The Land Registry has chosen Kainos to build it a single digital register for disparate local authority registers of restrictions on land or property across England.
Local land charges are restrictions on the use of land or property, such as when trees must be protected – Photo credit: Flickr, Julie Ann Johnson, CC BY 2.0
The LLC digital register will hold more than 26 million local land charges records, such as on tree prevention orders and listed building status, with the aim of making them more easily accessible and searchable.
The records are currently held in a variety of physical, electronic and digital formats by the 326 local authorities in England, but this will see the Land Registry hold all the information centrally.
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Kainos will build the central register alongside the Land Registry’s in-house development team, and the company’s divisional director Russell Sloan said that the move to digitise the register would “go a long way towards improving the ease of conducting property transactions in England”.
He said: “It is a true testament to the power of digital technology and will be an example to other public sector bodies. We very much look forward to kicking off the project and collaborating with Land Registry to develop a new way of working.”
The news comes after the government confirmed in the Autumn Statement that its proposal to privatise the Land Registry, which holds records on land and property ownership and transactions across England and Wales, had been scrapped.
“Following consultation the government has decided that HM Land Registry should focus on becoming a more digital data-driven registration business, and to do this will remain in the public sector,” the statement said. “Modernisation will maximise the value of HM Land Registry to the economy.”
In a blogpost earlier this week, the Land Registry’s IT director Steve Phillips set out some of the work the registry is doing on its common technology platform for its services, which aims to make it easier for customers and government partners to access the data held by the registry.
Phillips said that the platform had also allowed the Land Registry to increase the speed of delivery of applications, saying that multiple applications were deployed on a daily basis.
“By using this platform the developers have been able to deliver quickly more than 67 micro-digital service applications on more than 150 managed servers built and maintained using infrastructure as code,” he said. “So far 9,819 servers have been provisioned and destroyed to carry out automated infrastructure testing which would not have been possible on traditional platforms.”
