Second council transfers land charges data to national land register

Liverpool City Council has become the second local authority to transfer its local land charges data to the new national register as part of a national project to centralise all local authority land charge data by 2025.

The council’s transfer follows the move of data from Warwick District Council in July 2018 and will be followed by 10 more local authorities by the end of the year.

The project to standardise and transfer responsibility for all 326 registers in England was instituted by the Infrastructure Act 2015 and is expected to take seven years to complete.

When the transfer of data from an individual local authority to HM Land Registry is completed, local authorities will still be required to apply, vary and cancel charges in the new register. They will also need to provide source documents on request and respond to additional enquiries from customers following HM Land Registry’s issue of a search result.

The common obligations protected as local land charges include:
•    planning permissions (these form the majority of charges)
•    listed buildings
•    conservation areas
•    tree preservation orders
•    improvement and renovation grants
•    smoke control zone conditions
•    light obstruction notice conditions

The project is intended to make the home-buying process simpler, faster and cheaper and streamline the conveyancing process. There are a number of tasks that local authorities must complete before their data can be migrated to the Land Registry. A guide to these tasks can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-land-charges-local-authority-pre-digitisation-and-migration-guide

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