HM Land Registry has been safeguarding land and property ownership for more than 150 years.
That’s your house, your grandma’s house and your great-great-grandma’s house.
Our Annual Report and Accounts for 2016/17 reflects our commitment to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data.
We’re aiming to achieve the comprehensive registration of land in England and Wales. The initial focus will be on prioritising public sector land in order to provide an early indication of the scale of potential sites for house building and associated infrastructure needs.
Alongside the improved registration of land, the transformation will also involve working with the private sector to research and test new digital registers, potentially exploring blockchain, a plan we are calling ‘Digital Street’. By becoming a more digitally data-driven organisation, we’re looking to meet the changing needs of our customers, to make conveyancing simpler, faster and cheaper.
Responding to a Government commitment to drive innovation in the digital economy, we will open up more of our datasets externally and across government to support infrastructure development, financial security, tax collection, law enforcement and national security.
That’s something we can all be proud about.
Our digital transformation is an ambitious plan but we think the numbers from our Annual Report and Accounts show that our hardworking staff are up to the task.
We hope you agree.
So, what have we achieved?
Building on our work since 1862, we now have 12,745,582 hectares of land registered
That is 24.8m titles.
And 84.3% coverage across England and Wales.
Last year, our work brought in £311.4m
We paid £18.9m to the Treasury
Making more money for the Government to spend on public services and future infrastructure.
There were 31.8m applications for our services
More than 90% of customers rated our services positively
With over 1m searches via our MapSearch service this year, we have hit 10m overall
None of this would have been possible without our most important number we want to share with you:
4,862
This is the number of people employed by HM Land Registry. All of them have contributed to our success over the past year and this was reflected upon by our Chief Executive Graham Farrant:
“To our people, thank you. You have achieved a tremendous amount against a very challenging backdrop.”
Along with helping HM Land Registry achieve its targets, our staff have also raised £72,500 for charity and their attitude towards each other has been reflected by Stonewall who have placed HM Land Registry at number 70 in their Top 100 Employers list.
