Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what progress he has made on the Local Land Charges Programme.

HM Land Registry’s (HMLR’s) new national Local Land Charges search service went live for customers in 2018, the programme is making good progress in digitising this critical information on land and property, transforming how it is stored, searched and delivered. Since the launch of the programme, at the time of writing HMLR has transferred 8 million charges from 137 Local Authorities to the new service, and another 133 Local Authorities’ data is currently in the process of being digitised, ready for it to be transferred. So far, the new service has delivered over 1.9 million searches, which saves the average customer over £10 per search and approximately 12 days in waiting time. As a result, customer sentiment is overwhelmingly positive, with 74% of them rating the service as good to excellent.