Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, whether he has plans to reduce application processing times at the Land Registry.

HM Land Registry's (HMLR's) top priority is improving application processing times and I refer my Right Honourable friend to paragraph three of the answer I gave to Question UIN 187953 on 14 June 2023 for further information.

HMLR publishes information on GOV.UK about its latest processing times here. Applications to transfer a property fall within the category of 'changes to existing registered titles', sometimes known as register update services. The table below shows the average time taken to process changes to existing titles for the stated time periods:

(Includes data for all manual register updates. Data for July 2023 is not yet available.)

The time taken to process an application to change an existing title should not impact a property sale because it usually takes place after a transaction has completed. However, if any application becomes urgent, customers can ask for it to be fast tracked for no extra cost. 95% of these applications are completed within 10 days.