Corporate report

Performance report

Published 15 July 2021

Applies to England and Wales

Overview – HM Land Registry at a glance

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

Our objectives

1. Trust and confidence in land.
2. The conveyancing process is quick, easy and secure.
3. Property data supports a stable and innovative UK economy.

Our values

1. We give assurance ownership.
2. We have integrity.
3. We drive innovation
4. We are professional.

Our primary role

Land is our nation’s greatest asset. Clarity and security of land ownership is essential to a functioning property market. In the 2020/21 financial year alone, nearly £260 billion worth of property transactions took place in the UK. All were recorded in the Land Register.

For nearly 160 years we have played a key role in the UK’s economic stability and growth. Our secure registration system enables trust and confidence in investment decisions for all. We provide essential guarantees for our citizens’ and firms’ greatest assets, which are the cornerstone of a vibrant lending market.

Our register, a piece of Critical National Infrastructure, now contains more than 26 million titles, providing ownership guarantees for 87% of land in England and Wales, and has lending in the region of £1-1.5 trillion secured against it. The increased investment in property comes from a trusted system of guaranteed ownership, which has a wider impact within the UK.

The property market supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction, financial and legal services, which are spread throughout all regions of England and Wales. HM Land Registry provides statutory and non-statutory services available either through third-party professional customers or directly to citizens and businesses. These span the many stages of land and property ownership, from looking to buy or sell to the entirety of the conveyancing process and our guarantee of title.

HM Land Registry is now a non-ministerial department as well as a partner body of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Previously, it was an executive agency and trading fund, but following reclassification by the Office for National Statistics this status was relinquished at the end of the 2019/20 financial year. This report covers HM Land Registry’s first year under its new classification, which is reflected in how the accounts are reported.

HM Land Registry in numbers

1. 31.2 million service requests.
2. £239.2 million – total recognised revenue.
3. 30.7 million electronic applications.
4. 109,357 – total number of Local Land Charges searches.
5. 25,945,597 registered titles (as at 31 March 2021).
6. 87% of land mass registered in England and Wales.
7. 319,568 – times our new Contact Us channel was used.
8. 70% customer satisfaction. Rated good/excellent in Q4.
9. Top twenty for employee engagement (Civil Service).
10. 6,393 employees.
11. 60% female, 40% male.
12. 14 office locations.

Our role in the property market

Market interest

£7 trillion worth of land and property held

90,000 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 90,000 requests daily to search the register, with the majority answered instantly via our digital business tools to make buying a home quicker and easier. From people querying ownership to online sites such as Zoopla and Rightmove showing the latest house prices, our data is viewed by thousands of people every day.

Property transaction

76,000 daily guaranteed queries

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

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

After purchase

400 fraudulent registrations prevented since 2009

17,000 daily requests to change the register

We receive around 18,000 requests per day to change the register to accurately reflect 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 exchanged 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

31.2million service requests

Guaranteed queries

Guaranteed queries	Service requests
Official copies	16.3m
Official searches	2.3m
Searches of the index map (SIMs)	0.7m

Information services

 

Information services	Service requests
Views of the register	6.6m
MapSearch	1.0m

Register change services

Register change services	Service requests
Register updates	3.9m
Transfers of part	0.2m
New leases	0.1m
First registrations	0.1m

Statutory revenue

Register change services

Register change services	Total revenue
Register updates	£111.2m
Transfers of part	£19.8m
New leases	£13.6m
First registrations	£4.6m

Guaranteed queries

Guaranteed queries	Total revenue
Official copies	£48.9m
Official searches	£7.0m
SIMs	£1.0m

Information services

Guaranteed queries	Total revenue
Views of the register	£19.7m

Other

Guaranteed queries	Total revenue
Land Charges and Agricultural Credits	£6.3m
Commercial services	£3.9m
Local Land Charges	£0.2m

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

Foreword

Chair’s foreword by Michael Mire

HM Land Registry is a household name. But exactly what it does and how it does it are less well-known. For example, other property markets around the world depend on title insurance to guarantee ownership. HM Land Registry’s platform provides an unlimited guarantee backed by the Government within its relatively low fee structure. Every commercial lease over seven years is registered with us. We record every mortgage on the Land Register, making lending against property safe for financial institutions. Our data on property prices is unrivalled. This is why HM Land Registry is a critical component of national infrastructure and why our colleagues recognise that the property market depends on HM Land Registry every day.

Global real estate markets are in the process of slowly recovering but for the UK it has continued at pace. While many markets closed or shrunk, the property market in England and Wales saw record levels of demand boosted by the stamp duty land tax holiday.

This helped to maintain stability during the economic crisis that accompanied the pandemic with HM Land Registry playing a vital role. It is another reason why HM Land Registry is correctly seen as critical national infrastructure.

Our brilliant people responded rapidly to make sure commercial property transactions, house sales, mortgages and collateralised lending were able to continue uninterrupted despite the pandemic. There was no let-up in our digital transformation. In fact, we accelerated innovation. HM Land Registry is even more decisively becoming a world leader in using digital to make the property market more efficient for our citizen, firm and lawyer customers.

However, the pandemic exposed how difficult many property transactions have become with some taking months to complete due to the lack of readily available information and multiple processes that are often based on or reliant on paper.

It is clear that digital technology is the key to making the market more resilient. This includes our own processes which we are steadily migrating to digital. HM Land Registry still takes too long to deal with complex transactions and we know that offering a free expedite service, while useful, is not the long-term answer.

A more informed and efficient property market is important as well to levelling up across the UK. Rebuilding economies depends on well-functioning local property markets. A future where land and property can be used intelligently and traded as easily as stocks and shares will enhance all aspects of local economies including planning, housing, the reimagined high street, retail, offices, transport and the environment.

High quality property data is the key to this to becoming a reality. At the moment, while HM Land Registry holds crucial data on property ownership, there are data silos which make transacting in property and planning new developments too difficult.

We are working with the Geospatial Commission on making data more accessible but we also have a responsibility to take the lead in transforming the property market and how transactions can be simplified and speeded up through digitisation. Our Digital Street programme is HM Land Registry’s flagship initiative to make the property market the best in the world.

This report therefore sets out in detail how our transformation investments have improved our own organisation and how we are working in partnership with customers, stakeholders and tech firms to create a truly digital property market that can drive an even broader digital revolution.

For instance, our Local Land Charges Programme is far more important than its name implies (see Local Land Charges acceleration). In effect, it is a major step forward in making more data readily available on one platform, including data critical to planning. The Treasury has asked us to accelerate the programme because of its economic importance.

Our breakthrough Digital Registration Service is enabling our customers to submit digital data straight into our systems (see New services for customers). We are now training our people to become registration experts of the future with the launch of our new Land Registration Academy. Research and development is increasingly important too and this year we have delivered a proof of concept of how tokenisation could completely reshape the way the property market and property ownership work. There is now the potential to make property a digital currency.

Our highly successful Geovation start-up incubator, both in London and Manchester, with plans to reach more of the country, has brought new PropTech firms on board (see Partnering with the Geospatial Commission). We see helping and funding the PropTech sector, now closely linked to FinTech, as another way in which we can improve the property market and make our country the best place to start a digital business.

So to summarise – our unique position as the public body that is central to the functioning of the property market has enabled us to emerge from the pandemic with a stronger sense of purpose and a clearer understanding of how we can maximise value for all our stakeholders.

I would finally like to take the opportunity to pay a tribute to the non-executive directors who have left the board over the last year. Doug Gurr, who came to us from Amazon, Diana Breeze, the HR Director and Executive Committee member at Bunzl and before that LandSec, and Chris Morson, with his background in digital finance at Virgin Money, made our board one of the best in the public sector. Their commitment to ensuring the highest standards of governance is something for which we are all incredibly grateful.

We now welcome Ann Henshaw, the HR Director at British Land, and Jeremy Pee, the Chief Digital Officer at Marks & Spencer, as new Non-executive Board Members. You can read more about them and their fellow non-executives.

Overview

Interview with Simon Hayes, Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar

After your first year as Chief Executive, how would you describe HM Land Registry’s role?

The UK property market is one of the most valuable and active markets in the world – it is the greatest store of wealth in our nation and underpins our economic stability. For nearly 160 years HM Land Registry has played an indispensable role in supporting that stability by ensuring that property transactions can proceed safely and securely. We guarantee the ownership of over £7 trillion worth of land and property assets, making our registers part of the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure.

Our primary role is to ensure that property transactions can take place, without delay or interruption, and on the basis of trusted, accurate, and high-quality information. The critical nature of our mission, whether to facilitate searches of the register, or to change it to reflect new ownership, came sharply into focus when the global pandemic broke out and threatened to undermine the smooth operation of the market.

How did your organisation react to the pandemic?

Our priority was to our customers, ensuring that they could rely on us and continue to transact. The vast majority of property searches have been delivered online for some time, and posed less of a challenge. However, delivering changes or updates to the register meant enabling most of our colleagues to work remotely as quickly as possible, while protecting the integrity of the register and our services to the necessary level.

We moved immediately into business continuity arrangements, prioritising services and capabilities, and communicating daily to staff and customers. As well as the focus on customers we placed a strong emphasis on the safety and the wellbeing of all colleagues throughout this difficult time. The work which we have done in recent years on culture and engagement, and our commitment to diversity and inclusion, put us in a good position to ensure that the organisation stated connected and motivated at this very challenging time.

Within weeks we transformed HM Land Registry from an almost entirely office-based organisation to one where over 90% of colleagues were able to deliver services from home. The remaining colleagues who had to perform essential functions on site were able to work from COVID-secure offices. Our ‘pulse’ surveys show that colleagues felt more connected and committed to our organisation and each other than ever before and, once remote working was fully rolled out, were delivering services at nearly pre-COVID levels.

But we knew that, because of the disruption, customers might have to wait longer for some applications to change the register to be processed. While most updates happen after a property transaction is completed, there can be occasions when those changes are urgently needed, such as a property being registered for the first time or a new lease being added.

We therefore expanded our “expedite” services which enable customers to request an application to be fast- tracked for free and avoid any negative consequences that a delay may cause. We are currently processing nearly four times as many expedited applications as we were prior to the pandemic.

Most of our efforts continued to be focused on reducing the disruption to our core services. However, we realised there were other innovations and improvements we could pursue which would increase the resilience of conveyancing, such as the introduction of e-signatures. This was vital at a time when the property market continued to experience strong demand despite the lockdown restrictions in the UK, but should also be of significant benefit to everyone longer term.

I take great pride in the way in which we have worked together with colleagues, customers and stakeholders, in a true spirit of collaboration to ensure the property market in England and Wales could continue to operate effectively.

What do you think you can do to help customers and the economy to recover? I think there has always been an understanding that the key to unlocking a more efficient, effective and secure way to transact in property is through digital technology.

However, acceptance and adoption have been relatively slow within the UK property market. One of the key reasons for this is that land and property transactions involve a lot of information and several parties – attempting to create a single process or platform for all historically has proven difficult.

The pandemic has forced everyone to look at how they operate. Recent research suggests that about a quarter of property transactions fall through each year and the extension to the stamp duty land tax holiday highlighted to everyone how difficult it is to get transactions completed quickly and efficiently.

We began working even more closely with stakeholders and customers, engaging with both the public and private sectors to understand how we could help. As a result, we created a new standard for digital identity verification which will further remove friction from the homebuying and selling process (see Digital identity checks).

At the same time, we have been reviewing our future strategy and exploring with our partners how we can maximise the value we add to the economy, the environment and society as a whole.

It can take up to 13 weeks to gather all the necessary information for a property transaction to proceed. The UK is estimated to spend £3.3 billion per annum on manual offline identity proofing. Mixed paper and electronic systems result in disjointed and inefficient services, with lots of progress chasing.

What is your vision for the market?

To make better informed decisions, citizens and businesses need easy and early access to high-quality land and property information. They should be provided with a fully digital experience with simple and intuitive services and tools that give feedback in real time. Services should interact seamlessly with each other to create a frictionless process where multiple parties can transact swiftly and securely from anywhere.

How will this be achieved?

The key ingredient is digital property data. Data needs to move across organisational boundaries to enable joined-up services. The whole property ecosystem must be digital – at present there is a patchwork of legacy online systems that are not interoperable, cannot share data and lead to error and frustration for users. Machine-readable data can enable the automation of simple tasks and create a market for further services and the use of emerging technologies. This will continue to be our primary focus.

Developing unified data standards will ensure a trustworthy source of information for the public, policymakers and analysts across the property market. High-quality and reliable data can unlock wider innovation to underpin a diverse and resilient market of services, and support other priorities.

Our future strategy will be focused on how we can support those aims both through the delivery of our own transformation activity and in how we bring the market together to create opportunities that will change not just HM Land Registry processes, but the way in which we all use and interact with land and property in the future.

Finally, of course, we will continue to invest in our brilliant people. Our commitment to creating a culture where all colleagues can thrive remains as strong as ever. Our new culture model is helping to shape our decision-making to create an environment in which all teams feel included, empowered and equipped to improve outcomes for our customers. This year we have also reviewed and revamped our Diversity and Inclusion strategy, so that we reflect, and meet the needs, of the whole of the population which we serve.

