Land Registry customer satisfaction falls again

HM Land Registry says it will improve service speed after a regular survey carried out by Ipsos Mori showed that levels of customer satisfaction have fallen for the second year running.

A quarterly survey is conducted by Ipsos Mori tracking the percentage of customers rating the registry’s overall service as 8 to 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. The findings, which appear in HM Land Registry’s latest annual report, show that in 2022-23, 60% of customers rated its services as good to excellent, compared with 63% in 2021-22.

Data for this particular key performance indicator was not collected prior to 2019-2020, when customer satisfaction was recorded as being 67%. Satisfaction climbed to 70% in 2020-21, before dropping to 63% in 2021-22.

Customer trust in the integrity and accuracy of the registers also fell for a second year running. In 2019-20, 78% of customers rated Land Registry’s ability to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the register between 8 and 10. Trust climbed to 80% in 2020-21, falling to 77% in 2021-22 and 72% in 2022-23.

Risk to the integrity of the register has climbed slightly, from a risk profile of 1 in 2021-22, when this particular performance indicator was introduced, to 1.2 in 2022-23. The report says the metric is an early warning indicator that provides a view of the frequency of errors and their potential impact – it does not assess the overall integrity of the register of title. Land Registry said it would aim to reduce the level of risk this year by ‘focusing on targeted improvement activities as we process our oldest and most complex applications’.

In better news, monitoring the percentage of applications completed against those received, Land Registry output 99.5% of applications in 2022-23, up from 97.88% in 2021-22.

The time that applications to update or create new register entries spend being processed, excluding time waiting for a customer response and other third party action, more than halved – 16 median working days in 2022-23 compared to 38 in 2021-22.

However, it is taking longer for all known changes lodged by a conveyancer to be reflected in the register – 350 days in 2022-23, up from 206 in 2021-22. The report says the figures include the time an application spends with Land Registry, time the application is with a customer or third party to provide more information, and any time it may take for an application to go through a tribunal.

Kindly shared by The Law Society Gazette

Main article photo courtesy of Pixabay