Database: South Tyneside Council becomes one of the first local authorities to undertake voluntary registration of land


The government has confirmed its intention to develop a set of property information standards accepted across the industry to boost e-conveyancing.


In a recent letter to Roger de Boehmler, director-general of PISCES (the Property Information Systems Common Exchange Standard), the director of e-conveyancing at the Land Registry said he wanted to foster a strong continuing relationship between the two to serve the public interest.


Ian Goodall wrote: 'We will use the strengths, knowledge and experience of the Land Registry to work alongside PISCES to assist in the development of a set of standards for electronic conveyancing that are common to both the public and private sectors.'


The PISCES standard is a set of definitions and rules to facilitate automatic data transfer between software packages used regularly by the real estate market. It is not itself a piece of software but allows software providers to prepare solutions within their own packages for transfer of data to and from their databases.


Mr de Boehmler described the letter as 'an important step towards the goal of achieving a universally accepted standard'.


PISCES is a not-for-profit company that administers the standard and numbers many leading law firms, as well as IT, lending and property companies, among its members.


Meanwhile, Richard Barnett, senior partner of Southport-based conveyancing firm Barnetts, was this month appointed to the board of PISCES. In recent months, he has chaired the organisation's lenders' conveyancing working group.


Elsewhere in the world of e-conveyancing, the Land Registry and South Tyneside Council will shortly finalise a pioneering collaborative project to complete the registration of all the council's property and land holdings, one of the first local authorities to undertake voluntary registration of land.


Since the project began almost a year ago, 5,500 property deeds have been examined, computerised and 1,100 property titles added to the Land Registry's database. Working together is said to have hastened the process.


The project is part of the modernisation of the council's asset management process. It has moved away from its paper-based system of land records and digitised its property database. This has enabled integration with the corporate geographic information system, and staff across the authority are now able to access land ownership records and rely on the accuracy of the system.


Councillor Steve Forster, South Tyneside Council's lead member for resources, said several other authorities have shown an interest in following their example.


It is expected that the South Tyneside project will be completed by next month. By that time, more than 2,218 hectares of land and 2,000 titles will have been registered.


Links: www.pisces.co.uk