How can you deliver such a radical change within the property market?

I don’t think it is a change that could or should be delivered by us alone, but I do believe we have a key role to play and we are already starting to do that.

We are the only government department involved in every property transaction, delivering over 30 million service requests every year, so we are uniquely placed to understand and influence across the piece.

We also work closely with a whole range of stakeholders from other parts of government and international land registries, through to tech start-ups and financial service providers. And, of course, we have always maintained a strong relationship with trade representatives and regulatory bodies.

What is the most important thing you learned this past year?

After just 18 months here I have been struck by just how creative and resilient our colleagues and our organisation as a whole can be. Whether it was finding a way to text colleagues a ‘thank you’ YouTube video or running virtual events or digital workshops with managers and leaders, we kept colleagues informed, engaged, supported and motivated in the face of a global pandemic and a significant digital transformation in our ways of working.

Working with customers and stakeholders has been a key feature of our ability to innovate and deliver changes quickly. Our new Industry Forum has become a rapid testing ground for early concepts and ideas. Getting together via virtual meetings and groups has enabled us to understand the issues or opportunities right from the start and also to ensure the market knows from the outset what we are planning on doing in the future.

As we end our first year under a new central government framework arrangement (see Status change) we can reflect positively to how we have responded to challenges in a way that enables us to look ahead with a sense of opportunity. Our future strategy will seek to identify how we can accelerate and widen the value HM Land Registry can offer to the property market and to the nation as a whole.

Within this report you can read more about how our transformation programme is delivering changes today that are already taking us towards that vision of the future (see Driving transformation).

Over the next year, we will be refreshing our vision for our role in the property market, focusing on those opportunities we are uniquely suited to deliver, enable or assist as we strive to support economic recovery across the UK, and support a more sustainable future. To do this, we want to help the UK property market become amongst the most digitally informed in the world.

What do you see as the key objectives for the year ahead?

In addition to the longer term strategy described above, we have to improve our day to day operations and service. Before the start of the pandemic we were beginning to make headway into reducing our backlog of complex cases. However, the subsequent disruption to our services alongside an unexpectedly buoyant market means that we still have some way to travel. Above all else, we need to increase capacity, improve productivity, and reduce processing times.

Our Business Plan sets out our aims for the three years ahead, with three key objectives:

• to meet the needs our customers have right now, which is about delivering our services faster but maintaining our quality. This includes additional investment focused on optimising our operations, as well as accelerating the digitisation and automation of our services to enable more real-time services
• to look ahead at how we can best enable change in the conveyancing market in the future
• to modernise our organisational culture and ways of working, including by learning the valuable lessons from 2020/21

Our plans are most detailed for the 2021/22 financial year, where we have budget certainty. Our submission to the 2021 Comprehensive Spending Review will support the delivery of our longer-term ambitions.

Our Non-executive Board Members

Kirsty Cooper

Kirsty is General Counsel and Company Secretary for Aviva. She established Aviva’s first global leadership team and has responsibility for public policy and corporate responsibility. Kirsty is on the General Counsel Legal 500 Powerlist and is also a trustee of the Royal Opera House.

Elliot Jordan

Elliot is Chief Financial Officer and member of the Executive Board of Farfetch, the leading global platform for luxury fashion. He is responsible for the finance, legal, strategy and human resource teams across the global operation. He is also the executive sponsor of Diversity and Inclusion. Prior to joining Farfetch, Elliot held positions at ASOS plc, J Sainsbury plc, Credit Suisse and KPMG.

Angela Morrison

Angela is Chief Operating Officer at Cancer Research UK (CRUK) where she is responsible for Finance, HR, Technology and Corporate Services. Prior to joining CRUK, Angela was Retail, Supply Chain and Technology Director at Debenhams as well as holding roles at J Sainsbury plc, Direct Line Group and ASDA Walmart.

Jeremy Pee

Jeremy is the Chief Digital Officer at Marks & Spencer (M&S). Unlocking the power of data to personalise and create seamless digital experiences is his primary focus. This included the highly successful launch of a new customer engagement platform. Prior to joining M&S, Jeremy was the Senior Vice President of Loblaw Digital, the digital unit of Canada’s leading retailer ($45 billion turnover). At Loblaw Digital, he was responsible for building and growing a diverse portfolio of e-commerce businesses from inception to more than $500 million in six years.

Ann Henshaw

Ann has extensive experience in human resources (HR), having worked at several major companies across a variety of sectors, including property, both in the UK and internationally. She is HR Director at British Land and a member of their Executive Team. She joined the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 company in October 2015. Previous roles include serving as Group HR Director at Clear Channel International and HR Director at EDF Energy.

Ed Westhead

Ed is an Executive Director at UK Government Investments (UKGI), the government’s centre of excellence in corporate finance and corporate governance, based in London. He has previously been a non- executive board member for Companies House and held roles in corporate finance with Macquarie and BAE Systems.

Insights from Sweden

Interview with Thomas Öberg, Head of Land Registry Division, Lantmäteriet, Sweden

What specific challenges has the global COVID-19 pandemic presented to Lantmäteriet and how have you overcome them?

The pandemic disrupted our normal procedures and challenged us to adopt new routines and processes quickly. We transformed our office-based organisation into one that catered for nearly 90% of employees working remotely. This was possible thanks to our agile IT department who swiftly equipped all employees with laptops and Virtual Private Network clients. Lantmäteriet’s management board had frequent meetings to take control of the situation and steer the authority in the right direction. All our managers and co-workers have shown great responsibility and our missions and tasks were performed as well as before the pandemic.

In 2020 Lantmäteriet published a report on the value of open data. How do you see the role of data shaping the property market in the future?

The value of open data has been subject to intense debate over the past decade. The increased interest in reusing public sector information can be related to the emergence of data as an important and strategic resource in the digital economy. So, it is not surprising that free access to public sector data is associated with great value.

Sweden has made a case-based impact analysis on the socio-economic value of open public sector data. This analysis focuses on how the datasets currently restricted by fees may impact five different sectors.

Open data is often a catalyst for innovation, which is why it is interesting to consider the indirect dynamic values which can arise when new business opportunities emerge.

The study points to 20 applicable areas within five different sectors where the added value of providing open access to the proposed data amounts to 10-21 billion Swedish krona. The proposed datasets are estimated to have the greatest potential within the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and real estate sectors, where providing open access to the proposed data would enable more efficient IT systems and planning processes. Overall, the analysis shows that significant value arises from increased use, reuse and combining of datasets. This led to both efficiency improvements and more informed decision making.

What are the challenges for Sweden’s property market and how does Lantmäteriet influence the sector?

The population is increasing in Sweden and lack of housing has been a challenge in the country for several years, with rising house prices as a result.

Sweden is among the least densely populated countries in the EU, but the metropolitan areas are home to more than half of the population. More people are leaving the countryside and moving to bigger cities. The number of houses built in Sweden has increased significantly in the last two years, but is still insufficient because of the large population growth.

The underlying reasons for the lack of housing have been debated in recent years, with broad agreement that it is the result of more than one factor. One reason is the length of time land acquisitions and planning approvals take. Lantmäteriet aims to establish a national digital infrastructure, simpler, more open and efficient planning and a construction process for the benefit of citizens, companies and other actors. In order to achieve a smarter building process, a basic precondition is access to nationally uniform and open information for everyone involved in the process.

What are Lantmäteriet’s other priorities for the coming year?

Our number one challenge today and in the foreseeable future is to keep track of the digital and legal development that this requires. The digitisation of our authority will be a challenge to our ability to adapt to a new landscape and situation where we perform our tasks in a new digital manner.

Shaping trusted digital conveyancing

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

Buying and selling property is essentially about ensuring everyone has the right information, right up to the point of moving itself. You may have thought that conveyancing would be relatively unaffected by COVID-19 lockdowns, but it still works in quite a traditional way and is not as digital, or paperless, as some other business sectors.

We already had plans to work with the sector to support a successful digital evolution of the marketplace. These plans accelerated as soon as the first lockdown occurred, and it became clear that digital tools were a priority for conveyancers. Most in the industry became homeworkers who were unable to meet clients and print or scan documents. But commercial and residential transactions still needed to be completed and the appetite for new deals remained relatively high.

Developing new partnerships

To respond, we formed an Industry Forum which includes regulators, professionals, lenders, trade bodies and frontline practitioners in the commercial property and housing sectors.

Together we worked on steps to take paper out of the picture. The first priority was to set a standard for electronic signatures to remove the last strict requirement for paper in a conveyancing process.

Within 6 weeks we had introduced a first measure called the ‘Mercury approach’, which meant signatories only had to scan and return the signed page. In conjunction, we spent the next 12 weeks developing a standard for secure and wholly digital, witnessed electronic signatures, working with the forum and national and international technology companies.

These signatures still require a witness, though, unlike the more sophisticated and regulated qualified electronic signatures. The qualified signatures have in-built security around the identity of the signatory and encrypted evidence of what, how and when they are signed. We are working with the forum and technology companies on their introduction. In time we expect them to become the norm.

Our next priority was to look at the potential use of digital identity checking in conveyancing. Through research we had already identified technology that can be used to identify parties involved in a transaction securely and conveniently. Again, we partnered with the potential suppliers and the forum to find a way of setting a clear standard that would help develop more digital tools and encourage their use. The resulting digital identity standard was well received, which is testament and thanks to the collaborative effort of those we worked with.

Electronic signatures and digital identity checking were a quick response to lockdown restrictions, but they are also two important and permanent pieces of the digital conveyancing picture. They enable wholly online and paperless transactions. With the forum we continue to work on other steps that can make the conveyancing process more secure, digital and nearer to real-time.

For example, one obvious key component of a digital future is trust in the information. If information can be received by us as a trusted fact and not just data, then real-time automated processing of land registration services can become a reality.

To this end we are working with the forum and our wider customer base to determine how we can extend the current use of lawyer certifications within applications. This will potentially open up faster, more secure and intelligent land registration processes that work with the conveyancing process.

Strengthening our expertise

Of course, we still need to couple land registration expertise and judgement with more automated processing. We need to maintain the fundamental skill of accurately recording property rights and deploying the technology astutely to increase the trust in the data and process.

We continue to recruit expert lawyers from across the sector to meet the demands of today’s complex casework and to bring to bear their real-world experience on the development of digital land registration and conveyancing.

We are as keen to offer the best development opportunities internally. We were delighted this year to see our first apprentice become a fully qualified Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives after 3 years of hard work – Brian Jones, Assistant Land Registrar.

Developing our strategy

To ensure HM Land Registry is making the best contribution to a healthy and innovative property market, we have developed a central strategy hub. This will help the Board to understand the economic, social and environmental value that can be released through improvements in things such as digital property information and digital conveyancing.

It will also look at the speed and security of conveyancing and work with the sector to produce options on how those gains might be achieved and the role that HM Land Registry will play to facilitate positive change.

All these changes aim to improve quality and reduce risk, but the very act of changing holds risks. Knowing that, we have continued to increase our risk and assurance capability. We are pleased to note that claims and other indicators for error and fraud remain generally very low and consistent with prior years.

Claims against the guarantee

Last year there were 22 claims for fraud and 672 claims for inaccuracy in the register, compared with 18 and 1,055 in 2019/20 respectively.

The appropriate compensation for fair claims is paid. This was £3.5m in compensation for fraud and almost £2 million in compensation for inaccuracy, compared to £2.1m and £3.2m in 2019/20 respectively.

The total compensation was just 0.0000008% of the total value of the property register.

2020/21

Reason	Paid
Error	£1,990,684
Fraud	£3,453,678

First legal apprentice becomes CILEX Fellow

In just over three years Brian Jones progressed from being an Executive Officer to an Assistant Land Registrar, thanks to completing a Chartered Legal Executive Apprenticeship scheme.

After being a caseworker for two years, the scheme provided Brian with a clear career path, offering more flexibility than some traditional lawyer routes. As well as benefiting from bespoke tuition at CILEx Law School, internal training provided Brian with the opportunity to work closely with lawyers and senior caseworkers across HM Land Registry.

After completing the three-year apprenticeship scheme Brian became a Chartered Legal Executive, allowing him to apply for lawyer posts internally and externally. He obtained a position as an Assistant Land Registrar and is now enjoying his new role supporting HM Land Registry’s operational delivery teams and its customers.

Joining HM Land Registry was one of the best decisions I’ve made. The apprenticeship scheme gave me a great platform and helped me to realise my ambition.

Working with the market to improve conveyancing

We have continued to engage with our Industry Forum on how we could move toward a more digital future for conveyancing. This collaboration saw some quick wins for the market, such as acceptance of Mercury-style signatures, as well as shaping our new practice guidance on electronic signatures and our digital identity standard.

The forum is made up of groups representing:

• property and land law, regulators and professional bodies
• building societies and their representative body
• banks and their representative body
• search and data providers and their representative body
• surveyors’ representative body
• house builders
• estate agents’ representative body
• property tax submission specialists
• the representative body for local authorities
• the Coal Authority

Here’s how HM Land Registry has worked with the industry to shape the digital tools that aim to make conveyancing simpler, faster and cheaper.

