The Land Registry has told The Negotiator that it still expects to migrate all of the Local Land Charge (LLC) data of the UK’s 300+ local authorities to its centralised national online service by 2025.
This is despite just a handful of local authorities having completed the task so far, which requires tens of thousands of existing paper records to be digitised by each council.
The programme is a key plank in Land Registry attempts to speed up the conveyancing progress, which is often slowed significantly while solicitors wait for LLC data to be searched by a local authority.
There are 12 different parts of the LLC Register covering a wide range of areas such as financial charges, planning, miscellaneous, aviation, listed buildings and light obstructions notices, but the initiative excludes CON29 enquiries.
Ambitious target
The aim of the Land Registry to get so many local authorities’ records digitised in just three years is ambitious to say the least – so far just 17 have transferred are about to transfer their records since July 2018. This includes the latest, Stockon-on-Tees.
“To meet our ambition to migrate all local authority LLC data in England and Wales to the national register by 2025, we have adopted a regional migration approach,” a spokesperson says told the Negotiator.
“By working closely with local authorities and stakeholders we expect the pace of migrations to increase.
“As external factors can affect local authority engagement and LLC rollout, we are not able to put a definite figure of the number of local authorities that will migrate each year. But we do expect migration numbers to steadily increase over the next few years.”
The service costs £15 per search and will be instant.
But what this doesn’t say is that an LLC1 is only part of a search – less than half in fact so Search providers will still need to gather con29 information which are the main cause of delays. Also regulated search providers can obtain this data FOC and no mention of the cost of the govt funded project ?