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Peterborough Council joins LLC Register in largest migration

04/02/20

HM Land Registry has reported the largest migration so far of paper records to its Local Land Charges (LLC) Register with the Peterborough City Council joining the service.

It has also acknowledged the slow progress in signing up local authorities since the launch of the service in July 2018 and said it is aiming to speed up the process of bringing them onboard.

Peterborough has become the eighth council to join the LLC Register, which Land Registry designed as a central digital resource for land and property searches in place of those managed by local authorities.

The register will provide access to over 30,000 local land charges within the authority’s boundaries.

Karina Singh, director of transformation at Land Registry, said: “Migrating Peterborough to our national LLC Register is a significant milestone for us as it’s the largest number of paper records that we’ve digitised so far. This will make life easier for property buyers across the area, providing round the clock online access to the information they need.”

While the agency is celebrating the size of the migration, it has acknowledged that progress in signing up councils has been slower than originally hoped. When Warwickshire became the first council to use the register in 2018 Land Registry forecast that it would be joined by 26 other councils over the next few months.

Data quality barriers

In response to a question about the progress, it issued a statement saying there had been problems with the quality of data to be migrated, but that it is working on making the process quicker.

“To date over 48,000 spatially enabled local land charges search results across eight local authorities have been delivered instantly via our new central online register, something that would have been impossible only a couple of years ago,” it said. “But we realise that improving and migrating millions of local land charges from local authorities into one digital register is a huge project.

“Having created a viable service that customers really want, we are now focused on helping local authorities ensure their data is of the highest quality – so far around 50% of the data we have migrated has had to be improved before migration to meet the high standards required for the new register.

“By using new tools to help speed up the data analysis we hope to be able to accelerate the migration of local authorities’ data over the next few years.”

Image from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0

Amended on 4 February morning; eight councils not nine using the service

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