I. Stephanie Boyce, President of Law Society of England and Wales, said:

HM Land Registry responded quickly to the problems thrown up by the pandemic, offering technological solutions to immediate issues.

Stephen Ward of the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, said:

…electronic signatures which removed the need to physically sign legal documents was a big milestone.

Olly Thornton-Berry, co- founder of Thirdfort, said:

This was a positive step for the industry and there are clear benefits in accelerating the digitisation of the conveyancing process.

Electronic signatures

Over the last 12 months, we have worked with DocuSign to transform our signature process. The collaboration included building a clear understanding of the technology, testing and feedback on the implementation. This work was recognised at the end of May 2021 as DocuSign was awarded the Disruptive Technology of the Year award at the Legal Week Innovation Awards for DocuSign’s role in helping to digitise our signature and witnessing process further.

Speaking of the partnership, Doug Luftman, Deputy General Counsel at DocuSign, said: “The continuous open dialogue was invaluable and allowed us to provide better support to the legal community.”

Stephen Ward of the Council for Licensed Conveyancers agreed:

HM Land Registry’s policy statement of electronic signatures was a big milestone. The plans for physical witnesses to be replaced by technology that digitally verifies the signature will be something that we expect to see early next year.

66% of companies used digital ID checking, according to a CLC member survey in October 2020 reported in Property Industry Eye.

Digital identity checks

Due to the pandemic many conveyancing and law firms have sped up their digitisation plans in order to keep business going.

One key area in this work was connecting with the digital identity framework scheme. Discussions on this were led by the Home Buying and Selling Group.

Group Chair Stuart Young explained:

We established the Digital Identity Working Group within the Home Buying and Selling Group as an opportunity to provide greater clarity and confidence in the sector on how to use this technology.

We fed our conclusions directly into HM Land Registry’s draft digital ID standards. The common view is that industry should adopt the introduction of a standards- based digital identity assurance process, backed by regulators. This would lead to a significant reduction in the completion time, without adding cost to the process and reduce the risk of fraud. The reduction in time to complete is seen as the most pressing issue.

Law Society of England and Wales President, I. Stephanie Boyce also commented on this work:

Technological change in the conveyancing market has accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

HM Land Registry responded quickly to the problems thrown up by the pandemic, offering technological solutions to immediate issues such as having documents signed and witnessed while social distancing measures were in place.

Any technological solutions need to be easy to use and available at a reasonable cost and solicitors need to be confident about which providers fulfil HM Land Registry requirements.

Remortgaging

Our digital mortgage service, Sign your mortgage deed, has reached a major milestone this year: allowing us to add information to the register without caseworker intervention – a first for HM Land Registry.

Around 30% of applications received by the service are now updated in a matter of seconds from the time of submission.

In the face of one of the most challenging years for the property industry, the service has expanded. We have now seen more than 40,000 remortgage deeds registered through the service, with more than 30,000 registered since 1 April 2020. We have also welcomed both RBS and the Co-op to our list of providers alongside other high street names such as HSBC, Nationwide and Santander.

Driving transformation

Karina Singh, Director of Transformation

Accelerating our transformation

Our transformation portfolio is focused on two things: making HM Land Registry even more efficient and effective and transforming the way society interacts with property. During the pandemic, our transformation portfolio continued to drive a wider change towards the digital property market of the future. Working together with our colleagues, other government partners, key stakeholders and a range of customers, we believe we have the opportunity to make a real difference to the economy and society as a whole.

Last year we had to be extremely agile and work at pace, as lockdown brought challenges and opportunities. Not only did we create an entirely remote operation within weeks, we also rolled out new services, functionalities and enhancements. We prioritised our collective efforts based on insight. This enabled us to keep our customers at the heart of our decision-making, while maintaining the right balance of short and long-term aims.

Shaping a digital property market

Having all the information to make decisions is vital for property transactions to proceed. Nearly 100% of HM Land Registry information services are already available instantly online. We are investing in making our data more digital and interoperable, opening the door for us and our customers to transact digitally and automate more of our work. More than 40% of our data is now machine readable and works in conjunction with other systems.

While our searches remained unaffected, those local authorities who had already migrated their local land charges (LLC) data (such as restrictions on the use of land imposed by public authorities) to our national digital service avoided the delays experienced by many others. We have committed to accelerating the pace of delivery significantly, with an ambition to complete the migration of all LLC services from local authorities across England and Wales by 2025.

Partnering with the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) is a key step to digitising all local authority property information and supports their wider efforts to reform planning information. We are also supporting the work of the Law Society and the Home Buying and Selling Group, who are working towards making key property information available much earlier in the process.

Being able to transact from anywhere came into sharp focus. In response we worked closely with stakeholders and customers to fast track the introduction of electronic signatures and digital identity checking to reduce the reliance on paper and face-to-face services. These changes will increase the resilience of the conveyancing market, as well as the value that can be gained from the property market. We will soon open up more secure and easier-to-use ‘qualified electronic signatures’ and are now in the process of exploring the creation of digital deeds and online lawyer certification. (See Working with the market to improve conveyancing for more information).

Fully digital services are a key to unlocking a simpler and faster conveyancing process. Customers want simple and intuitive services and tools that can interact seamlessly with each other. This is where the bulk of our transformation investment has been focused. It has resulted in the launch of our new Digital Registration Service – a significant step forward in delivering a truly digital service for our customers (see Making it simpler and faster to submit and track applications). This milestone, along with a more digital register and a new digital casework engine, will unlock end-to- end digitisation, with the potential to automate future transactions to benefit the speed and ease across the conveyancing process.

By aligning most of our investment to the most straightforward, high-volume requests, we intend to accelerate our journey towards digital land registration. By next year we expect 60% of our straightforward applications to be fully digital, making our simplest transactions 50% more efficient overall. This will enable us to redeploy colleagues onto the more complex and time-consuming work.

We are continuing to create a public service geared towards success. Alongside digitising the land registration process, we’ve continued to invest in our expert people. In rapidly enabling colleagues to work effectively, efficiently and safely from home, we have improved how we deliver the change and are now focusing on our culture, leaders and technical skills.

Our change deployment model, designed to support change in 14 offices, now helps colleagues in more than 6,300 locations to understand and adopt new ways of working. We shared the model with several government departments after it became widely adopted across the organisation. Our recent survey data shows that the assessment of ‘change being managed well’ in the organisation has increased by 23%.

Our colleagues-focused programmes in operations and digital, data and technology have been working across the organisation to increase our capabilities and embed a culture of continuous improvement and data-led conversations. We launched the Land Registration Academy, a national centre of excellence to oversee and support our technical training, development and sharing expert knowledge. More than 600 colleagues are now being upskilled through the academy. We anticipate it may also support the conveyancing sector which already uses our guides and videos as a point of reference.

We have also migrated all our services and systems to a new flexible technology platform, which empowers our development teams by making changes and improvements quicker and easier.

We closed one of our 3 data centre sites (for the remote storage of large amounts of data) by building an independent data hall within our existing facility. The closure is delivering benefits of £1.2 million annually by reducing our rent, and reducing the power consumption of our data centre estate.

We continue to use property data to enable and support innovation. Our award-winning research, development and start-up incubator programmes explore the boundaries of a future digital property market and create opportunities for new innovative business (see Meet the new Geovation cohort). Our intention is to expand our award-winning Digital Registration Service beyond our online portal. This will enable free application programming interface (API) access to encourage software providers or new market innovators to integrate these new fully digital services into their own systems and platforms as other elements become digitised.

The cross office change deployment model

1. Establish delivery date and agree deployment timeline.
2. Identify the people who need to be involved in the pilot and rollout.
3. Agree multiple offices from which to create the virtual pilot team taking change load into account.

4. Communicate the pilot to all offices. With affected offices, clarify outcomes and what can go wrong.

5. Create a temporary virtual team for duration of pilot across offices including DDaT.
6. Use collaboration tools and virtual stand ups to create a shared sense of purpose and team.
7. Baseline data before the change to verify estimated benefits and isolate from productivity.

8. Appoint a pilot lead for the virtual team. Supported by accountable Customer Team Leader and Local Change Manager in each office.

9. Have a fixed time period for the initial pilot, but accept that when things don’t go to plan.
10. A virtualised trial team provides greater flexibility for rollout and opportunity to increase pace.
11. Break the rollout into phases to manage the impact on the business.

12. Pilot teams run virtual ‘go sees’ for other offices and teams to support rollout.

13. Maintain a focus on recording the benefits and enabling them to be measured and realised after implementation.
14. Build lessons learned into the deployment model to identify further improvements.
15. Review and iterate the deployment model to reflect the way we work and the changes we’re making.

The flexible, scalable model enables HM Land Registry to create virtual teams to introduce and embed changes across the organisation, ensuring business continuity and supporting our digital transformation.

Local Land Charges acceleration

The Local Land Charges (LLC) service demonstrates that HM Land Registry can deliver a truly digital service that offers property buyers easy and instant access to property information. Our ambition to deliver a national register for all local authorities in England and Wales by 2025 is becoming a reality.

Since going live with the first local authority in July 2018, we have piloted various engagement models. These have been tested and refined consistently to deliver a robust solution that worked effectively during the pandemic.

In December we announced plans to adopt a regional engagement strategy and industrialised our processes to help deliver the service faster. A £26 million fund has also been offered to local authorities that transfer their LLC service to the national register within an agreed timescale. These transition payments allow them to address practical challenges that could hinder their timely participation in the programme.

By May 2021, 5 additional local authorities transferred their service to the national register, bringing the total to 17. We are working with ministers, government partners local authorities and the Local Land Charges Advisory Board to accelerate service delivery. Recent changes to the Welsh Local Land Charges service fees mean Welsh local authorities can now transfer their LLC services to the national register.

Total number of searches since July 2018

More than 30,000 total official searches

More than 100,000 total personal (free) searches

More than 240 different organisations used the HM Land Registry portal or Business Gateway to order an official search. The major users were search intermediaries who order searches on behalf of their conveyancing clients.

Transformation timeline

Information before you decide

Providing easy and early access to high- quality land and property data.

2020/21

1. Within 2 days of lockdown our priority search activities were restored, enabling the property market to continue to function. All services resumed within a few weeks. See Preparing for a digital future for more details.
2. We continued to migrate local authorities onto the Local Land Charge (LLC) register at pace and the service was uninterrupted was uninterrupted throughout the year. See Local Land Charges acceleration for more information. Carlisle City Council and East Lindsey District Council migrated.
3. Milton Keynes Council migrated.
4. More than 67,000 total number of Local Land Charge official and personal searches. See Local Land Charges acceleration for more information.

2021/22

1. Stockton-on-Tees, Spelthorne, Sevenoaks, Stratford-on-Avon and Welwyn Hatfield migrated. This takes the total to 17 local authorities on the Local Land Charges register.

Fully digital services

Digital data will help to unlock a more seamless, quicker conveyancing process.

2020/21

1. In response to lockdown we introduced a new online contact form enabling nearly 320,000 customers to self- serve. 75% were able to find an answer to their query without needing to call our busy teams. Read our case study.
2. View My Applications has been used by over 100,000 users – equivalent to £1 million of customer time saved since the launch. See Reviewing application progress for more information.
3. Enhanced our Counter Fraud solutions to ensure we protect the integrity of the register. See Developing our strategy for more information.
4. Robotic process automation enabled the Customer Support Centre to handle cases and enquiries quickly. See Digital transformation for more information.
5. Robotic processes search around 119,000 applications weekly, saving caseworkers time checking whether prior applications have completed. See Digital transformation for more information.
6. Saved 313 caseworker hours since Sign your mortgage deed was automated – the first time the register has been updated without caseworker intervention. See Making it simpler and faster to submit and track applications for more information.
7. Onboarded 195 users as early adopters of the Digital Registration Service from 329 businesses. See Making it simpler and faster to submit and track applications for more information.

2021/22

1. Our award-winning Digital Registration Service launched in April – more than 35,000 applications have already been submitted. See Making it simpler and faster to submit and track applications for more information.
2. Estimated Completion Date feature added to View My Applications, with 60,000 users benefitting in the first month. See New services for customers for more information.
3. In May 2021, robots began moving approved fast-tracked applications, ensuring that 250 of the most urgent applications each day are completed as quickly as possible. See Digital transformation for more information.

Transact from anywhere

Creating a more secure, frictionless and resilient property market.

2020/21

1. We have added to the list of professionals able to witness an ID check and accepted video verification. See Our approach to business planning for more information.
2. Officially started accepting ‘Mercury approach’ signatures – an idea generated by our Industry Forum. See Electronic signatures for more information.
3. We have transformed our signature process and started accepting witnessed electronic signatures after customer feedback. See Electronic signatures for more information.
4. Supported the development of more secure online ID checks for property buyers by publishing our Digital ID Standard. See Digital identity checks for more information.
5. Ongoing work to digitise and improve our Register Data – now at 43% digital (data structured and quality checked). See Digital transformation for more information.

