditure

In 2021-22 we incurred a credit of £0.3m relating to the downward revaluation of the indemnity provision by the Government Actuary’s Department offset, in part, by an impairment against an IT mainframe asset. Further information on outstanding claims and Incurred But Not Reported (IBNR) provisions – including sensitivity analysis that reflects the estimated nature of the IBNR liability and susceptibility of the provision to fluctuation – can be found in note 14 to the accounts.

Fees and charges

HM Land Registry collects all fees and charges and surrenders them to HMT upon completion of the work. In accordance with a direction from HMT, this income is now reported in a separate annual Trust Statement. The property market in England and Wales remained buoyant for the whole of 2021-22 following the outbreak of COVID-19 and changes to stamp duty land tax rules. In 2021-22 we collected fees of £366.1m from customers with £314.7m worth of applications processed during the year. As a result, over 2021-22, balance of Fees Received in Advance (FREDA) has increased by £51.4m, taking the total to £148.4m million as at 31 March 2022. This balance will be worked down as we increase our daily capacity above the number of applications that are received each day.

54.5% of our fees related to updates to existing titles in the register (for example change of ownership), which accounted for £173.9m. 14.9% related to the creation of new register entries (such as first registrations, transfers of part and new leases) which accounted for £47.4m.

This year we increased some of our land registration fees for the first time since 2009. On 31 January 2022 fees increased for first registration and for the registration of transfers, leases and mortgages of property (scales 1 and 2) applications. In the majority of cases the fee increased by 11% for those submitted electronically and 21% for those submitted by post.

Our other major income stream came from guaranteed query services, which are critical steps in every property transaction and where we see our largest volume of demand. These are pre-completion services which are vital to the running of the property market and are largely delivered instantaneously. In 2021-22, guaranteed query services accounted for £64.7m.

Information services enable users to go online to get a snapshot of any registered plot of land or property. These generated £21.0m in 2021-22.

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 £7.3m. In addition LLC provided £0.4m of income in 2021-22.

Other income

Additionally, we offer commercial data services for customers in the property market and wider economy. Income from the commercial release of our data generated £4.2m in 2021-22.

Aside from income derived from our services, we received rental income of £2.7m from investment properties held by HM Land Registry. This income is reported in our resource accounts, but is surrendered to HMT rather than being retained by HM Land Registry.

2022-23 onwards

Following on from the Autumn Spending Review HM Land Registry has received a three-year settlement for both RDEL and CDEL. The longer-term certainty allows HM Land Registry to continue to invest in frontline capacity and transformation while accelerating the rollout of the LLC Programme. HM Land Registry has been allocated RDEL (excluding depreciation) of £393.5m in 2022-23, £389.2m in 2023-24 and £383.7m in 2024-25. The department’s Capital Departmental Expenditure Limits (CDEL) will be £65.6m in 2022-

Improving our services – Transformation

In order to achieve our ambitions, our strategy depends on investment in transforming the services we provide and how we provide them. In 2021-22, we invested £24.8m (excluding LLC) of RDEL in our ambitious change programme, an increase of £2.1m from 2020-21. In addition we spent £25.1m on transformation CDEL.

The majority of this spend relates to the continuation of our digital and data programmes. The overall aim of these is to modernise our 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 continued to accelerate the progress of the LLC Programme with 21 new local authorities migrating to the service (as set out on page 26) which incurred costs of £8.8m (RDEL) and £10.8m (CDEL). The programme continues to deliver more, in line with the Government’s ambition, and plans to migrate the remaining local authorities in the next three years.

Business planning summary 2021-22

Following the unprecedented challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic on HM Land Registry and the property market, the 2021 Business Plan was established to support both the UK’s economic recovery and the delivery of our longer-term ambition to improve service standards. Overall, we have successfully delivered 17 of our 27 key deliverables on time during the year. Of note:

• we have increased our caseworker capacity;
• our Customer Support Centre achieved accreditation from the Institute for Customer Service for customer service excellence;
• we continued to invest in our people through the launch of a Diversity and Inclusion strategy and the rollout of the Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders programme;
• we have made more data available to our teams to enhance performance-led conversations and drive continuous improvement; and
• we structured 60% of our register title data, laying the foundations for future automation

We have carried over/progressed the remaining 10 deliverables through the business planning cycle for 2022-23+ where we expect to deliver the remainder in the first few months of 2022-23.

Corporate performance framework

Strategic planning and performance

Key Performance Indicators Assessment

Performance on the whole has been strong this year. We consistently delivered the services necessary to keep the market moving and increased our output of post-completion services (updating or changing the register) over the past year.

We introduced a new corporate performance framework at the start of this year to ensure we were monitoring a balanced scorecard of performance indicators. The information below explains how our end-of-year performance compares against the expectations set out in our Business Plan. Performance was within (or better than) expectations for seven of our eight Key Performance Indicators, details of which have been provided below.

