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It has always been the case that a sale of a government organisation is for quick money instead of the long term. It is amusing that the same government that doesn't bawk at increasing court fees by thousands of pounds doesn't consider increasing land registry fees at all. This is probably because the court fees were increased in order to enable the courts to 'pay for themselves'. As the LR does not run at a loss, a similar justification will not work.

In 2015 a conservative estimate of around 4.7 million applications were processed by the land registry. (https://data.gov.uk/dataset/monthly-land-registry-property-transaction-data) In order to make £1Billion over 22.6 years a fee increase of £4 on all applications would be required. A £5 increase would net the same in around 13 years.

If the LR is sold and is run by a private organisation, in addition to a lot of ancillary issues this would cause, increased profits would be required to justify the investment. I have no doubt they will not shy away from increasing fees. Probably justified by the fact that they have to keep funds saved or pay insurance premiums to indemnity people against their own mistakes which will probably rise due to profit driven cuts across the organisation.

Maybe this consultation is all a political ploy so that people like me rejoice when the government increases LR fees instead of selling it for pennies on the pound. Who knows, one can only hope.

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