Unleashing innovation

Supporting emerging technologies and new services to improve automation and collaboration.

2020/21

1. Industry Forum set up to work together to find new ways to improve the conveyancing process. See Working with the market to improve conveyancing for more information.
2. Our new data publication platform, Use land and property data, was launched, hosting the full complement of 10 datasets and associated licences in one place for the first time. See More data, easier to use for more information.
3. Registered leases and Restrictive covenants datasets were released, resulting in over 2,000 downloads. See More data, easier to use for more information.
4. Worked with the Geospatial Commission to speed up the conveyancing process. See Spring cohort 2021 for more information.
5. Supported the latest cohort to join our Geovation Accelerator Programme. See Spring cohort 2020 for more information.

Excellent public services

Investing in our brilliant people to have the right skills and infrastructure.

2020/21

1. As a response to COVID-19 we redeployed 218 colleagues to Department for Work and Pensions to support vital work. See Working together to respond to COVID-19 for more information.
2. In order to best serve our customers we quickly moved to distributing 30,000 pieces of IT kit enabling our colleagues to work remotely. See Preparing for a digital future for more information.
3. Expanded and strengthened our ‘fast-track’ expedite service in response to exponential customer demand – see Fast-track service: Going above and beyond for more information.
4. Our HR team enabled smartphone access to our learning portal, LearnHub , which included a line manager view showing training and progress at individual or team level. See Going digital with development for more information.
5. We worked with Red Hat Open Shift to move our digital services to a new technology platform based on containerisation technology – one of the first public sector organisations in the UK to do so. See Digital transformation for more information.
6. Achieved top 20 position for Civil Service employee engagement in People Survey. See Creating the culture for success for more information.
7. Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders initiative launched in Hull and Leicester.
8. More than 1,500 colleagues helped shape our Future Ways of Working principles, including on our desired culture, leadership, technology and workplace investment choices. See Creating the culture for success for more information.
9. Saved £1.2 million in rent and power consumption by reducing the number of datacentres from 3 to 2. See Shaping a digital property market for more information.
10. Twelve weeks of training completed by each of 461 new starters equating to 106 years of investment. See Building brilliant teams for more information.

2021/22

1. Achieved bronze in the UK 2021 Employee Experience awards. See Creating the culture for success for more information.
2. Recruited almost 900 colleagues across the year. See Creating the culture for success for more information.
3. Launched the Land Registration Academy, a centre of excellence for learning. Over 600 people have already been upskilled. See Shaping a digital property market for more information.

Customer-driven delivery

Chris Pope, Chief Operations Officer

Service delivery in the face of a pandemic

Being part of every property transaction, we receive roughly 90,000 searches that are mainly automated, and around 17,000 requests for our experts to change the register every day.

Prior to COVID-19, few people were equipped to work remotely. Three-quarters of our colleagues who are frontline and deliver services direct to customers relied on desktop technology connected through fixed infrastructure.

Within days of lockdown we had created enough homeworking capability to deliver essential and time- sensitive services, such as searches and official copies, to pre-pandemic levels. Three months later we had already completed a major transformation by enabling 98% of colleagues to deliver land registration services from home for the first time.

The scale and significance of this radical change, which ensured the property market remained intact, is something we are very proud of. While the quality of work remained strong, the difficulty we faced was the backlog of uncompleted requests that had increased while we restored our services to near pre-COVID levels.

While many other markets shrank, the demand for property remained unabated. The introduction of the stamp duty land tax holiday and its subsequent extension punctuated the story of a property market that, against all odds, continued to thrive during an overall economic downturn.

We played a critical part in that story. By December we had reduced the backlog by over a third but, overall, customers were having to wait longer than usual for changes to the register.

While these delays wouldn’t usually affect a property transaction, we promoted and strengthened our expedite service, which enables customers to fast-track urgent applications for free. As such we were well prepared when the demand for expedites more than quadrupled to ensure property transactions could progress smoothly and quickly.

We regularly survey our customers to help us better plan our ongoing service delivery. At the start of the year we did see an impact on the number of customers who gave us the highest rating for our service provision but, by focusing our efforts on issues highlighted in these surveys, by the end of the financial year this figure had risen above the scores given before the impacts of the pandemic were felt.

Customer satisfaction scores

New services for customers

Providing a brilliant service is central to our purpose. While the pandemic may have impacted our service provision, we stayed closer to our customer needs than ever before. Within days we set up a new Contact Us communication channel on our website, enabling more customers to self- serve and ensuring we could prioritise urgent enquiries.

Two-way communication with customers has been key to ensuring that even while we continue to face a backlog of uncompleted requests, we can still find ways to improve the service we offer. Throughout the year we have further developed our understanding of our customers’ needs and the conveyancing market more generally.

Progress queries were the most common reason for calls to our Customer Support Centre. Via our online portal, customers can now view all their requests in one place, respond directly to requests for information and check on progress, including a new estimated completion date feature. These enhancements deliver a better experience for customers while ensuring the more efficient use of our colleagues’ time. We also launched a new service for members of the public who need to find basic details for research purposes. By the end of March 2021, since its launch, citizens had used the new more intuitive service more than 1.25 million times. Eventually it will replace our older service as we gradually decommission its use.

Following extensive testing with more than 250 conveyancing customers, in April we also launched a new, wholly digital way to request changes to the Land Register. Our new Digital Registration Service enables customers to directly input data, eliminating the need for paper-based application forms and enabling information to be verified before it is submitted.

This new service is already available via our online portal, where more than 80% of transactions are completed. Since we started developing the service over 35,000 applications have been submitted and the service was recognised by the 2021 Real IT Awards, winning the Excellent Customer Service category in May. We are now expanding access via our application programming interface (API) channel, Business Gateway. This will allow customers who already use integrated digital practice or case management systems to benefit from the Digital Registration Service and other new digital services as they come online. Our intention is for this to become the primary way customers submit their requests to us.

A more digital form of registration is the key to unlocking significant operational efficiencies where simple requests and tasks can be processed using automation and artificial intelligence. This allows our experts to focus on the more complex changes. Our plans for next year will see us achieve a 40% gain in efficiency for register updates, enabling us to redeploy more of our experts onto tackling our current backlog.

Strengthening expertise

Of course, we aren’t just focusing on digital technology. The other vital component is our expert people. In many ways the pandemic has accelerated our plans to create a national operations function and we are already reimagining what the operations of the future will look like.

This year we recruited more than 500 caseworking colleagues and delivered individual technical training to more than 640 members of staff at all grades. Our plans for 2021/22 prioritise the optimisation of our operational capacity, and will see us recruit a further 650 members of staff, including more senior executive caseworkers, and deliver more than 1,200 technical training interventions. We have also begun rolling out our new leadership programme to create the culture we need within our operations teams. We expect to have rolled out the full programme by the end of 2021.

Making it simpler and faster to submit and track applications

The vast majority of HM Land Registry applications come through the online portal. This channel is extremely important to the day-to-day work of many conveyancers and we have been exploring how to ensure their experience is as strong as possible.

Submitting applications

The Digital Registration Service (DRS) simplifies the way customers can submit applications to us via the portal. Its ability to spot potential errors prior to submission improves application quality.

By capturing the data in this way, we can automatically check and validate the information before it is submitted, helping to avoid requests for information (requisitions) for basic mistakes.

Alongside the automated error checking, DRS will also automatically work out the fees for our customers as well as pre-populating certain data from the register and giving more options to save and review each application. Each one of these features lead to better quality applications, saving time for our customers and us. After testing with more than 1,500 individual users, DRS was launched in April 2021. We will be gradually including new features throughout the coming year as well as introducing the service to Business Gateway customers.

Reviewing application progress

In August 2020 we launched View My Applications for all portal users. This new feature brings together details of a customer’s applications all in one place, clearly indicating the status and all of the relevant documentation connected to the application. More than 100,000 portal users have used the tool since its launch.

In May 2021 we included an estimated completion date for each application, giving customers a calendar date when they can reasonably expect to receive the completed application.

Preparing for a digital future

Andrew Trigg, Acting Director of Digital, Data and Technology

Historically the majority of our 6,400 colleagues had worked entirely from one of our 14 offices. As with many organisations we had to react quickly when the restrictions were put in place in March 2020. Only 13% of our workforce had the IT equipment necessary to enable them to work from home, so we needed to make HM Land Registry a remote organisation overnight.

We had to find a way to enable our registration experts to make changes to the register from home for the first time. We also needed to ensure all our support services and technology teams could collaborate and engage remotely too. Of course, any solutions had to safeguard the integrity of the register and the trillions of pounds worth of assets it holds.

In the first two days we had ensured priority services were restored remotely, thanks to previous work completed to automate most searches.

Within 12 weeks we had moved our systems to a secure and robust virtual platform and distributed more than 30,000 pieces of IT equipment, fully restoring our services. Our colleagues provided the support and guidance needed to ensure everyone could get up and running again and no one was left behind – including those few, vital colleagues who needed to work from our offices. Public bodies which are fully funded from the public purse were not expected to furlough staff, and HM Land Registry did not want to furlough anyone, nor had to.

While initially these changes were a response to the pandemic, it has proven to be a significant transformation for HM Land Registry. Despite the leap of faith for our organisation, colleagues embraced the use of digital technology to find new ways to collaborate and connect with each other, which is reflected in our strong People Survey scores.

Digital transformation

By creating new services and enabling digital signatures and automating updates to the register for the first time, we have continued to deliver innovations to the market that make it easier for our customers to do business with us, even during the most challenging of times.

However, we know that to create a truly digital form of registration we need to bring together not only digital customer services but also a digital caseworking engine, supported by a fully digital and geospatial register.

We have developed a new caseworking process that our expert colleagues will use to create and update registers. It takes data that customers submit via our new Digital Registration Service and, when parameters allow, applies business rules and robotic decision-making engines either to automate the update or route cases to our people when we need to use their expert skills and judgement to make a decision.

We used Robotic Process Automation tools to very quickly search through applications to find prior applications, take on the administrative burden of sending out reminder letters and support the management of the expedite request service.

This is all underpinned by a digital Land Register and a modern technology estate. Our digital Land Register gives us machine-readable data that we can use in the validation of customer data and means our systems know what entries are in a register when our new system is considering what we need to do with an application. This is a critical enabler to future automation. We have migrated 43% of our existing register data into the new digital register, against a target of 40%, aiming to increase to 60% by the end of next year. The focus so far has been on those applications that can be automated and those that are raising requisitions.

In 2021/22 we intend to bring those elements together to digitise the register updates, which comprise 70% of our manual applications. Focusing on this will generate significant operational efficiencies in the short term, enabling our experts to focus on reducing the backlog of more complex requests. However, prioritising the digitisation of register updates will also lay the foundation for the automation of other register change services over the medium term.

We have also invested in the underlying infrastructure that supports our digital services. We worked with Red Hat Openshift to implement a new shared technology platform to ensure our services are easier to run and maintain. The platform runs on containerisation technology, making us one of the first public sector organisations in the UK to adopt this technology.

Exploring the future of property

We’ve continued the work we started with our research and development programme, Digital Street, with our innovation community now having worked with more than 250 organisations to explore how new and emerging technology can help us and the wider property market. We aim to maximise the opportunities Digital Street provides, by using it as a vehicle to answer some of the big strategic questions for HM Land Registry and the property market. Data science and machine-learning technology is an area we’ll be exploring further. We want to learn how we could further release the value of the data within the register, and what benefits this could provide us and those who use our services.

More data, easier to use

Unlocking the wider value of land and property data remains a key element of our future ambitions to be a world-leading data-driven organisation.

In March 2020 our new data publication platform, Use land and property data, was launched, hosting 10 datasets and associated licenses in one place for the first time. The service has improved accessibility and enabled electronic licensing and full application programming interface (API) integration, which greatly enhances the availability and accessibility of our property intelligence.

In July 2020 we added the registered leases and restrictive covenants datasets. Both were published under a range of licences which include free-to-use terms for personal and research uses, a commercial licence for business use, and an ‘exploration licence’ tailored to foster the development of new and emerging products and services by allowing customers to test opportunities free of charge for three months.

The datasets, available through Use Land and Property Data, mark a big step in realising the wider economic potential in our data while enabling innovation in property-related industries.

Organisations have been able to combine the data with a variety of information from other sources (such as Ordnance Survey and Companies House) and create a series of property and planning portals. Subscribers can visualise properties on a map (enhanced by ingesting HM Land Registry polygons), determine the property’s suitability for an automated valuation, establish a risk profile (such as is there a restrictive covenant on the title?), assess how many years remain on the term of the lease and differentiate between short-term and long-term leaseholders when analysing building ownership records.

The registered leases dataset contains unique property reference numbers (UPRNs) which were made available under the Geospatial Commission’s Public Sector Geospatial Agreement in the same month, signifying the latest step in a cross-organisational collaborative approach to support the economy through land and property data.

Partnering with the Geospatial Commission

As one of the six partner bodies of the Geospatial Commission (Geo6), we have been an integral part of the Data Improvement Programme (DIP), which is a cross-organisational collaboration in relation to data improvement, increased communication and sharing of ideas and best practice. Embedding the outcomes from the DIP will move the UK a step closer to delivering the objective of “Improving access to better location data’’.