KPI 1 – Customer trust in the integrity and accuracy of the land registers - Met expectation

KPI 2 – Customer satisfaction - Exceeded expectation

KPI 3 - Staff engagement - Met expectation

KPI 4 – Cost of our services - Met expectation

KPI 5 – Risk to the integrity of the register - Exceeded expectation

KPI 6 – Applications completed - Outside expectation

KPI 7a – Speed of our services - Met expectation

KPI 7b – Time taken to change the register - Exceeded expectation

KPI 1 Customer trust in the integrity and accuracy of the land registers

Our ability to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the registers was rated as good to excellent by 77% of customers (Q4 2021-22). This is within the trajectory range set out in our Business Plan. Performance against this KPI is strong and has been broadly consistent over the years, 80% for 2020-21 and 78% 2019-20.

KPI 2 Customer satisfaction

Our service was rated as good to excellent by 63% of our customers (Q4 2021-22), within the trajectory range set out in our Business Plan. This is down 7% on the same period last year, though critically satisfaction varies by different users of our services and is considerably impacted right now by the speed of our services (see below) for applications to update or change the register. Satisfaction levels for customers who only use pre-completion services, including requests for information, remains high at 85%.

KPI 3 Staff engagement

Our People Survey results are among the best in Whitehall with a 71% engagement score. These results are equal to those we achieved last year and have shown considerable resilience over the COVID period, reflective of the investment in our people over the past five years.

KPI 4 Cost of our services

The rolling 12-month Cost of our Services was £47.90, down £4.70 on last year. The positive improvement in our output over the past year has driven down the average cost of delivering our services, though it remains outside of the trajectory range set in our Business Plan as output did not quite reach the levels anticipated (see below explanation under KPI 6).

KPI 5 Risk to the integrity of the register

This KPI looks at the quality of new entries to the register and quantifies the impact of any errors found in terms of their frequency and impact. Our ambition is always to reduce the risk profile, which is baselined at 1.0 at the beginning of each year. Ongoing improvement activities around critical check points have contributed to an end-of-year score of 0.95, which represented a positive reduction in risks to the integrity of the register and is well within the trajectory range set out in the Business Plan.

KPI 6 Applications completed

Over the 12-month period as a whole, we output 97.9% of the applications we received to update or change the register, which is outside of the trajectory range but up 0.3% on last year. Output levels rose throughout the year, and in the last quarter output equated to 99.8% of intakes. There are several reasons performance in this area was below expectations. The first is the market has been buoyant this year, and while the provision of these services is largely manual today, our ability to track changes in market demand is limited. Our automation plans should limit this sort of impact in the future. Progress with digital transformation was slower than expected in the year, which impacted our overall productivity. We increased our operating capacity by 145 full-time equivalent over the last year and invested in developing the skills of 978 caseworkers, with a focus on more complex post-completion services. As we build the capability of our people, we have seen fluctuations in casework efficiency, but overall productivity improved over the last quarter in particular.

KPI 7a Speed of our services

HM Land Registry processed over 134,000 service requests every day in 2021-22. Approximately 85% were information services requests. These are the pre-completion services that are vital before housing transactions complete and people can move into their new homes. The vast majority of these are automated with customers receiving a response on the same day, and the remainder are delivered within three days. Applications to change or update the Land Register make up the other 15% of requests. These are post-completion applications which, while important to the overall accuracy of the Land Register, do not hold up housing transactions. The average time in which we processed an application over the past six months was 27 working days, which is within the trajectory range set out in our Business Plan. We also offer an expedite service with over 95% of requests for expedition delivered within ten days. While average processing times remain consistent with the end of last year, we are conscious that average is too high and there is a wide range of customer experience meaning some applications are taking almost ten times the average. This past year was about increasing our operating capacity so output reached intakes (KPI 6), and the years ahead will be about improving the speed of services for our customers as outlined in our 2022-25 Business Plan.

KPI 7b Time taken to change the register

Our final operational measure reflects the accuracy of the register as a dataset at a given moment. At the end of Q4, it was taking 206 working days for the register to reflect 95% of all known changes (that is those lodged by a conveyancer), including the time that an application spends back with customers to correct errors. This metric will become increasingly important as we look to maximise the value of our data as set out in the 2022-25 Business Plan. We have a large number of metrics and measures that support this performance framework, updates on which are provided to HM Land Registry’s Executive and Non-Executive Boards (as well as other committees) on a regular basis.

Business planning deliverables 2021-22

Delivering what our customers are telling us they most need right now

Deliverables achieved in 2021-22:

• Implement the agreed Operations Resourcing Plan, including recruitment, progression and in-grade development to increase capability and capacity (net additional caseworker capacity of 320 full-time equivalent by March 2022).

• Continue to develop the Land Registration Academy, designing and implementing high-quality, accessible training and professional development to build critical/key capability by March 2022, and delivering a range of continuous development options to enhance land registration expertise by March 2024. Agree proposed approach to professional accreditation by March 2022.

