With effect from 9 December 2024, fees for certain services such as obtaining title documents and submitting priority searches will more than double, to reflect HM Land Registry's increased operational costs but also to enable greater investment in digitisation and automation.
Broadly speaking, the cost of obtaining title registers, title plans, other title documents and submitting priority searches will each increase from £3 to £7, whilst the cost of searches of the Index Map and searches of the index of proprietor names will also increase by £4. There will also be increases to fees for Land Charges searches and registration of Agricultural Credits, but the fees for substantive registration services (which were last raised in January 2022) remain unchanged.
Whilst increases in fees payable on property transactions are rarely welcome, it is worth noting that the prices of the affected information services have not changed for over a decade, and that even after the increase takes effect, they will still be lower than they were in 1992 for the majority of customers.
Moreover, the increased revenue generated by the higher fees is said to form part of plans to increase digitalisation and transformation of data. In this regard, HM Land Registry's latest annual report confirmed that the processing of 89% of the requests for official copies, official searches and searches of the Index Map had already been automated, with the results being made available instantly. Some simple types of registration applications involving mortgages are now also being automated.
It is hoped that further investment in digitisation should go some way towards reducing the backlog of applications – some of which can still take up to 20 months – by freeing up time for case workers to focus on the more complex transactions which require expertise to process.
For pending applications that are stuck in the queue, HM Land Registry does allow some of them to be expedited, for example where the delay is causing financial hardship or is jeopardising prospective transactions. Their annual report indicated that even though requests for expediting applications have increased by 450% compared to early 2020, 94% of such expedition requests resulted in the application being completed within 10 working days.
A full public consultation on a more substantial change to the structure of HM Land Registry fees is also expected to be published in the coming weeks, which may lead to further growth in financial capacity in order to drive improvements to customer service and accessibility of title data.
In the meantime, those in the property market who are embarking on large scale portfolio projects in the near future may wish to consider commissioning the title gathering or due diligence stage ahead of 9 December to avoid the fee increase.