As a result of the collaboration, we now have:

• clearer licences that align with all the partner bodies, creating a consistency of approach for users of the data and lowering the risk of data misuse
• a simplified common data catalogue, providing core information on the geospatial datasets we hold and manage. This catalogue is made available under an Open Government Licence
• provided valuable resource into the projects and played a central role in the delivery of the UK’s Geospatial Strategy, both through the geospatial data we hold and our extensive expertise
• led on a project to explore the value that could be generated in the housing and planning industry through better access to data. The project has created a prototype which demonstrates how the geospatial data we hold can be used to bring wider economic benefits, in this case tree preservation order information from Local Land Charges data

The case for the importance of geospatial data has continued to be made during the COVID-19 pandemic. From food and supply deliveries through to test and trace and the vaccine rollout at local and national levels, all this activity is underpinned by open data and innovation. HM Land Registry has continued its efforts to be a role model in that wider vision and in our work with the Geospatial Commission so far. Our aim for the future is to take a more sustainable approach to our data publication strategy and our geospatial transformation. We will continue to work with partner bodies and the commission to help define success in terms of higher quality and more findable, accessible, interoperable and re-useable data, in line with the pillars of the National Data Strategy.

Geovation cohorts

The Geovation Accelerator programme’s mission is to help launch and grow innovative solutions to social, environmental and economic challenges that harness the power of data and technology. In partnership with Ordnance Survey, HM Land Registry has been supporting the PropTech track, which provides at least six months’ focused support. Since October 2017 we’ve supported 24 companies through the programme across six cohorts. The latest cohort joined in April 2021 and, like their predecessors, will receive the following support.

1. Mentors – expert support from industry leaders.
2. Funding – £10,000 grant over six months.
3. Workspace – 12 months’ dedicated desk space.
4. Data – access to Ordnance Survey, HM Land Registry and partner datasets.
5. Product development – lean and agile development teams.
6. Marketing and PR – active promotion and marketing.
7. Professional development – workshops and 1:1 sessions.
8. Personal development – presentation and pitch training.

The companies we’ve supported have continued to grow and flourish, supporting the economy and the wider industry and bringing innovation to the market. For example, Thirdfort, part of the spring 2018 programme, is now helping to shape the conveyancing of the future through its digital identity verification platform.

Digital Street – exploring the future of property

Digital Street continues to work with community members to prioritise, design and test new technology and conceptual services in land registration.

Tokenisation

Our work on tokenisation has now concluded. We created a prototype of HM Land Registry creating and issuing digital tokens to represent title ownership. These tokens would be stored on a database underpinned by blockchain technology. Using security tokens linked to the title token, property owners would be able to record fractional ownership of property – where more than one person holds a legal interest in a property – securely and with greater flexibility than currently possible. The team worked with the Digital Street community to demonstrate how these security tokens could be traded on a digital marketplace. This opens up a series of potential benefits, including providing more opportunity for investment and ownership in property.

Transformational application programming interfaces

In this theme we explored how application programming interfaces (APIs) could be delivered to energise the market and transform the way customers interact with us. We created a future property transaction process using APIs and tested them with case management providers, so we could understand from the community what benefits these could bring. This concept transformed the conveyancing process. HM Land Registry would provide data about a property at a much earlier stage in the conveyancing process. This provides earlier validation and enables any errors to be highlighted and addressed prior to completion. The findings from this were documented and shared and have gone on to shape the future roadmap and decisions for our API channel, Business Gateway.

Staying connected

The view from a caseworker

I was working from our Hull office when the order came to stay at home. Contingency plans already in place meant we were all connected to our line managers and able to log in to the intranet securely for the latest instructions. Excellent communications meant caseworkers were kept informed at each step and I soon collected my kit in a well-honed, safe operation. Setting up and logging in back home, it was clear how much thought, effort and planning had gone in to adjusting the office environment to remote working. We all pitched in on team information boards (TIBs) to ensure everyone was up to speed, sharing tips and advice and quickly maximising the software features underpinning ‘the new normal’. As the pilot office for Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders, Hull spearheaded the development of TIBs and their role in remote collaboration. With virtual meetings, screen-sharing and online ‘chat’, plus impressive new training systems, most of our work can now be done from home quickly and efficiently.

Alister Heywood, Caseworker

The view from the Digital, Data and Technology Directorate

We were ready to react to ensure everyone had access to email and our intranet through a large- scale deployment of security tokens and SMS access to email. We engineered our desktop computers into proto-laptops and within weeks had equipped almost all of our colleagues to have setups similar to what they were used to in the office. Our teams implemented innovative and secure solutions in a matter of weeks that would normally take months. Securing and distributing IT kit was key to maintaining the work carried out by the organisation but behind the scenes new secure platforms were also built that will enable the organisation to rethink how and where it works from.

Steve Phillips, Deputy Director – Technology

Searching for land and property information

Whether it’s prices or ownership, the national conversation is never far away from property, and HM Land Registry holds a lot of the data that underpins it all. From people and organisations wanting to know who owns a piece of land to real estate companies generating their house price indices and journalists finding out how much a house costs, our data is viewed by thousands every day for a multitude of reasons. It helps to support the economy and is the backbone of property-related industries.

Our Use land and property data service saw more than 1.2 million searches made in its first year. This new facility is easy to use and is a portal for anyone to find the information they need, in bulk, such as house prices, ownership or other information.

Before, the process was very manual with datasets stored in different systems. Now the datasets are stored in a central location and the API makes it easy to automate, saving us time and ensuring we always have the latest information. We liked how HM Land Registry engaged with us, letting us know in advance of new features or changes and listening to our opinion.

Adem Certel, Partner, Data Analyst, Knight Frank

The new service streamlines the process of user set up and data download. The API access key and ability to automate the download of monthly datasets is a move forward that all government bodies should look to emulate. It is both progressive and moving with the times, a breath of fresh air.

Tom Plews, Director, Innovation at CLS Data

Meet the new Geovation cohort

Spring cohort 2020

Building Passport The Passport system enables the storage, organisation and sharing of building information. Developed with guidance from the Fire and Rescue Service, leading building control firms and insurance and property market experts, it seeks to reduce the risks of a tragedy while making occupants feel safer in the real estate they inhabit and use.

An ongoing pilot with Surrey Fire and Rescue is influencing the platform’s future direction. Improvements to the built environment promise to be substantial as it is rolled out across the UK.

Staze, formerly OneStay, is a UK-based, last-minute booking app that displays availability in rental properties over a two-week window. It aims to make it cheaper, easier and faster for customers to book trips and to help property managers maximise occupancy and profits by reaching new guests to fill gaps in booking calendars. In the past six months, the start-up has raised £500,000 to build a team of six full-time staff.

Occubly has been working with housing providers to create bespoke applications that make it easier to manage, analyse and use complex datasets. The start-up helps large social and corporate landlords harness data to improve tenant satisfaction, business performance and compliance. Workstreams include a temporary accommodation solution to reduce management time and increase efficiency and allocation of housing to vulnerable people, as part of a modern service that supports local communities.

Autumn cohort 2020

Sail Homes offers homeowners a stress-free sale avoiding the common pitfalls of selling property. Selling a no-chain property still takes around four and half months from offer to exchange. Sail Homes has created a “no chain, no pain” approach to selling. On the day a customer instructs Sail, the firm starts the legal process, preparing the documentation, ordering searches and raising enquiries. Sail reports that, on average, sales complete within 57 days of clients accepting an offer, with the fastest turnaround taking 22 days. In 2021, Sail will add legal services to its business portfolio, targeting an average of four weeks to carry out conveyancing.

adoor is an online platform that brings together buyers, sellers, conveyancers and estate agents to track the property transaction process. Adoor focuses on communication and knowledge sharing, aiming to provide a dashboard which empowers agents and conveyancers by eliminating repetitive queries, enabling all concerned to focus on completing transactions faster and ensuring a stress-free experience for buyers and sellers.

Mappin Technologies develops software solutions for large premises, offering a smartphone app that helps visitors find their way round a site – a ‘Google Maps for indoors’ – facilitates accessibility and provides a direct way to alert staff to any risks arising in the space. The app generates anonymous data on user flow which is fed into location analytics software to inform space and staff allocation for sales, marketing, energy and security strategies.

Spring cohort 2021

Digihome is a smart home system that puts everything together at the touch of a button such as lighting, heating, audio visual, internet and security.

With multiroom functionality, and the ability share with anyone in a household it’s a convenient, simple way to capture the right information that helps save time and money around the home.

NOCO Energy specialises in aggregating and processing data to accelerate decarbonisation by working closely with renewable energy project developers and investment funds to provide them with crucial decision-making data. They use big geospatial data to identify opportunities in the solar development market. Recent success in this field has led to the demand for a more automated solution that can be scaled while integrating more and more data.

SearchLand is a map-based property and planning data web app for small and medium-term developers, planners, architects and investors to make informed property and land decisions.

It covers a wealth of information including title boundaries and ownership, land ownership in the UK, company ownership searches, historic and current market values for all property types in England, planning application analysis and map layers.

Creating the culture for success

Simon Morris, Director of Human Resources

For nearly 160 years we have provided the trust and confidence the property market and economy need through our expertise and integrity in all we do. This sense of history and purpose underpins our values and the culture of the organisation.

And it is this very culture that ensured our people met the challenges of the past year, finding creative solutions in the most difficult of circumstances and at a time in which health, wellbeing and harnessing the talents of all have never been so important.

In the 2020 Civil Service People Survey we recorded our highest-ever scores. In total our scores for eight of the nine survey themes ranked in the ‘high performers’ category. Our overall engagement score now ranks in the top 20 across Civil Service organisations and significantly higher compared to other similar departments, which is a fantastic achievement. A similar leap was recorded in our leadership and managing change scores too so we want to learn from what has worked well and build on the progress we’ve made.

The focus on ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our people was reflected in our PERMA index score, which rose above the Civil Service average to 74%, with our wellbeing response to COVID-19 recognised across government as exemplary. We also received industry acknowledgement, securing a bronze award at the 2021 UK Employee Experience Awards in the category Best Employee-Centric Company.

Engagement Index Score

Leadership and Managing Change

PERMA Index Score: 74% (Civil Service Average 73%).

Our overall engagement score now ranks in the top 20 across Civil Service organisations and significantly higher compared to other similar departments, which is a fantastic achievement. A similar leap was recorded in our leadership and managing change scores too so we want to learn from what has worked well and build on the progress we’ve made.

The focus on ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our people was reflected in our PERMA index score, which rose above the Civil Service average to 74%, with our wellbeing response to COVID-19 recognised across government as exemplary. We also received industry acknowledgement, securing a bronze award at the 2021 UK Employee Experience Awards in the category Best Employee-Centric Company.

A new way of working

Despite the vast majority never having worked from home before, our colleagues have embraced remote working technology with virtual meetings, events and training sessions. Leveraging this technology is enabling us to reach people more quickly and our creative approaches are facilitating better interaction and the ability to engage with leaders to a greater extent than ever before. We’ve held more than 70 virtual question and answer sessions. Our monthly national events with the Chief Executive, Simon Hayes, are attended by an average of 1,000 colleagues, while a session with the Land Registry Board attracted around 1,700. Feedback has been universally positive, with a favourability rating exceeding 90% and comments received such as:

I like the fact that our leaders are happy to be questioned by staff and that they seem to genuinely care about staff wellbeing.

These innovations are laying the foundations for more ambitious changes to the way we work, with the introduction of a blended model as part of the Future Ways of Working programme, which aims to transform our workspaces, technology and practices, putting people and culture at its heart. More than 10% of the workforce shared their views and helped to shape the early plans as part of the discovery phase. We have also encouraged everyone to get involved in a month-long conversation about new ways of working. We have listened to feedback and as a result, a framework is being developed to support decision-making about when and where to work that not only takes account of business and individual preferences but also ensures we have the flexibility to adapt and deliver services in the years to come.

Building brilliant teams

We have continued to build and maintain the talented workforce we need to deliver expert land registration services, recruiting 872 colleagues, including into essential operational roles. This has been an ongoing success with processes being adapted to accommodate interviews carried out remotely.

We instigated a series of digital development programmes focusing on remote management and leadership, ‘The Art of Being Brilliant’, and developing a coaching style of management to enable our colleagues to reach their full potential and maximise their performance. More than 6 sessions were held online, attracting 1,533 attendees. We also moved to remote inductions for the new starters brought into the organisation over the past year.

Developing capability at all levels has included the launch of a technical Land Registration Academy, as part of a wider learning framework that focuses on building and professionalising land registration knowledge and expertise across the organisation. As well as boosting our operational capability, we continue to invest and strengthen our support services, creating a new analytical function and bolstering our in-house expertise in terms of planning and strategy.

We have focused significantly on health and wellbeing to offer support to colleagues when they have most needed it. Providing flexibility in how and where they work has ensured we continue to meet the needs of our customers and has reinforced a culture that recognises people give their best when their wellbeing needs are met.

