Company will support the agency in developing a digital register to replace those run by England's local authorities
The Land Registry has intensified its work on developing a unified digital Local Land Charges (LLC) Register, with a deal of up to £11 million for PA Consulting to provide support for the project up to 2023.
It said the company will help to deliver and populate the register, which is being created to host LLC data – which provides prospective purchasers with information about a property – from England’s 326 local authorities.
"PA Consulting will provide additional programme delivery capability, capacity and insight that Land Registry does not already have," a spokesperson told UKAuthority. "They will be fully integrated into the established Land Registry programme team delivering against nine requirements."
This follows the conclusion in July of a consultation on changes in the Local Land Charges Rules that are needed to make the transition possible. The project follows the passing of the Infrastructure Act 2015, which is consolidating the 20 million LLC records in council registers into a single source.
The migration process is scheduled to begin towards the end of 2017-18 and continue until 2023.
Standardisation and search
In a blogpost on the project, the lead architect Ian Edmunds said the new register should make data on the charges available in a standardised format, and include a search function that will provide a near instant response.
“This will be a purely digital service built in line with government digital standards and deployed in the cloud with an aim of completely eliminating any paper processing,” he said.
The data migration will take place in stages, and local authorities will become responsible for keeping the register updated.
The contract with PA Consulting is one of the steps, along with the recruitment of more people in-house, that was scheduled to follow the presentation of an alpha version of the register to the Infrastructure and Projects Authority and Government Digital Service this month.
In a separate project, Land Registry has made changes to its portal enabling business customers to receive email notifications on when their application results are available for download.
For the past few years they have been able to receive notifications through an RSS feed, but have told the agency that they would prefer email notifications.
It said that recent changes to its infrastructure have made this possible.
Image from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0
