League table of conveyancing 'errors' to be published this year

HM Land Registry says it’s consulting with the legal industry on a proposal to publish a league table of conveyancers who submit documents that require correction or further work - and which thus could hold up transactions.

Over the holiday season Andrew Robertson - head of customer policy at the registry - posted on the organisation’s website that it wants to be more transparent and publish conveyancing data “to provide citizens with the real picture on how well their conveyancer is performing, and to enable those same conveyancers to track their relative performance.”

The Law Society Gazette has already referred to this strategy as paving the way for a ‘Compare The Conveyancer’ culture. 

Now HM Land Registry says it wants to publish, later in 2018, a list of the 500 conveyancing firms that submit the most documents - likely to indicate those handling the largest volume of transactions.

With this, the registry says it will also publish “how many requisitions we have had to send back in reply, in order to process these applications.”

Robertson writes that every day the registry currently sends 5,000 requisitions  - and he describes a requisition as “a request for further information or action that we have had to send conveyancers before their applications can be completed.”

He admits that HM Land Registry, too, needs to improve its performance on consistency but he says that a goal of the organisation is to “make conveyancing simpler, faster and cheaper for everyone”. 

But he says that the 5,000 requisitions every single working day is “holding us back.”

You can see the whole article on the registry site here.

Last month Estate Agent Today reported on other proposals being outlined by HM Land Registry to make conveyancing faster and simpler.