Creating an inclusive community

We’ve continued to build relationships across directorates, grades and locations with our internal diversity networks and have worked with our black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) colleagues to improve workforce diversity through recruitment and internal progression schemes, as well as raising awareness of race at work issues through enhanced staff communications and engagement.

The Disabled Employee Network and the Future Ways of Working team have been exploring how new working patterns might affect those who are deaf or hard of hearing, while the Women’s Network has supported wider campaigns around gender, as well as providing menopause support to colleagues. In a challenging year, there has been a focus on providing assistance to individuals where needed, such as those shielding at home.

Our networks have played an invaluable role for their members at this time and helped raise awareness of the challenges they faced. A member of our Assured Network (formerly known as LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex)+) wrote a blog about mental health, while colleagues from the Carers Network have shared stories of supporting their families during lockdown.

We want to create a workforce for the future and have spent the last year developing our approach to inclusion, ensuring it aligns with our culture model. We’ve launched a new strategy that sets out our vision and is focused on improving our evidence base as well as developing knowledge and skills to support our aims.

These successes have been achieved through a period where we have had to adapt to external factors and accelerate our approaches to developing our culture. The pandemic has shown us what we are capable of, but the challenge now is how we capture that spirit of innovation and service provision in the longer term.

Building on the launch of our culture statement in 2019, we have developed a new model that lays out the steps to achieving the culture we aspire to. We are clear that only by creating an environment in which all our people can thrive, will we be able to achieve our ambitions to transform the property market truly.

Going digital with development

Innovative online learning and the use of digital tools supercharged colleague learning and development while working from home, reaching more people than ever before and at a fraction of the cost.

We started by enabling smartphone access to our learning portal Learnhub and transformed our traditional in- person content for digital formats. We reimagined corporate induction, training events and development programmes.

To help managers with managing teams remotely we held virtual workshops and events – using virtual classroom tools such as Adobe Connect and Microsoft Teams.

We expanded our leadership and management development framework and delivered development programmes using tools such as Zoom webinars and podcasts, as well as virtual learning technologies that encouraged collaboration.

Our approach led to an 11% increase in the People Survey result for learning and development, more than 5,000 attendees on sessions over the course of the year, including manager workshops and inductions, and thousands of views on our interactive monthly development newsletter.

Virtual workshops as part of our Digital Staff Development Programme focused on the science of positive psychology and the response to the sessions was overwhelmingly positive with comments received such as “Thank you so much, utterly inspiring” and “Really enjoyed this, can’t wait for the next ones”.

Lifting spirits though a sense of community

Our thriving sports and social network LR Leisure played a pivotal role in keeping people connected while working from home, organising health and wellbeing activities for our people. These provided a genuine sense of belonging and community during a time of limited social contact for many.

Our volunteers, locally and nationally, have been truly inspiring in the work they have done to lift everyone’s spirits.

In the past year we have moved online to connect our workforce in new and different ways. Our monthly virtual quizzes have involved star turns from our Chief Executive and directors. We’ve held monthly health and wellbeing challenges with 300 to 700 registering each month, run our own version of the Eurovision Song Contest and held a virtual Christmas Party attended by more than 600 people.

We have a busy 2021 calendar of events planned, combining face- to-face and virtual activities as we continue to celebrate our people.

Performance analysis and financial review

Iain Banfield, Chief Financial Officer

Status change

In line with the Office for National Statistics reclassification, HM Land Registry’s trading status was revoked on 1 April 2020. This means that in 2020/21, HM Land Registry was funded through the Parliamentary Estimates process as a part of central government. This has changed the look and feel of our financial reporting with expenditure now reported through the resource accounts against the control totals that have been set by HM Treasury (HMT). All fees, charges and commercial income are now captured through our Trust Statement and surrendered to HMT. See our Detailed financial statements for more information.

The new financial statements require the restatement of the prior year comparatives previously reported in our Annual Report and Accounts. Note 18 to the resource accounts sets out this restatement in more detail.

Financial summary

Our status may have changed but our core ambition has not. Our main financial objective going into 2020/21 remained that of balancing investment in the short-term capacity and capabilities we need to service the day-to- day demand for our services, alongside the longer-term transformation required to help us become the world- leading land registry we aspire to be.

I am pleased to say we have responded successfully to these challenges. We have also invested significantly in our capacity by increasing both the number of caseworkers we employ and the wider support functions needed to operate as a central government department. We have invested significantly in our capability by improving the effectiveness of our systems as well as supporting the development of our people through programmes such as Brilliant Teams, Inspiring Leaders. We have done this by enabling our people and customers to work in new ways through the extensive roll-out of home-working coupled with market initiatives including the introduction of e-signatures. And we have managed all this while keeping within the new spending controls that were set by HMT before the start of the pandemic.

Statement of Parliamentary Supply (SOPS) review

Summary table 2020-21	Outturn	Supplementary estimate budget
In £000	Total	Total
Departmental expenditure limit (DEL)
Resource	332,700*	346,357
Capital	32,160	40,211
Total	364,860	386,568
Annually managed expenditure (AME)
Resource	(858)	22,000
Capital	-	-
Total	(858)	22,000
Total resource	331,842	368,357
Total capital	32,160	40,211
Total budget expenditure	364,002	408,568

*Reconciles to Statement of Consolidated Net Expenditure outturn of £381.8 million by adding Capital Grant in Aid (£52.8 million) (see Transfer of assets to the Government Property Agency) and AME (-£0.9 million), and excluding non-budget income (£2.8 million).

Our resource and capital underspends against budget were driven by specific delays to expenditure and reduced operating costs as a result of COVID-19.

Although we increased the number of caseworkers during the year, their recruitment and onboarding was delayed as we loaned over 200 new recruits to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to support the wider cross- government response to the pandemic. In addition, there were reduced operating costs, when compared with budget, as we modified our ways of working in light of the first lockdown. This meant we underspent against Resource Departmental Expenditure Limits (RDEL) and Capital Departmental Expenditure Limits (CDEL) control totals by £13.7m and £8.1m respectively.

Resource Accounts (RDEL) financial review

As part of the changes to our status we have produced a Statement of Consolidated Net Expenditure (SoCNE) which accounts solely for expenditure for the first time. Previously, in the 2019/20 financial year, we accounted for income and expenditure in one statement.

	2020/21 (£ million)	Restated 2019/20 (£ million)
Staff costs	243.7	225.9
Purchase of goods and services	70.5	65.9
Depreciation and amortisation charges*	11.8	9.0
Indemnity payments for indemnity including legal costs**	5.6	5.4
Total operating expenditure	331.6	306.2
Finance income/ expense	0.6	(1.1)
Restructure and re-organisation costs	-	(3.1)
Net resource expenditure for the year	332.2	302.0
Other provisions utilised	0.5	2.1
Total resource DEL	332.7	304.1

Staff costs

We recruited more expert colleagues and funded increased overtime to help manage demand. Our average full-time equivalent headcount increased from 5,136 to 5,503 at 31 March 2021. This contributed to an increase in staff costs for our business-as-usual activity, rising from £225.9m in 2019/20 to £243.7m in 2020/21.

Purchase of goods and services

The key areas of spend and their movements from 2019/20 were:

• IT services, including maintenance of equipment and licences, increased from £14.9m to £16.1m in 2020/21, which reflected the additional costs associated with implementing working from home for more than 5,500 staff and the IT costs associated with delivering our transformation programme;
• professional services, which have increased from £9.2 million to £10.3 million in 2020/21 in line with additional transformation activities. This largely relates to spend through our digital delivery partners
• accommodation costs, which increased by £2.9 million to £18.9 million partly as the result of a one-off investment in making offices COVID-secure and enhanced cleaning costs

Depreciation, finance costs and indemnity payments

Depreciation increased by £2.8m as a result of historic capital investment. We incurred £0.6m of costs relating to interest on finance leases. 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 in case of unforeseen errors. In 2020/21, £5.6m (including HM Land Registry legal costs) was paid out against 540 claims, an increase of £0.2m when compared with 2019/20.

Capital expenditure (CDEL)

Total capital expenditure in 2020/21 was £32.2 million, including £13.6m on the transformation programme. This mainly related to IT, software and capitalisation of Local Land Charges development costs.

Annually managed expenditure

In 2020/21 we incurred a charge of £2.2m relating to the impairment of properties transferred to the Government Property Agency. This was offset by a downward revaluation of the indemnity provision of £2.6m and the utilisation of £0.5m of other provisions, resulting in a net charge to the AME budget of (£0.9m).

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 13 to the accounts.

Transfer of assets to the Government Property Agency

On 31 March 2021, HM Land Registry entered into agreement with the Government Property Agency (GPA), an executive agency of the Cabinet Office, to transfer our freehold properties, alongside the majority of our long- leasehold properties. This includes a transfer of the legal ownership of the land, buildings and any associated components. We will lease these properties from the GPA with rent payments commencing 1 April 2021.

The assets were transferred to GPA on 31 March 2021 at nil consideration resulting in a capital grant in kind expense equal to the fair value of £52.8 million. This was offset in the capital budget by the disposal value, resulting in a net nil impact on the capital budget.

All freehold and leasehold assets were subject to a professional valuation by Montagu Evans as of 31 March 2021, the date of the transfer and the reporting date. This resulted in an impairment charge of £2.2 million to the AME budget.

Fees and charges

As a result of the change in our status, we collect all fees and charges and surrender 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 volatile for the whole of 2020/21 following the outbreak of COVID-19. In 2020/21 we collected fees of £289.0 million from customers with £232.5 million worth of applications processed during the year. Over that time, this increased the balance of Fees Received in Advance (FREDA) by £56.4 million, taking the total to £97.0 million as at 31 March 2021. This is largely due to interruptions to post-completion services during the first quarter of the year as effective and secure home working capabilities were established.

As in previous years, almost half of our fees related to updates to existing titles in the register, which accounted for £149.3 million, of which the creation of new register entries (such as first registrations, transfers of part and new leases) generated income of £38.1 million.

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 have been available to customers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020/21, guaranteed query services, accounted for £57.0 million.

Information services enable users to go online to get a snapshot of any registered plot of land or property. These generated £19.7m in 2020/21.

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 £6.5 million.

Additionally, we offer commercial data services for customers in the property market and wider economy. Income from the commercial release of our data generated £3.9 million in 2020/21.

Aside from income derived from our services, we received rental income of £2.8 million 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.

2021/22 onwards

As part of the 2021/22 settlement letter HMT has allocated HM Land Registry a settlement of £376.0 million (RDEL) and £57.7 million (CDEL), which will allow us to continue to invest in frontline colleagues and transformation services while accelerating the rollout of the Local Land Charges Programme. In addition, we have been allocated £75.0 million (CDEL) for the transition to the new International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 16 regarding finance leases.

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 2020/21, we invested £22.7 million (excluding LLC) of RDEL in our ambitious change programme, an increase of £5.3 million from 2019/20. In addition we spent £13.6 million 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 also prioritised a number of workstreams to enable our colleagues and customers to continue to work as effectively as possible. This included the Future Ways of Working programme, portal enhancements and the introduction of e-signatures.

We continued to accelerate the progress of the Local Land Charges programme (LLC) with 17 new local authorities migrating to the service (as set out in Local Land Charges acceleration) which incurred costs of £3.1 million (RDEL) and £3.9 million (CDEL). The programme will substantially increase in scope from 2021/22 in line with the Government’s ambition to migrate the remaining 219 local authorities in the next four years.

Strategic planning and performance

The evolution of our performance framework

We had planned to introduce a new performance framework at the start of this year. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we adopted an agile approach to business planning to ensure we were able to focus resources on maintaining our critical services and maximising recovery of the property market.

Since the operational environment stabilised, we have transitioned to a new corporate performance framework, which is ready for full adoption from 2021/22. It has been designed to underpin an outcome-directed approach to planning in accordance with the principles laid out in the Public Value Framework, and is designed around HM Land Registry’s focus on supporting the following national outcomes:

• there is trust and confidence in land ownership
• the conveyancing process is quick, easy and secure
• property data supports a stable and innovative UK economy

This framework is designed to endure, providing a mechanism to support strategic planning over the next few years and is underpinned by the key performance indicators (KPIs) set out below. Expected performance trajectories for each KPI will be presented in the Annual Business Plan, and future annual reports will monitor against those trajectories.

Providing assurance

Our approach to performance management in the first half of the year was refocused to support our response to COVID-19. We needed to adapt our ways of working to keep the property market functioning. As reported in Preparing for a digital future this involved establishing effective and secure home-working capabilities for the vast majority of the workforce for the first time. New performance indicators were developed and shared twice weekly with the Executive Board to monitor progress and provide assurance around the organisation’s response.

Within two days of lockdown our priority search activities were restored, which ensured continuity of service for the pre-completion checks and expedited applications on which the homebuying process relies. All our services were operating within a few weeks.

Our key performance indicators and business planning deliverables

Sitting below our Key Performance Indicators are key deliverables. The information below gives examples of how the key deliverables complement the Key Performance Indicators.

