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Good afternoon. I’m Andrew Robertson, Head of Customer Policy & Service Performance at HM Land Registry. As one of those involved in the development of HM Land Registry’s customer charter, it’s been very interesting to read all your comments about it. I thought it’d be useful to clarify our perspective of a few of the points raised.

First, let me assure you that guaranteeing and protecting property rights is our mission – and that the quality, and integrity of registrations is the very core of our purpose. We take this very seriously, as demonstrated through our target-exceeding performance against our application quality KPI this year.

While meeting our mission, we are also striving to meet our ambition to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data. Our Business Strategy sets out how we will meet our customers’ needs through knowing our customers better, being more efficient and effective in what we do, creating faster, simpler digital services and empowering our people. Our customer charter builds on this by explaining how we will achieve this together with our customers through the shared responsibilities that we have for our respective parts of the conveyancing and registration process. That’s why the charter concludes by saying that together we can make conveyancing simpler, faster and cheaper.

On the issue of making conveyancing cheaper, this is not about reducing the fees that conveyancers charge for their services. What we’re saying is that by working together to better meet our collective needs we can create efficiencies and savings in conveyancing and registration for all concerned.

For example, we know you need us to get things right first time and that doing so will make the whole registration process cost less and make it faster. But we also need the same from conveyancers. Amongst other things, that means lodging better quality applications. Every time you receive a requisition it costs you or your firm the time to respond to it. And there’s also the cost to us. In 2017/18 we needed to raise over 4,000 requisitions every day, costing us between £2 and £3 million in staff time and resource. Much of this cost to both of us is avoidable.

Our commitment to you includes improving our consistency, particularly on how we raise requisitions. This summer, 98% of our caseworkers undertook training to improve that. This in turn is improving our data, giving us a much clearer picture of the reasons for errors in applications and showing us where we can improve our processes and guidance.

We are working hard to reduce processing times for more complex applications, whilst we maintain our performance of completing more straightforward work within a few days. 43% of the more complex applications (first registrations, new leases and transfers of part) are now being completed within 25 days. The average time taken to process these is now 49 working days. We accept that is still too long, but it is a significant improvement on the position earlier in the year. And, as I said, we are working hard to reduce processing times further.

We want to continue this conversation though our future blog posts where and we’ll be sharing more about our progress with serving you quickly, accurately and consistently.