• Get the Customer Support Centre accredited by ServiceMark from the Institute of Customer Service, demonstrating best in practice in the UK by September 2021.

• Conclude the initial roll out of Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders, an initiative to invest in developing our people, equipping managers and leaders with the skills to devise a coaching and outcome-focused culture, driving engagement, performance and a positive customer experience, across 13 locations by the end of March 2022 and all offices by the end of May 2022. Develop internal operational excellence capability and embed Brilliant Teams, inspiring leaders.

• Progress the Comprehensive Registration Strategy, creating a more definitive record of property ownership in England and Wales by 2030.

• Progress the Digital Register, which aims to enable digitisation and automation of internal processes by making data machine readable, with 60% of title data structured by the end of 2021-22.

• Eighty per cent of register update applications handled through workflow; our internal work allocation tool, by January 2022.

• Launch ‘Search for land and property’ tool (currently in private beta), enabling customers to apply for official copies and monitor property within our new service, removing the need for Property Alert by 2021-22.

Deliverables carried over to 2022-23:

• Enhance Management Information (MI) to support operational and strategic decision-making, by developing more granular availability data to allow us to understand productivity and utilisation, and by developing tools to automate more of our MI production. Develop tools to allow managers to self-serve and recombine a wide range of data, supporting data-driven decision-making throughout the organisation through establishing tools to enable real-time availability and reducing time on developing MI packs by January 2024.

• Forty per cent of all applications received via the Digital Registration Service by the end of March 2022.

• Sixty per cent of all register update applications processed in our new Application Processing system, providing a more efficient service and supporting digitisation and opportunities for future automation of casework by March 2022.

• Introduce a new API Gateway making it easier for customers to access and consume business-to-business services by the end of 2021-22.

Enabling and driving change, pace and innovation in the property market

Deliverables achieved in 2021-22:

• Collaborate with the Geospatial Commission to understand how we can improve the quality, findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (the QFAIR principles) of our data, to enable future development and new use cases for unlocking additional value. Review to be completed in 2021-22

• Pilot a new lawyer certification scheme in 2021-22 to support its introduction across all application types to change the register (a key to automation).

• Deliver a Spending Review settlement that secures the budget and flexibility HM Land Registry needs to deliver against its priorities over the planning period, autumn 2021.

• Deliver an incremental fee uplift as required within HM Land Registry’s SR20 settlement, Q2 2021.

Deliverables carried over to 2022-23:

• Migrate local authority (LA) data into the Local Land Charges Programme according to the schedule below:

1. 2021-22 – migrating over 30 LAs across England and Wales
2. 2022-23 – migrating over 70 LAs across England and Wales
3. 2023-24 – migrating over 70 LAs across England and Wales

• Publish three further datasets and enhance existing datasets in accordance with FAIR principles (FAIR data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and reviewed by April 2023.

• From 75-85% of approved publishable datasets available on our new data publication service, making it easier for our customers to access our data by April 2024.

• Introduce Qualified Digital Signatures, which will reduce the burden on our customers by making the signing process simpler by the end of 2021-22.

• Deliver a longer-term review of fees and charging strategy, including a public consultation planned for December 2021

Modernising our organisational culture and ways of working

Deliverables achieved in 2021-22:

• Launch our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy in 2021, measured against associated governance and delivered against agreed associated action plans.

• Develop and embed apprenticeship programmes that provide high-quality entry routes and development programmes that support our Business Strategy and People Strategy objectives by October 2023.

• Launch a Culture Model using the Leadership Group as the key dissemination route for embedding principles and to ensure team and directorate action plans are in place by June 2021 and measurable from Q2, with assurance and reporting through to the People and Estates Committee.

• Progress the Smarter Working Programme, which seeks to establish a hybrid approach to how our people will work in the future. This will be an iterative process, enabling our expert people to meet the needs of our customers while driving efficiency. The internal capability to deliver this will be established by the end of 2021-22.

• Enable our people to work seamlessly and flexibly across locations, including home, by replacing all desktop personal computers with laptops and investment in modern workplace technologies by the end of 2021-22.

Deliverables carried over to 2022-23:

• Close all HM Land Registry’s privately operated data centres as part of a strategic move to government-shared hosting over the next three years.

Although we did not deliver all of our business plan deliverables during 2021-2022, they were either re-prioritised and did not impact on our operational ambitions for the year (launching our ‘Search for Land and Property’ tool, the postponement of the second phase of work on our fees, release of more publishable datasets) or have been carried over and will be delivered through our Business Plan 2022-25.

Sustainability

1. Carbon: 42% reduction.
2. Water: 49% reduction.
3. Waste: 66% reduction.
4. Paper: 31% reduction
5. Waste: 71% recycled
6. Waste to energy process: 29%

Sustainability governance

Compliance with environmental legislation is managed through the Environmental Management System and internal meetings within HM Land Registry and with the facilities management provider. This is administered by the Sustainability Manager in conjunction with our senior facilities business partners and Total Facilities Management provider.