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

Developed business case for accelerated delivery of LLC programme, gaining approval via HM Treasury

KPI 2 Customer satisfaction

Delivered portal enhancements, enabling customers to keep track of application progress

Enabled Customer Support Centre telephony to be delivered from mid-May 2020

Introduced Customer Support Centre Web Chat

KPI 3 Staff engagement

Implemented a pay award for 2019 while successfully negotiating a pay increase in exchange for modernising employment terms and conditions

Introduced a Culture Model, which includes themes around modernising the way that we work and further developing our customer relationships

Updated our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, setting out key actions to improve workforce representation and create a more inclusive culture

KPI 4 Cost of our services

Identified and monitored new fraud and other business risks resulting from COVID-19 and the economic downturn.

Successfully negotiated a Spending Review settlement that supports on-going investment in our staff and transformation.

KPI 5 Accuracy of new entries on the register

Delivered functionality to reduce requisitions due to name discrepancies.

KPI 6 Applications completed

Launched the new Land Registration Academy to support building operational capability.

Launched a public beta of the Digital Registration Service.

KPI 7a Speed of our services

Updated our Transformation ambition and prioritised plans to reflect the impact of COVID-19.

KPI 7b Time taken to change the register

Started accepting electronic signatures on conveyancing deeds, removing the last strict requirement for paper and wet-ink signatures in the conveyancing process.

Provided online register and title plan views in Search for land and property information.

Our approach to business planning

We took a more flexible and iterative approach to planning this year to ensure we were sufficiently responsive to emerging developments and the changing needs of our customers. We established and maintained regular engagement with industry representatives, and experts across the conveyancing market, citizens and business to support this. We also used these mechanisms to keep our customers informed of what they could expect.

The acceleration of our plans to roll out electronic signatures, digital cryptographic identity checks and digital deeds are all examples of how we adapted our original plans in response to the industry’s evolving needs. Over the past year, too, we have instigated our Digital Registration Service, launched View My Applications and introduced estimated completion dates for portal users, as well as embarking on the large-scale digitisation of our register update application processes. Over the first half of the year, we also loaned 218 of our people to the DWP to support the wider-government pandemic response.

Overall we have successfully delivered 39 of our 48 (81%) key deliverables on time during the year, with the remaining nine on track for delivery in the first few months of 2021/22.

Tracking performance

Overall, this has been a strong year for HM Land Registry. We have maintained our services in the face of extraordinary challenges over the past 12 months, while putting in place a new framework and data ecosystem that will enable the organisation to understand better what is driving our performance as we move forward. This deeper understanding of our business, combined with our investment plans and a normalisation of market conditions, puts us in an excellent position to continue to improve performance over the years to come.

Of the KPIs we measured ourselves against this year, three (KPIs 1, 2 and 3) are consistent with those used in previous years. We have also developed an additional four KPIs, one has been under trial during 20/21 (KPI 6) the rest will be formally reported against from 21/22 and onwards.

KPI 1 Do our customers trust the information held on the Land Register?

Customer trust (KPI 1) remained high throughout the year. Results gathered by an independent research company showed 79% of customers rated us as either good or excellent (8-10 on a 10-point scale) in ensuring the integrity and accuracy of the Land Register, 2% higher than in 2019/20.

Customer Support Centre

Our Customer Support Centre (CSC) had to rebuild its services after the first lockdown and, while we identified a solution to enable its remote operation, we introduced a new Contact Us channel on GOV.UK to give our customers a self-help solution to finding key information. By mid-May we had reopened our CSC phone lines and over the subsequent months we not only expanded the on-call hours but also continued to enhance the Contact Us channel.

542,011 calls answered in 2020/21

KPI 2 Are we delivering a service that aligns with our customers’ needs?

Despite the disruption to our activities, and some changes in service standards to accommodate this, our customer satisfaction (KPI 2) rating was 64% for the year as a whole. We saw an understandable dip in customer satisfaction at the mid-year point as the pandemic took its toll on the whole conveyancing process, but we saw a steady improvement in the second half of the year as our services normalised.

Fast-track service: Going above and beyond

Services that enable sales to be completed have always been our priority and never more so than in a year of soaring demand alongside a global pandemic that saw the entire property industry go home, briefly stalling the market. As we became used to remote working, the looming end of the stamp duty land tax holiday saw conveyancers in a race against time. To help our customers, we strengthened, promoted and expanded our expedite service, ensuring an urgent application could be fast-tracked for free and completed within 10 days. Despite a near quadrupling in demand for expedites – from 2,914 requests in April 2020 to 11,413 in March 2021 – we dealt with many on the same day or within 48 hours, and 97% in less than 10 days. This ensured people in difficult circumstances could get on with their lives.

2,914 requests in April 2020

11,413 requests in March 2021

KPI 3 How connected do our staff feel towards their work and our organisation?

Our staff engagement (KPI 3) score in the 2020 Civil Service People Survey was 71%, which is both an 8% improvement on 2019/20 and the highest HM Land Registry has ever recorded, placing us 18th out of 106 governmental organisations that participated in the survey, and first among those of a comparable size.

Reflecting and remembering one year on

In March, one year from the day that our offices closed, we held a special virtual remembrance service attended by 800 colleagues. Nine HM Land Registry colleagues tragically passed away in the year, and many more were affected by the loss of loved ones to COVID-19.

Attendees shared photos, memories and stories and took part in a collective national one-minute silence.

Collaborative technology allowed us to keep everyone informed and enhance our employee-centric culture and a sense of community that has helped colleagues support one another through the toughest of times and allowed our organisation to thrive.

KPI 6 Does HM Land Registry have the right capacity and capability to deliver its services in a timely manner?

Among the new KPIs, we trialled KPI 6, which is the proportion of applications we process against those we received. Our Operations directorate was heavily impacted by the pandemic and we reacted swiftly to set up our office-based operations workforce to process applications from home. We are permanently more flexible as a result. As outlined in our Annual Business Plan, we began a large-scale recruitment and progression exercise this year to increase capacity and flexibility within the directorate but to support the nation’s response to the pandemic we loaned 218 new starters to DWP. Despite this our output this year was 97.6% of intake. An acceleration of our digitisation and automation plans will drive speedier processing, enabling us to bring down our backlog of applications over time.

Working together to respond to COVID-19

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic around 220 of our registration officer (RO) colleagues worked to support priority tasks undertaken by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Pre-pandemic, the DWP would typically receive around 8,000 Universal Credit claims per week. This increased to around 58,000 claims per week, and each of those claims was submitted by a person or family in need. Our team was called on to support some of the most vulnerable in our society through the toughest of times.

There were many examples where we have positively impacted the lives of the claimants. One example was supporting a claimant who was struggling to pay their bills by deferring some ‘advance’ repayments that they were due to make. This made a significant difference while they resumed their search for new employment.

Will Hawtin, Fylde Office

Sustainability

Sustainability figures

Current performance against the 2009/10 sustainability baseline data is as follows against the Greening Government Commitments (GGC) targets.

1. Carbon: 73% reduction.
2. Water: 68% reduction.
3. Waste: 85% reduction.
4. Paper: 84% reduction
5. Waste: 65% recycled
6. Waste to energy process: 34%.

Net zero carbon commitments

Our commitment to the delivery of the Government’s net zero carbon requirements has included upgrading to LED (light-emitting diode) lighting at our Birkenhead and Weymouth offices and working with the GPA on three buildings (Gloucester, Telford and Hull) delivering additional LED lighting projects, with a further view to implementing photovoltaic electricity generation, and improving heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) efficiency and decarbonisation through the use of heat pumps removing gas combustion.

Paper 84%

Waste paper reduced from 505 tonnes to 78 tonnes.

Waste recycled 65%

99% of total waste not going to landfill. Recycled waste includes mixed recycling (plastic, tins, foil and so on), paper and glass.

Waste to energy process 34%

Incineration for energy conversion contributes significantly to our overall targets.

Sustainability overview

We have made significant progress on our commitments due to the impact of COVID-19 and we will be looking to embed as many positive changes as we can when we move into a hybrid way of working. This year we have worked on delivering some major projects in line with Government’s net zero carbon commitments.

These include:

• replacement of lift equipment, including the installation of more efficient motors at Hull
• upgrading lighting to LED at Birkenhead and Weymouth and the commencement of works in conjunction with the GPA at Hull, Gloucester and Telford, where the works will be completed in first quarter of the 2021/22 financial year
• replacement of boilers at Nottingham
• heating system changes at Croydon and Plymouth
• replacement of Building Management Systems (BMS) at Leicester
• improvements in the solar shading provision at Weymouth

Other initiatives

We have started the transition from plastic envelopes to paper following a successful trial, with an aim to move all outgoing post to paper envelopes in the next financial year.

Our performance

Our Environmental Management System ensures we are continually improving and working towards the targets set as part of the GGC and the Greening Government Information and Communications Technology (ICT) requirements.

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

We have continued to maintain our accreditation to the environmental ISO14001 standard, which independently ratifies our performance across the full range of sustainability activities within the organisation. During the year we transitioned to a new external auditor and successfully retained our accreditation through a remote audit in November.

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

	Achieved	Target for 2021	On target/achieved?
Carbon	73% reduction	40% reduction	Yes
Waste arising	85% reduction in waste generated	Reduce the amount of waste generated by at least 25%	Yes
	65% recycled	Recycle or compost at least 70% of waste and landfill less than 10% of waste
	1% landfill
	34% Waste to Energy process
Water consumption	68% reduction	25% reduction (self-imposed)	Yes
Paper consumption	84% reduction	Reduce our paper use by 50% from 2009/10 baseline	Yes

In addition, we continue to deliver the following requirements within the GGC:

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

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

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

Area	Performance
	Actual (£’000)	2021 reduction target
Energy: greenhouse gas emissions, all areas within scope: carbon emissions (tonnes)	3,895	9,776
Energy: greenhouse gas emissions, all areas within scope: carbon emissions (tonnes): expenditure (£)	1,779
Waste consumption (tonnes)	299	1,484
Waste expenditure (£)	99
Water consumption (m³)	18,492	38,346
Water expenditure (£)	134

Sustainability governance

Compliance with environmental legislation is managed through the Sustainability Governance Framework and meetings 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.

Overall delivery of additional requirements of GGC

The 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 2021.

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. The climate change adaptation plan is kept under continuous review.

The delivery of the Government’s net zero carbon requirements forms part of the considerations behind maintenance and wider property management decisions. As previously set out, work has begun on several major carbon zero works funded by the Government Property Agency. We will deliver a carbon zero plan early in the next financial year in line with GGC and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Biodiversity and the natural environment

We recognise the importance of Biodiversity. Biodiversity plans have been created and are being implemented at Fylde, Hull, Plymouth, Weymouth and Telford. This process will continue at sites that have been identified as benefiting from future enhancements, such as Swansea.

Carbon

We have reduced consumption of electricity by just under 1.5 KWh. This reflects the reduced use of our buildings to an average of 10% of normal occupancy, while remaining open to deliver essential services. Travel was significantly reduced over previous years but does not have a substantial impact on overall carbon used as this is primarily from the office estate. Gas consumption has increased by just under 8% since the pandemic. It is generally being reported that office buildings have used on average 20% more gas per month than the previous year. This is mainly because ventilating buildings with cooler fresh air and the loss of thermal capacity inside (owing to fewer people, less electronic equipment and so on) has increased the demand for heating. Our performance is significantly better than the 20% quoted.

Our overall reduction in carbon emissions since 2009/10 is 73%. See Appendix C for historic trend data.

Waste

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

In partnership with our waste providers we have moved over the year to achieving zero waste to landfill. We are currently meeting most of the targets, with the amount of waste generated reduced by 85% and 99% of all waste is recycled or incinerated for energy conversion (34%) rather than going to landfill. This contributes significantly to the overall performance. The only area where we did not meet a waste target was for the amount recycled, which is at 65% against a target of 70%. Waste paper was reduced from 505 tonnes to 78 tonnes.

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 22% of waste arising and 78 tonnes was sent for recycling. Our overall reduction in waste generated since 2009/10 is 85%. See Appendix C for historic trend data.

Water consumption

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

A 68% reduction in water consumption has been achieved against a target of 25%. However, it should be noted that, in general, occupancy has been at around 10% of the full-time equivalent, delivering essential services and to meet some wellbeing needs.

Paper usage

The GGC reduction target to reduce our paper use by 50% from an HM Land Registry baseline year of 2011/12 shows a current improvement of 84% of A4 equivalent. Our digital services programme and our move to on-request printing are continuing to have a significant impact.

Sustainable procurement

September 2020 saw the publication of Procurement Policy Note 06/20, which is a new model aimed at delivering social value across all competitively tendered procurements from 1 January 2021. This means that in our evaluation of bids we apply a minimum of 10% weighting as part of the scoring process.

Social value metrics are applied across a range of different themes to help us get the best from our contracts and includes COVID-19 recovery, tackling economic recovery, fighting climate change, equal opportunities and wellbeing. These are all topics that we as an organisation are already passionate about. We consider sustainability elements throughout the whole procurement lifecycle.

