Top 500 conveyancers could be ranked according to their track record of completing TP1s and other Land Registry forms correctly under new proposals to open up data on land and property transactions. The proposals, published on HM Land Registry’s website today, flesh out the agency’s announcement last month that it wants to publish data to show the public how well their conveyancer is performing as well as enabling conveyancers to track their relative performance.  

In a blog post, Andrew Robertson, head of customer policy, reveals that the registry will concentrate on the 500 entities responsible for the highest volume of applications. The agency is planning to publish: 

  • a downloadable file in comma-separated value format naming the top 500 conveyancers along with the percentage of the applications sent needing further work before processing; and
  • a chart tracking the above data for the top 50 customers by volume of applications.

’We are currently working with the legal and conveyancing sectors to understand their views about our proposal to publish this data in 2018,’ Robertson says. 

In the meantime Land Registry has started sending a monthly workbook to the 500 highest volume conveyancers, he reveals. ’These are the customers who we plan to list in our conveyancing data and so it was important for us to keep them up to date about their applications and how we could work together to improve these applications to make sure they are processed simply and without delay.’

Part of the aim is to cut down the need for ‘free format’ requisitions, currently needed in about 25% of cases. ’This is not just about conveyancers improving the quality of their applications; we need to improve too, and by working together to do better across the board we can help make conveyancing simpler, faster and cheaper for all of us,’ Robertson states.