HM Land Registry has appointed a new Head of Sustainability to oversee all aspects of delivery.

Overall delivery of additional requirements of Greening Government Commitments

The Greening Government Commitments (GGC) targets continue to drive central government to be more sustainable and ensure the requirement of the Climate Change Act (2008) that a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is delivered by 2024.

Climate change adaptation

Climate change impacts are considered during the implementation of building works and projects. We use information collated 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. A review of climate change adaptation is planned for 2022.

The delivery of the Government’s Net Zero programme forms part of the considerations across several areas of business delivery in HM Land Registry, including Commercial, Digital, Data and Technology and Facilities Management. Facilities Management delivers reductions as part of maintenance and wider property management decisions. Activity has continued through the Government Property Agency on several major Net Zero works. We are working across the organisation to deliver a Net Zero plan in line with GGC and the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.

Risk assessments and action plans to be reviewed and implemented where required during the 2022-23 financial year.

Biodiversity and the natural environment

We recognise the importance of biodiversity in the built environment. Biodiversity plans have been created and are being implemented at Telford and Weymouth. This process will continue as sites are identified as benefiting from future enhancements.

	Achieved	Target for 2022	On target/achieved?
Carbon	42% reduction	62% reduction	On target
Waste arising	66% reduction in waste generated	Reduce the amount of waste generated by at least 25%	Achieved
	71% recycled	Recycle or compost at least 70% of waste and landfill less than 10% of waste
	0% landfill
	29% Waste to Energy process
Water consumption	49% reduction	Reduce the amount of waste generated by at least 8%	Achieved
Paper consumption	31% reduction	Reduce our paper use by 50% from 2017/18 baseline	On target

Area	Performance
	Actual (£’000)	2022 reduction target
Energy: greenhouse gas emissions, all areas within scope: carbon emissions (tonnes)	3,416	4,834
Energy: greenhouse gas emissions, all areas within scope: carbon emissions (tonnes): expenditure (£)	1,626
Waste consumption (tonnes)	354	979
Waste expenditure (£)	84
Water consumption (m³)	20,978	39,645
Water expenditure (£)	100

Carbon

We have increased consumption of electricity against last year’s use by 48% and reduced against the baseline year 2017/18 by 4361 KWh. This reflects the reduced use of our buildings while remaining open to deliver essential services.

Gas consumption has continued to increase, this year by 1,075 KWh over last year and increased against the baseline year by 1,325 Kwh which is a 17% increase.

Our overall carbon emissions have reduced since 2017/18 and are at 3,416 tonnes, a reduction against the baseline year of 42%. See Appendix C for historic trend data.

Carbon from domestic flights to be reduced by 30% by end of March 2025 is a new target set in the current GGC. In the baseline year HM Land Registry had a total of 351 domestic flights with a carbon impact of 18.03 tonnes. Current financial year had 25 domestic flights with a carbon impact of 2.44 tonnes resulting in a carbon reduction of 86%.

No international flights were undertaken by colleagues in this financial year.

A review and update of the Travel Policy will include the requirement to use lower carbon options for all reasons of travel as set out in the GGC requirements.

Waste

The target set is to reduce the overall amount of waste generated by 15% from a 2017/18 baseline and strive to reduce it further, recycle or compost by 70%, and send less than 5% of waste to landfill.

In partnership with our waste providers, we have moved over the year to achieving zero waste to landfill and this has continued throughout this financial year.

We are currently meeting the above targets, with the amount of waste generated reduced by 66% and 100% of all waste is recycled or incinerated for energy conversion (29%) rather than going to landfill.

Waste management is delivered through two routes. Paper is managed through a confidential disposal contract outside of the facilities management arrangements. Other waste is delivered through the facilities management contract.

Paper equates to 58% of waste arising and 130 tonnes was sent for recycling. Our overall reduction in waste generated since 2017/18 is 66%. See Appendix C for historic trend data.

GGC targets also require the removal of consumer single use plastics (CSUP) from the government estate. HM Land Registry is aiming to set the baseline use of CSUP across the estate in the current financial year. Stationery suppliers are yet to advise on the number of items used in financial year 2021/22. The Facilities Management contractor has advised that 28,385 items of CSUP were used across the estate in the financial year.

Water consumption

The target is to reduce water consumption by 8% from a 2017/18 baseline.

A 49% reduction in water consumption has been achieved against a target of 8%. This reduction continues to be measured against a lower occupancy then was evident in the baseline year due to the COVID restrictions still in place for most of the year and the move to hybrid working from September 2021.

Paper usage

The GGC reduction target to reduce our paper use by 50% from a baseline year of 2017/18 shows a current improvement of 31% of A4 equivalent. Our digital services programme and our move to on-request printing are continuing to have a significant impact. Paper consumption has increased on the use in 2020/21 reflecting higher demand for HM Land Registry services and more on-site printing by colleagues as office attendance increased.