Our procurement strategy includes a section covering sustainability to ensure this is always considered. We also refer to the GGC as part of our procurement policy and undergo regular supplier training to cover these aspects, including a session with ISS (one of our facilities suppliers), where we learned how to be greener together and how to achieve greater levels of sustainability as promoted through our commercial weeks last year.

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 476 Freedom of Information requests, of which 456 were answered within 20 working days.

Following a comprehensive review of our information assets, the new Information Asset Register and ownership model are improving the effectiveness of the overall management of our assets and in managing information-related risks. A new Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) strategy will help us ensure the integrity, sensitivity and security of our corporate information assets while giving staff the information they need to be empowered to deliver our aims and objectives.

In the provision of our data services, HM Land Registry complies with the Reuse of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015. (HM Land Registry has been advised that the changes to the reuse of public sector information regime made by the European Open Data Directive 2019 will not be implemented in the UK).

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 £5 million threshold. HM Land Registry regularly reviews its activities to assess the impact on its business customers in complying with its regulatory processes and requirements. We are continuing to develop our electronic lodgement of applications to make it easier and cheaper to deal with us, and this year we started accepting electronic signatures on conveyancing deeds, which is one of the key elements of a digital conveyancing process.

Health and safety

We have delivered proactive and reactive policy changes to meet the ever-changing demands of the COVID-19 pandemic. We introduced a specific Coronavirus Homeworking Response Policy and a Return to the Office Policy (for essential workers). To meet the changes in work environment we also introduced an accident reporting process for work-related accidents while working at home and reviewed and updated the display screen equipment (DSE) workplace assessment policy.

COVID-19-related activities have been delivered in line with central government guidance and include the completion of risk assessments and site level checklists, resulting in guidance and protocols to monitor the impact of increased occupancy levels and mitigate the risk to essential workers. To ensure our buildings are COVID-secure, we have introduced specific COVID incident response plans, social distancing management plans and enhanced cleaning regimes and increased the availability of sanitising products. We also introduced new processes to ensure we meet the requirements of the NHS Test and Trace programme.

Information on COVID-positive tests for staff attending an office have been recorded since October 2020. In that time, we have had 45 positive COVID-19 test results, including instances advised by staff, tenants and contractors.

We have maintained compliance of our main mechanical and electrical equipment throughout the pandemic, working collaboratively with our facilities management provider, enabling us to keep all buildings open to facilitate the delivery of essential services while maintaining a COVID-secure workplace.

In December 2020 we successfully maintained our accreditation to the ISO 45001 Standard through a remote external audit delivered by our appointed auditors. The retention of this standard provides assurance of the maturity of our health and safety management system and alignment with best practice and promotes continual improvement.

We have adapted our Display Screen Equipment (DSE) assessments. These now reflect the different workspace locations and have applicable questions relating to all settings. We have improved the management information and reporting functions during the transition to a new assessment platform, providing live data on the number of completed assessments and the numbers of staff with high risks. To assist with homeworking and manage the risks relating to DSE we have delivered a new furniture contract to include the provision of furniture and equipment to enable the office workplace set up to be replicated in the home.

During the financial year 2020/21, we recorded a total of 16 accidents.

Office workplace

There were:

• 9 accidents relating to HM Land Registry staff
• 0 accidents relating to contractors
• 1 accident relating to visitors

None of the accidents needed to be reported to the Health and Safety Executive under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations.

Home workplace

There were:

• 7 accidents relating to HM Land Registry staff
• 0 accidents relating to contractors
• 0 accident relating to visitors

None of the accidents needed to be reported to the Health and Safety Executive under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations.

Complaints We recorded 5,169 complaints in 2020/21 compared with 5,678 in 2019/20, a decrease of almost 10%. This is mainly accounted for by the impact of COVID-19, which at times during the year significantly reduced customer contacts and applications.

One particularly significant factor in this was the suspension of our cancellation procedure on most registration applications with outstanding requests for information (requisitions) from May to November 2020, previously a common cause of complaints. This was one of a range of temporary measures put in place to support customers through the COVID-19 pandemic (further details are given below).

47% of recorded complaints 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 32% of the upheld total. This reflects the fact that some of our processing times for non-automated services are longer than we would like them to be.

The other main areas of upheld complaints related to the requests for information (requisitions) we ask customers when their applications lack required information (8%).

The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman investigated two HM Land Registry complaints during the year. These have not yet been reported on.

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:

• guidance on how to fast track applications and for us to be more helpful on the options open to them when we refuse requests. We have updated our guidance on how to request expedition and what to provide, and have publicised this more widely. We have also revised our standard wording used when we reject requests or require more information to help with consistency and to be clearer on what we need to reconsider the request
• more information on the progress status of registration applications pending with us, the reason for delay and our average completion times on the different types of application we process. Business e-services customers lodging applications via our HM Land Registry portal can now use the View My Applications service to check the status, progress and estimated completion date of pending applications. We also provide more detailed information published on GOV.UK about completion times
• a more digitised solution that helps them lodge applications correctly first time. Our Digital Registration Service is being made available to Business e-services customers lodging applications via our HM Land Registry portal, initially in a test phase and subject to further developments going forward. This should reduce errors and the need for us to raise requests for information (requisitions)

Due to the impact of COVID-19, we introduced a range of measures to support customers after listening to their feedback. Details of their feedback and the action taken included the following.

1. They were experiencing difficulties in verifying their identity in person before a conveyancing professional for land registration purposes. We introduced temporary changes to our evidence of identity requirements, increasing the range of professionals that can verify identity, and accepting verification by video call.
2. They wanted additional time to reply to requests for information (requisitions). The cancellation of applications with outstanding requests for information (requisitions) was paused. From November 2020 we resumed cancellations but in a gradual way, sending reminder letters and giving more time to reply to outstanding requests.
3. They were experiencing difficulties in visiting conveyancers’ offices to sign paper documents involving multiple parties which required a signature(s) in the presence of a witness. Until further notice, we accept for the purposes of registration a transfer of ownership and certain other deeds executed by virtual means, referred to as Mercury Signatures, and also by witnessed electronic signatures.

Our Independent Complaints Reviewer 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 need to improve.

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. A planned change to the commercial software provider of our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in 2021/22 gives us an opportunity to build in further enhancements to that system.

Service standards

For details of the service that customers can expect from us, see our Customer service standards.

Land Registration Rule Committee annual summary of activities

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

In April 2020, the committee provided advice and assistance to the emergency amendment of the Land Registration Rules 2003 to give additional flexibility where required during exceptional circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. When needed, the amended rules could help protect those in the homebuying process. The amendment rules came into force on 16 April 2020.

In April 2021, the committee scrutinised and advised on the proposed new fee order, which is expected to be implemented later in the year.

In view of the restrictions on movement, the committee’s business was conducted by email. There were no changes to membership during the year.

Modern slavery

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

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. We have a dedicated Welsh language team in our Swansea Office and a Welsh language telephone line for general enquiries – 0300 006 0422.

Find further information on our Welsh language services.

Policy and stakeholder coordination

The Chief Land Registrar’s Office fulfils a range of functions to uphold the reputation of HM Land Registry with government and key stakeholders. It coordinates our contribution and response to the development of government policies and our representation internationally. HM Land Registry takes an active approach to policy horizon scanning that ensures it responds appropriately to formal consultations. The office is responsible for HM Land Registry’s relationship with its sponsor department as well as corporate governance that includes the Board Secretariat. The office also supports the executive and non-executive senior teams.

The Chief Land Registrar’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. We work in accordance with our framework which was updated and published in January 2021, reflecting our status as a non-ministerial department with formal obligations to BEIS, HM Treasury and the Geospatial Commission.

During the year, HM Land Registry has provided expert advice on land registration, HM Land Registry’s strategic aims and intended outcomes to several key government and stakeholder policy initiatives. Examples include working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to align our digital identity innovations with wider policy on digital identity and the national data strategy; and contributing to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s work on leasehold and commonhold reform, and on planning reform. Other highlights have been to lead HM Land Registry’s preparations for the end of the EU transition period and preparing the Government’s response to the Law Commission’s review of the Land Registration Act, which was published on 25 March and sets out a range of next steps towards implementing a range of recommendations to meets the needs of modern conveyancing. We supported other government departments in Parliamentary Questions throughout the year and BEIS responded to five Parliamentary Questions specific to HM Land Registry with topics including the data we hold on land ownership, the services we provide and the technology we use.

The office coordinates HM Land Registry’s key stakeholder relationships to ensure 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. The Land Registry Advisory Council brings together key representative organisations involved in the conveyancing process and has met four times to share views and contribute to HM Land Registry’s policy development by sharing industry- wide perspectives.

We established the Industry Forum in April 2020 to engage directly with a cross-section of stakeholders and customers to inform HM Land Registry’s prioritisation process and to listen to customers as they were dealing with the challenges of the pandemic. This enabled us to work collaboratively in relaxing and amending processes and policies so that property transactions were still able to take place as our customers adapted to different working situations.

The forum has become one of our key engagement mechanisms and we will continue to use it to find out how we can best support customers. It has explored different solutions to improving the effectiveness of the property market by building a shared understanding and vision of what measures HM Land Registry might take to help the property market become more efficient and effective for wide benefit. It has also provided a channel for HM Land Registry to closely test ideas with a representative group of stakeholders and customers with immediate impact.

HM Land Registry maintained an important connection with the land registries of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland and the Isle of Man by having four online meetings. The office has also ensured HM Land Registry adopted an appropriate international presence to share best practice, including through participation at the annual Registers of Titles Conference in November 2020 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, with HM Land Registry presenting as part of a panel discussion in March 2021 on accelerated digitisation as an impact of COVID-19. The Chief’s Office has also co-ordinated HM Land Registry’s involvement with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office in providing advisory services to support international development commitments.

Simon Hayes
Chief Executive and Chief Land Registrar
7 July 2021

Glossary

Term	Definition
Agile	A method of project management that uses collaborative efforts to evolve solutions which achieve its goals.
Annually Managed Expenditure Resource (Resource AME)	Items of an uncontrollable or unpredictable nature. For HM Land Registry, the most significant element is the annual movement in the Indemnity Fund provision, which is utilised to underwrite the accuracy of the Land Register. The provision acts as a mechanism to indemnify the organisation against fraud and/or error.
Application	Applying for the registration of unregistered land, updating registered land or property titles, or applying for information from HM Land Registry.
Artificial intelligence (AI)	Intelligence and learning demonstrated by machines.
Blockchain	A distributed, decentralised public ledger.
Capital Departmental Expenditure Limit (Capital DEL, CDEL)	Investment in internally-generated software, IT equipment and estates.
Containerisation	A form of operating system that packages up code and all its dependencies so each individual application runs quickly and reliably from one shared computing environment.
Continuous improvement	An ongoing effort to improve products, systems, services and knowledge.
Core registration services	The registration of ownership, interests and mortgages against land and property.
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.
Digital Registration Service	A HM Land Registry portal service allowing applications to be submitted digitally where the data is automatically checked before it is lodged
Document view	View a document as a PDF and print or save it.
Expedites/expedite services	Customers can request HM Land Registry processes an application urgently.
Fintech	Fintech combines the word finance and technology and refers to businesses that use technology to enhance or automate financial services and processes.
Geospatial	Data and information that is associated with a particular location.
Guaranteed queries	Services that provide information and results which come with a state guarantee.
Industry Forum	A cross-section of customers and stakeholders within the property market conveyed by HM Land Registry, who work together to find new ways to improve the conveyancing process.
Land Charges	Interests in unregistered land that are capable of being protected by entry in the Land Charges Register.
Mercury approach	‘Electronic signatures’ whereby the deeds have been signed in pen and witnessed in person, then captured with a scanner or camera to produce a suitable digital copy.
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 home-buyers or mortgage lenders to have their purchase, lease or charge prioritised for completion over applications lodged subsequently.
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 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.
Request for information	Where HM Land Registry has to make enquiries to the applicant on an application because information or evidence is missing or incorrect and so cannot be processed.
Requisition	See ‘Request for information’.
Resource Departmental Expenditure Limit (Resource DEL, RDEL)	A net ceiling comprising day-to-day organisational running costs. This total is typically analysed into ringfenced amounts (depreciation and amortisation charges) and non-ringfenced sums.
Restriction	An entry that limits HM Land Registry from updating the register unless specified conditions are met.
Restrictive covenant	An agreement, usually contained in a deed, creating an obligation on the owner of land affected, such as limiting the uses of the land.
Robotic process automation	A form of business process automation technology.
Sustainable Procurement Flexible Framework	A self-assessment mechanism that allows organisations to measure and monitor their progress on sustainable procurement over time.
Title	The evidence of a person’s right to property.
Title plan	A plan showing the area of a registered property on a map, usually Ordnance Survey.
Tokenisation	The creation of a blockchain-based, digital representation (token) of a real-world asset such as property.
Transfer of part	The transfer of part of a registered title, such as where a house and garden are registered under one title and the owner sells part of the garden.
Trust Statement	The financial statements that provide an account of the revenue collected by HM Land Registry which is due to the HM Treasury Consolidated Fund. For HM Land Registry, this relates to revenue from fees and charges, and income from commercial activities.
View My 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.