His Majesty's Land Registry is a non-ministerial department of His Majesty's Government, created in 1862 to register the ownership of land and property in England and Wales. It reports to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). The land register contains information on 87% (by area) of the freehold land in England and Wales as of 2019.
While HM Land Registry reports to MHCLG, it is operationally independent. The fees it charges for the registration and information services it provides are returned to HM Treasury. The current chief land registrar and chief executive is Iain Banfield.
The equivalent office in Scotland is the Registers of Scotland. Land and Property Services maintain records for Northern Ireland.
Purpose
HM Land Registry registers the ownership of property, as well as noting other interests in registered land, in England and Wales, with this property valued at £9 trillion. The organisation receives 17,000 requests a day to change information on the register, maintains 13 datasets and manages 215,000 requests daily, about the information on the register.
Like land registration organisations in other countries, HM Land Registry guarantees title to registered estates and interests in land. It records the ownership rights of freehold properties, and leasehold properties where the lease has been granted for a term exceeding seven years.
Until April 2020, HM Land Registry operated as an executive agency of the UK Government and, as a trading fund, received no direct government funding, instead ensuring that its fee income covered all expenditure. In April 2020, HM Land Registry's trading fund status was revoked - since then it has received a budget from HM Treasury, like most other government departments. The funding that the Land Registry receives is offset by the fees charged under the Land Registration Fee Order 2021. It provides online access to its database of titles (ownership and charges or interests by other parties) and most plans (maps). Customers need to pay a fee to access some information.
Property owners whose property is not registered can make voluntary applications for registration. As of March 2024, there were more than 26.7 million registered titles representing 89% of the freehold land mass of England and Wales. Registration of land under the Land Registration Act 2002 affords property owners some protection against squatters.
Advantages of land registration
Advantages of land registration include it making buying and selling property easier and it facilitating people being able to provide proof of ownership. According to the Deputy Director for Comprehensive Registration at HM Land Registry:
When land is registered, a title plan is created to show the general extent of the land that is contained in the title on the Ordnance Survey map. The boundaries shown on a title plan are general and not definitive unless they are expressly noted in the register.
Offices HM Land Registry has 14 offices at: Birkenhead, Coventry, Croydon, Durham, Fylde (Warton), Gloucester, Kingston upon Hull, Leicester, Nottingham, Peterborough, Plymouth, Swansea, Telford and Weymouth. HM Land Registry's head office is located in Croydon. IT services are provided by the Plymouth office.
A review of staffing levels and office space began in 2009. The economic recession and reduced property sales meant that HM Land Registry's work was reduced to an extent where it made a financial loss. HM Land Registry announced proposals to close offices at Portsmouth, Tunbridge Wells, Croydon, Stevenage and Peterborough.Land Registry's Accelerated Transformation Programme – Consultation on office closures. Consultation Document, v1-0 22 October 2009. As a result of the consultation the Croydon and Peterborough offices remained open, but the closure of the other offices went ahead, albeit with a small office remaining at Portsmouth until 2013 as a sub-office of the Croydon office.Accelerated Transformation Programme Decisions Report 17 March 2010
The head office moved out of its Lincoln's Inn Fields building in March 2011. The building was purchased by the London School of Economics for a sum of £37.5 million.Press Notice dated 8 October 2010. Retrieved 10 October 2011.
Structure Traditionally, customers sent applications to the office that dealt with applications for the geographical area where the property was located, but the majority of applications are now typically processed at any Land Registry office, regardless of geographical location. From 6 January 2014, all paper applications lodged by members of the public have been processed at the Citizen Centre at Land Registry's Swansea Office.
The organisation is led by the Chief Land Registrar and Chief Executive (both one role). The Chief Land Registrar is assisted by the HM Land Registry Board. The HM Land Registry Board sets the overall strategy for the department. A number of senior committees are responsible for delivery of the annual business plan and are responsible for day-to-day management.
Since December 1990, the Land Register has been open to the public. For a fee, anyone can inspect the register, find out the name and address of the current owner of any registered property or obtain a copy of any registered title. This can also be done online.Land Registry Find a Property webpage. landregistry.gov.uk.
HM Land Registry was awarded the former Charter Mark five times, and 97% of its customers rate their service as good, very good or excellent.Press Release – Customer Satisfaction Success for Land Registry. landregistry.gov.uk. Complaints about HM Land Registry can be submitted to the Independent Complaints Reviewer.
Tribunal Disputed applications were determined by the Adjudicator to HM Land Registry, an independent office created by the Land Registration Act 2002. From July 2013, the functions of the Adjudicator have been transferred to the Land Registration division of the Property Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal.
