“Avoidable errors” costing conveyancers £19m, says Land Registry

Avoidable errors in property applications are costing conveyancers and practitioners up to £19m, HM Land Registry has said.

This revelation is to justify its repeated pleas to the sector to help drive down the number of requests (requisitions) it has to send out for further information.

In its latest blog, Land Registry’s head of directorate planning, Ilia Bowles, stressed that practitioner errors were not solely to blame for longer processing times, ‘but they are a significant contributing factor’.

Land Registry analysed how many requisitions were sent out over the last 12 months in relation to 10 groups of “mainly administrative errors and omissions”, referred to as “avoidable”.

Variations in names was the reason for 114,000 requisitions, closely followed by missing information, which prompted 110,00 requisitions. Errors in plans and descriptions, identity, missing evidence, ownership type, dates and amounts, witness details, death of a proprietor and deed in parts also prompted thousands of requisitions.

Bowles said:

“Our economists examined how much it costs conveyancers to rectify a mistake in a simple application to update the register, such as a straightforward transfer or remortgage.

“Based on average pay levels in the sector, they calculated a sum of between £5 for each ‘avoidable’ clerical error and £30 for issues that involve chasing third parties for a document or consent, for example.

“Multiplied across all firms, these ‘minor mistakes’ become hugely expensive, costing the industry anything between £3.2m and £19.1m every year.”

Requisitions add on average 15 working days to the time it takes for the transaction to be registered, Bowles added.

Bowles acknowledged that Land Registry is not blameless, after practitioners complained of caseworkers being inconsistent with requisitions. Bowles said the organisation is exploring ways to make data more accessible so that practitioners can understand their own requisition rates and make improvements.

In other news, property lawyers should soon find out how Land Registry wants to simplify its “unnecessarily complex” fee structure – and whether that includes charging practitioners who supply complete and accurate data lower fees than those who do not.

The registry issued a call for evidence on future fees and charging in March. An announcement on 10 September about information services fees – which will increase for the first time in more than a decade – stated that Land Registry’s response would be published “in the coming weeks”.

Kindly shared by The Law Society Gazette