HM Land Registry
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment his Department has made of the potential savings to the public purse of reducing the annual expenditure by HM Land Registry on requisitions arising from manual or inconsistent submissions; and what the planned role is of property sector digitalisation in helping to achieve those savings.
Answered by Matthew Pennycook
For the year ending 31 March 2025, HM Land Registry (HMLR) estimated it had nearly 450,000 avoidable requisitions costing the conveyancing industry and HMLR up to £19m annually.
HMLR is supporting the conveyancing industry to improve the quality of its applications through a number of measures:
- Using technology to validate data supplied in applications pre-submission;
- Providing avoidable requisition data to conveyancers to understand the error and correct these errors prior to submission to HMLR; and
- Extensive training and engagement activities with the property sector.
HMLR has been sharing avoidable requisition data with conveyancers for the last six months and since December 2025 HM Land Registry has published avoidable requisition data on gov.uk here. This has resulted in over 29% of law firms reducing their avoidable requisition rate and 20% now have an avoidable requisition rate under 1%.
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