Congratulations. I remember the public excitement that greeted the first publication of data
But the Land Registry must not stop here
I975 was a particularly bad year for conveyancing. The Land Charges Registry broke down delaying house moving and post offices ran out of Land Registry stamps causing writer's cramp from cheque signing.
The then Chief Land Registrar, Theodore Rudolf, bravely addressed the former problem with technology.
He spoke to a rampantly hostile meeting at Croydon DLR where I said that this was the wrong approach and was applauded. Having been so wrong it says a lot for the tolerant attitude of LR that I am allowed to put forward views on your website only 43 years later.
The tragedy was, however, that LR was not able to extend innovation for many years. You must now do so.
Valuable data must be used to help citizen customers.
First, comparison sites for conveyancing services have mushroomed but these depend primarily on subjective reviews. While these are important consumers also need objective information. And LR us probably the only source of this. Rejection/requisition rates for applications and statistics for registrations not protected by searches should be readily available on a firm-by-firm basis
Secondly. drafting quality should be assessed and published.
Leases can be terrible documents.
My own (drawn up less that 10 years ago) has no table of contents, index and section or clause headings. It raises suspicion that it was produced to hide information. I pointed out to my landlord that a rent demand had a date wrong. He had to ask me where the correct one appeared in the lease because he could not find this. And his signature was on the document.
At the end of the last century, the Law Society produced a booklet on clear drafting starting with a condemnation of the unnecessary use of "demised" which confused lay-people. About the same time I received a draft of the lease for a right-to-buy. This was based on a very bad precedent made worse by the council/landlord adding the offending term, according to Word, 81 times!
Artificial intelligence should be able to identify the name of the drafting firm and examples of reader unfriendliness and and produce performance tables
Keep up the good work. And extend it.