Sustainable procurement

HM Land Registry’s purchasing policy pays proper regard to sustainability, including environmental issues, and still securing best value for money on a whole-life basis in terms of generating benefits not only to the organisation, but also to society and the economy, while minimising damage to the environment. Through our investment choices around technology and the workplace we will contribute directly to achieving GGC targets.

Details of any social, economic or environmental requirements that suppliers need to be aware of will always be included in our invitation to tender documents and we are committed to engaging with our suppliers to ensure they recognise and understand their role in supporting sustainability.

Information and communications technology and digital

Our commitment to Government’s Net Zero carbon requirements includes ensuring upgrades or replacement of any information and communications technology (ICT) and digital equipment, hosting or supporting mechanical and electrical infrastructure, must perform better than the equipment being replaced. We comply with all relevant environmental legislation and key Government objectives, including reporting annually to the Sustainable Technology Advice & Reporting (STAR) Team. We ensure 100% of all decommissioned ICT equipment is reused, recycled or disposed of environmentally and ethically.

We aim to run our data centres as efficiently as possible. Currently we run at an annualised PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) of 1.8 across our on-premises data centre estate. This is an improvement over the past 12 months from an annualised PUE of 2.2. We achieved this by using a mix of deploying energy efficient ICT equipment and smarter utilisation of data hall space, including raising the operating temperature of the data centre rooms in line with ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) best practices. We have reduced our ICT power consumption by over 15% in the last 12 months.

Our ICT and digital hosting model is both virtual and physical. For our virtual hosting model we aim to be Cloud first. As well as assessing the ICT requirement, we assess the business, economic and environmental impacts. We also consider the reuse and redeployment of existing on-premises ICT. For our physical hosting model, our strategy is to migrate away from an on-premises data centre to a crown-hosted data centre model. Last year we migrated one of our three data centres to a crown-hosted facility that has an annualised PUE of 1.2, reducing our environmental impact and demonstrating HM Land Registry’s commitment to Government’s Net Zero carbon target.

Other corporate information

Public sector information holder

We fulfil our role as a public sector information holder, which we take very seriously, through adherence to UK data protection legislation 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. The Information Rights Team is leading on a privacy compliance programme to help ensure we meet our legal obligations under relevant legislation.

We received 477 Freedom of Information requests in 2021-22, of which 415 were answered within the statutory timescale of 20 working days.

Our new Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) strategy has delivered a new Information Management Policy that supports the delivery of HM Land Registry’s aims and objectives through enabling and sustaining the creation, organisation and exploitation of corporate information and knowledge. Our assurance activities support the effective management of information assets and information-related risks via the corporate information asset register.

In the provision of our data services, HM Land Registry complies with the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015.

Personal data-related incidents

There were three data-related incidents reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) during this reporting period. The ICO determined that no further action was required by them in relation to the incidents reported.

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 Digital Registration Service as part of our vision for automation of applications to make it easier and cheaper to deal with us.

Health and safety

We have continued to deliver an agile and proactive approach to managing health and safety including arrangements to ensure our offices remained COVID-19 secure. We appointed a new Head of Health, Safety & Sustainability in the latter part of the year to focus on moving towards business as usual and support our future ways of working.

We have provided a range of support to those working from home, alongside ensuring those who needed to attend our offices worked in a COVID-19 secure environment. We have continued to follow England and Wales government guidance throughout, responding to the national and local changes to ensure our colleagues’ and other building users’ health, safety and wellbeing remain a priority.

As we moved to increased occupancy of our offices and introduced a new hybrid-working model, our focus has been adapting policy, guidance and our health and safety arrangements to support new ways of working.

We have continued to focus on compliance with all aspects of legislation and have successfully maintained our accreditation to the ISO 45001 standard following external audits.

Our suite of health and safety policy and arrangements has been delivered with the support of our facilities management provider to ensure compliance, risk assessments, adverse event investigations and training and information are undertaken on all aspects of work activities.

Health and safety arrangements are delivered in collaboration with our stakeholders and champion groups, and in consultation with our trade union groups. This has been a key contributor in maintaining a positive and proactive profile in health and safety.

During the financial year 2021/22, we recorded a total of 20 accidents, two of which we reported to the Health and Safety Executive as required under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR). This is broken down as:

Office workplace

• 16 accidents relating to HM Land Registry colleagues

• 0 accidents relating to contractors

• 0 accidents relating to visitors

Home workplace

• 4 accidents relating to HM Land Registry colleagues

• 0 accidents relating to contractors

• 0 accidents relating to visitors

The two RIDDOR incidents were:

1. A slip in the office car park – resulting in a bone injury/fracture to wrist.

2. A fall from a chair – resulting in a bone injury/fracture to arm.

Complaints

We recorded 9,566 complaints in 2021-22 compared with 5,169 in 2020-21, an increase of 85%. This reflects an increase in the number of customer contacts and applications overall as a result of the stamp duty land tax (SDLT) holiday, which increased activity in the housing market. Additional factors were internal training and engagement around complaints and further moves to centralise complaint resolution and customer contact. These have resulted in greater consistency in the identification and recording of complaints.