History
In 1857 the Royal Commission on Registration of Title proposed a system of registration administered by a central registry in London with district offices. The Land Registry Act 1862 was introduced by the then Lord Chancellor, Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury. The Act provided for the registration of freehold and long leasehold estates in land. The system of registration adopted differed somewhat from that piloted in South Australia by that colony's then Premier Sir Robert Torrens, although both were founded on the 1857 report.
Brent Spencer Follett, the first Chief Land Registrar, opened the Land Registry's first offices, at 34 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, on 15 October 1862. Mr Follett had a staff of just six people and was paid £2,500 a year, at a time when the average labourer's wage was £40.British Labour Statistics: Historical Abstracts, 1886–1968, quoted in Essex University research. Retrieved 10 October 2011.
At first, registration was not compulsory, and once property was registered there was no compulsion to register any subsequent transactions. Thus it was possible for the person registered as the owner of a property to cease to be the owner while remaining on the register. Serious flaws in the 1862 Act led to the Land Transfer Act 1875, which forms the basis of the system used today. However, that Act did not make registration compulsory.
A report by Sir Charles Brickdale on the system of land registration used in Germany proved influential. In 1897 the then Lord Chancellor, Hardinge Giffard, 1st Earl of Halsbury, introduced the Land Transfer Act 1897, which brought an element of compulsion into the registration system, however it was still possible for local counties to veto compulsory registration, so registration was still limited, although it was adopted in London.
From 1905 to 1913 new HM Land Registry headquarters were built in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Significant pieces of land legislation were enacted in 1925: the Law of Property Act and the Land Registration Act (LRA 1925). Government-initiated extensions to compulsory registration were suspended for ten years, but Eastbourne (1926) and Hastings (1929) voluntarily became areas of compulsory registration. After the ten years were up, compulsory registration was extended to Middlesex (1937) and the County Borough of Croydon (1939). Plans to extend it to Surrey in 1940 were abandoned due to the Second World War. In 1925 the government had forecast that the whole of England and Wales would be subject to compulsory registration by 1955, but the process took much longer.
In 1940, after damage sustained in the 193rd air raid on Central London, HM Land Registry was evacuated to the Marsham Court Hotel in Bournemouth so that it could carry on its normal business.
Post-war and beyond In 1950, 88 years after its creation, HM Land Registry registered its one millionth title.
The growth in property ownership after the war years meant that the potential number of properties to be registered increased dramatically. This, in turn, slowed down the rate of land registration. To deal with the increasing workload, an office was opened in Tunbridge Wells in 1955 and a further office at Lytham St. Annes in 1957. In 1963, 101 years after the registry started, it registered its two millionth title.
Theodore Ruoff, who was appointed Chief Land Registrar in 1963, confirmed the three fundamental principles of Land Registration that had been laid down in the LRA 1925:
The mirror principle — the register of title should reflect, accurately and completely, and beyond all argument, the facts that are material to the title. The curtain principle — the register should be the sole and definitive source of information for proposing purchasers, but should not reveal sensitive information. The insurance principle — if, as a result of human error, the title is proved to be defective in any way, then the person or persons suffering loss as a result must be able to claim compensation.
New offices were opened in Gloucester and Stevenage (1964), Durham and Harrow (1965), Plymouth (1966), Croydon and Swansea (1967), Birkenhead and Weymouth (1977), Peterborough (1978), Telford (1986), Coventry and Hull (1987), Leicester (1988), Portsmouth (1989), York (1991) and Lancashire (2000).
Land registers at this time were not public records, and processing them required laborious typing and the completion of plans by hand using paintbrushes and ink on linen. Copies of everything produced had to be made by hand. HM Land Registry retained the originals, and the copies were sewn, using needle and thread, into large certificates. The certificates were produced as indisputable evidence of the ownership of the land. Such was the importance of the certificates that tampering with them was a criminal offence.
In 1986 the Plymouth Office became the first HM Land Registry office to produce registers electronically. Computerisation dramatically increased the efficiency of the Land Register at a time when HM Land Registry was keen to bring the whole of England and Wales under compulsory registration.
In 1990 compulsory registration was extended to the whole of England and Wales, the ten millionth title was registered, and for the first time, the Land Register was opened to public inspection.
Although compulsory registration had now spread to the whole of its jurisdiction, it only became compulsory when a property was sold. This was a barrier to the registration of the whole of England and Wales, and in 1998 new triggers for registration were introduced, dramatically increasing the rate of registration of land. These triggers included gifts of land, assent of land on death and raising monies by mortgages on the land.