Performance, progress towards strategic objectives and future strategy

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE 4: To promote and introduce progressively, new, electronic transactions in land and property from 2005 (e-conveyancing)

Our E-conveyancing Task Force is developing an electronic system to help with the buying, selling and registration of land and property in England and Wales. It will provide open access to chain information and will also allow chain transactions and payments to occur simultaneously, with automatic registration on completion. This will help reduce the delay and anxiety often experienced in the house-buying process.

Land Registry’s Minister at the time, David Lammy MP, approved our submission on the way forward for electronic conveyancing on 20 April 2004. We will now build and control a central e-conveyancing infrastructure and a service delivery channel. We are currently securing the services of an IT prime contractor to assist us in this.

We met potential customers during November 2004 to help us identify which of the proposed services would be most attractive and would hold the most value for them. This has provided a vital steer as to what would achieve early and sustained take-up, and also what the design, priority, build and implementation should be. We are now in the process of updating our plans and the programme business case accordingly.

The Land Registration Act 2002 was the key enabling piece of legislation for e-conveyancing. A secondary legislation project has been initiated to deal with the detailed aspects that were envisaged by the Act and are required for e-conveyancing to proceed. Formal consultation projects will inform the process. Rule 14 Notices were published in time to enable the e-lodgement pilot (for forms and deeds). A working party, including a representative from the Department for Constitutional Affairs, has been set up to provide scoping for the rules required for e-signatures and e-dispositions.

The e-discharges pilot project was successfully completed, and a full roll-out of the service began in September 2004. This enables lenders to update our records electronically once property owners have paid off their mortgage.

The first and second phases of the e-lodgement (forms and deeds) pilot project went live on 14 February 2005 and 21 March 2005, as planned.

We anticipate that an Electronic Funds Transfer Service will be provided by an ‘Agent Bank’ to be appointed following a negotiated procurement exercise. A discussion document was issued to stakeholders in early 2004. In response to concerns raised by the Office of Fair Trading about a single agent bank, we obtained advice from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Bank of England, HM Treasury and Leading Counsel. All are broadly supportive of our proposals.

We have started a document authentication project to provide a solution for e-signatures. The necessary hardware and software have now been purchased to begin the e-signatures prototyping, which is expected to take six months.

The chain matrix will be a key component of the new e-conveyancing service. Thirteen forums were held in February 2005 to establish stakeholders’ needs and aspirations. We are collating the results in order to prepare the detailed definition of the initial phases of the chain matrix service.