Another significant factor in the increase was feedback recorded prior to the end of the subsequent temporary reduced rates of SDLT for residential purchases on 30 June 2021 and 30 September 2021. This mainly related to application progress where a dependent transaction needed to be finalised before the SDLT deadline. Also, following the suspension of our cancellation policy at the start of the coronavirus pandemic to allow customers additional time to reply to requests for information, we gradually resumed the policy which resulted in increased feedback in this area.

In terms of recorded complaints, 48% were upheld or partially upheld. Customer feedback about delays with registration applications and associated customer enquiries was the most common area of upheld complaint, comprising 27% of the upheld total. This reflects the fact that some of our processing times for non-automated services remain subject to significant delay.

The other main areas of upheld complaints related to the requests for information (requisitions) we ask customers for when their applications lack the required information (7% of the upheld total).

The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman investigated two HM Land Registry complaints during the year, which were not upheld.

We conduct analysis of all complaints received throughout the year to capture and act on learning points. For example, our customers said they would like:

• an improved service on fast-track applications where earlier outstanding applications need to be considered or completed first. We have improved our processes for fast-track applications, including better monitoring of these applications and being more proactive in dealing with earlier outstanding applications that are causing a delay;

• when complying with restrictions – an entry in the register that potentially prevents or regulates the making of certain further entries – the third party consents or certificates provided to us are often defective and customers then have difficulties getting these amended by third parties to meet our requirements. We have introduced an optional form RXC that applicants can use when providing consents or certificates. The RXC form helps customers to explain to third parties what consent or certificate they need to provide and avoids our requisitions by getting it right first time;

• more clarity in our guidance on using electronic signatures. We have adopted a single certificate for all deeds and documents signed using a conveyancer-certified electronic signature. The guidance in this area has been consolidated into a new Practice guide 82: Electronic signatures;

• improved communication when registration applications have gone beyond the Projected Completion Date Calculation (PCDC) that we provide. Customers informed us of an issue with the follow-up process on applications that have gone beyond the PCDC, which was resolved to ensure that customers are kept informed of the position when applications are delayed, and their expectations managed;

• our Digital Registration Service available to Business e-services customers to be developed and enhanced further to assist customers in improving application quality and reducing requests for information (requisitions). The service is being used by an increasing number of customers who can already submit a wide range of applications to change the register. It is due to replace our electronic Document Registration Service in November 2022;

• us to resolve an issue where customers do not receive our emailed requisitions and requisition reminders which can result in the cancellation of applications. We have set up a working party which identifies and deals with the reasons why this is happening, including fixing system issues, and ensures that any issues continue to be reported and taken into account;

• us to retain sufficient correspondence records when applications are cancelled to enable us to answer customers’ follow-up queries. We published an internal article for colleagues on the importance of retaining correspondence following cancellation and signposted the relating internal guidance on the retention of documents; and

• us to contact customers by telephone to resolve simple issues with an application. These points are often straightforward to resolve and do not always require a written request for information (requisition). We have let customers know that we are trialling telephone requisitions and are monitoring the results.

Our Independent Complaints Reviewer (ICR) provides a free and impartial review and resolution service for any customer dissatisfied with how we have handled their complaint. Throughout the year, her reports and recommendations arising from the complaints she has reviewed have continued to provide a valuable source of insight and identification of areas where we might need to improve. The ICR also publishes an annual report.

We continue to review our customer feedback processes aimed at improving the way we recognise and deal with complaints and helping us more effectively identify insights and improvements arising from customer feedback. The planned change to the commercial software provider of our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system was implemented in November 2021 and we plan to build further enhancements into that system.

Modern slavery

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

Land Registration Rule Committee annual summary of activities

The Land Registration Rule Committee was constituted under the Land Registration Act 2002 and the Cabinet Office has confirmed its classification as an Expert Committee. The committee’s role is 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 and September, the committee scrutinised and advised on HM Land Registry’s new fee order, which changed some land registration fees. The order was laid before Parliament on 2 November 2021 and came into effect on 31 January 2022.

After 12 years as Chair of the Committee, Sir Paul Morgan retired from the role and in December Mr Justice Edwin Johnson was welcomed as the new Chair. In December 2021, Jenny Holt came to the end of her second and final four-year term as the consumer affairs committee member. Anne Pardoe of Citizens Advice has taken on the role for a four-year term.

Service standards

Details of the service that customers can expect from us can be found on our website.

Welsh Language Scheme

We remain committed 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 current scheme containing our four-year action plan was approved by the Welsh Language Commissioner on 27 September 2019. Further to the UK House Price Index service going live in January 2021, we achieved several successes during the year to further the action plan, including introducing two Welsh language services:

• Search for Local Land Charges in April 2021; and
• Search for land and property information’s citizen account in November 2021.

The Welsh version of LLC Maintain (which enables local and other authorities to register new local land charges and amend existing charges on our LLC Register) went live in March 2022.

The featured links on our GOV.UK home page are now available in Welsh and lead directly to Welsh language pages.

We have a dedicated Welsh language team in our Swansea Office and a Welsh language telephone line for general enquiries – 0300 006 0422. Further information on our Welsh language services can be found on our website.

Government and stakeholder coordinated engagement

The Chief Land Registrar’s Office fulfils a range of functions to uphold the reputation of HM Land Registry with government and key stakeholders.

The Chief’s Office is responsible for HM Land Registry’s corporate governance coordination and management including its Board Secretariat and support to both executive and non-executive senior teams. The Chief’s Office leads our partner relationship with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), which is underpinned by a published Framework that also establishes the formal relationships with HM Treasury and the Geospatial Commission. The Chief’s Office works closely with UK Government Investments, which acts as the agent of BEIS in representing the Government’s interest in the governance and performance of HM Land Registry as an organisation. Much of the Chief’s Office corporate governance activities are reflected elsewhere in this Annual Report.

The Chief’s Office is also responsible for ensuring that HM Land Registry contributes effectively to wider government policy delivery in a coordinated way. We take an active approach to policy horizon scanning to enable timely engagement. We have drawn on expert land registration knowledge in supporting a number of policy initiatives. We have supported ministerial departments with parliamentary questions including drafting answers to eleven BEIS parliamentary questions and we considered over 50 government and other consultations. Particular collaborative policy highlights over the last year include:

• working with BEIS and Companies House in the Bill work that has culminated in the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022, paving the way for a new Register for Overseas Entities;

• working closely with the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities on a range of initiatives to improve the current housing landscape, including their proposals to improve the transparency of contractual mechanisms used to exercise control over land; planning reform; leasehold reform; and identifying how the homebuying and selling process could be improved;

• securing an opportunity to showcase our industry-leading work on data improvements (QFAIR) with the Geospatial Commission;

• aligning our digital identity innovations with wider policy on digital identity and the national data strategy through effective collaboration with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport;

• contributing to an industry working group on digital signatures facilitated by the Ministry of Justice; and

• joining a cross-government group to share information on Environmental stewardship as part of our developing focus on Net Zero.

The Chief’s Office coordinates external stakeholder relationships for HM Land Registry so that stakeholder engagement is integral to HM Land Registry’s customer delivery, with insight and experience widely shared. We optimise opportunities to track sentiment, gathering and sharing intelligence to inform effective planning and delivery across the organisation as well as to inform policy development and interventions. Our Land Registry Advisory Council brings together key representative organisations involved in the conveyancing process and has met three times to share views and contribute to HM Land Registry’s strategic delivery by sharing industry-wide perspectives.

Our Land Registry Industry Forum, first set up in April 2020, gives us a well-rounded view of our stakeholders’ and customers’ experiences from a cross-section of industry voices. It serves an important role in identifying and testing approaches to operational changes and facilitates collaborative development of potential future transformation plans. The forum also explores wider property market issues and what solutions might improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the property market. The forum is one of our key engagement mechanisms and we continue to work with members to find out how we can best support our customers, stakeholders and the wider property market.

HM Land Registry maintained an important connection with the land registries of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland and the Isle of Man by having three online meetings. The Chief’s Office has also ensured HM Land Registry adopted an appropriate international presence to share best practice, including through participation at the annual Registrars of Title Conference in November 2021 and as a member of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Working Party on Land Administration. The working party has met online throughout the year, contributing to webinars and studies on selected topics in land administration and management. The Chief’s Office has also coordinated HM Land Registry’s involvement with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in providing advisory services to support international development commitments.

Glossary

Term	Definition
Agile	A method of project management that uses collaborative efforts to evolve solutions which achieve its goals.
Agricultural Credits Register	A register against which provides a means of ensuring security for lending over farm assets such as livestock and equipment.
Application	Applying for the registration of unregistered land, updating registered land or property titles, or applying for information from HM Land Registry.
#Application Programming Interface (API)	Enables companies to open up their applications’ data and functionality to external third-party developers, business partners and internal departments within their companies.
Artificial intelligence (AI)	Intelligence and learning demonstrated by machines.
Blockchain	A distributed, decentralised public ledger.
Business Gateway	The Business Gateway Application Programming Interface allows customers to seamlessly access our services from within their case management systems and automate repetitive processes.
Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (Capital DEL, CDEL)	Investment in internally-generated software, IT equipment and estates.
CO2/carbon footprint	The total amount of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) generated by our actions.
Common data standards	Data standards set a clear and common understanding of how the government must describe, record, store, manage and access data in consistent ways.
Critical National Infrastructure	A term used to describe processes, systems, facilities, technologies, networks, assets and services essential to the nation’s health, safety, security or economic wellbeing and the effective functioning of government.
Customers	Individuals and businesses who use our services, including conveyancers, financial institutions, intermediaries, property businesses, land and property owners and data users.
Data economy	A global digital ecosystem in which data is gathered, organized, and exchanged by a network of vendors for the purpose of deriving value from the accumulated information.
Dataset	A collection of related sets of information that is composed of separate elements but can be manipulated as a unit by a computer.
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy	The ministerial department leading economy-wide transformation by backing enterprise and long-term growth, generating cheaper, cleaner, homegrown energy and unleashing the UK as a science superpower through innovation.
Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport	The ministerial department responsible for driving growth, enriching lives and promoting the UK abroad.
Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities	The ministerial department responsible for supporting communities across the UK to thrive, making them great places to live and work.
Digitisation	The process of converting information into a digital (computer-readable) format.
Digital identity	A virtual form of identity which reduces the time, effort and expense that sharing physical documents can take when people need to provide legal proof of who they are.
Digital transformation	The adoption of digital technology by a company. Common goals for its implementation are to improve efficiency, value or innovation.
Digital Registration Service	An HM Land Registry portal service allowing applications to be submitted digitally where the data is automatically checked before it is lodged.
Digital Street	An existing research and development approach, collaborating with a strong community of innovation leaders, entrepreneurs and creative disruptors to push the boundaries of property market expectations.
Expedites/expedite services	Customers can request HM Land Registry processes an application urgently.
FAIR	Findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data.
First registration	The requirement to register unregistered freehold and leasehold estates in land.
Geospatial Commission	An expert committee, sponsored by the Cabinet Office, that sets the UK’s geospatial strategy and promotes the best use of geospatial data.
Geospatial	Data and information associated with a particular location or place.
Geovation	The practice of using location data and intelligence to help identify opportunities and create solutions.
Geovation Accelerator Programme	A scheme supported by HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey providing grant funding, access to data, geospatial expertise and property insight to location-data and PropTech start-ups.
Greening Government Commitments	The actions UK government departments and their agencies will take to reduce their impacts on the environment in the period 2021 to 2025.
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.
Land Charges Register	A register that contains the following information: a register of land charges, a register of pending actions and pending actions in bankruptcy, a register of writs and orders effecting land and writs and orders in bankruptcy, a register of deeds of arrangement affecting land and a register of annuities.
Land Register	Records the ownership of land and property in England and Wales.
Land Registration Academy	The staff training centre of excellence at HM Land Registry.
Land Registry Advisory Council	An advisory board that ensures stakeholders’ interests are considered when developing policies, services and products. It provides an opportunity for information exchange and discussion, drawing on the collective knowledge and expertise of the members.
Land Registry Industry Forum	A cross-section of customers and stakeholders within the property market who work together to find new ways to improve the conveyancing process.
Local Land Charges (LLC) Register	A statutory register that contains local authority information about the use and enjoyment of properties. It includes things such as listed building status, tree preservation orders and other environmental protections.
Machine learning	The study of computer algorithms that can improve automatically through experience and by the use of data.
Machine readable	Data structured and coded in such a way that it can be processed by a computer.
National Data Strategy	An ambitious, pro-growth strategy that drives the UK in building a world-leading data economy while ensuring public trust in data use.
National Geospatial Strategy	Promotes and safeguards the use of location data to provide an evidenced view of the market value of location data, set clear guidelines on data access, privacy, ethics and security, and promote better use of location data. Owned by the Geospatial Commission.
Net Zero	Achieving a balance between the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere.
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 have their purchase, lease or charge prioritised for completion over applications lodged subsequently
Open data	Data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone.
Ordnance Survey (OS)	Great Britain’s national mapping agency.
PropTech	The use of technology to help individuals and companies research, buy, sell and manage real estate.
Register create application	Any application that leads to the creation of a completely new register, such as a transfer of part of an existing title, a new lease or registration of land for the first time.
Register of Overseas Entities	A public register of beneficial owners of non-UK entities that own or buy land in the UK, operated by the Companies House registrar.
Register update	Any application to change the register of the whole of an existing property title, including new mortgages, name changes, transfers and discharges.
Register view	Viewing the current version of the register.
Requisition/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.
Restrictive covenant	A contract between two landowners. One landowner promises the other landowner not to carry out certain acts on their own land.
Restriction	An entry that limits HM Land Registry from updating the register unless specified conditions are met.
Title	The evidence of a person’s right to property.
Tokenisation	The creation of a blockchain-based, digital representation (token) of a real-world asset such as property.
Use land and property data	Datasets about all registered land and property in England and Wales.
United Nations	An international organisation founded in 1945. Currently made up of 193 member states, the UN and its work are guided by the purposes and principles contained in its founding charter.
View Applications	A free-to-use service within the HM Land Registry portal which allows users to view all the applications made using the portal, as well as checking the status and downloading all relevant documentation relating to each application

Simon Hayes
Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar
8 July 2022