Bad database decisions 30 years ago mean a register that disadvantages consumers … but suits freeholders’ interests just fine
Joshua Reynolds MP has expressed concerns and the Housing Select Committee was unimpressed by Land Registry failings
Competent Land Registry databases would hugely benefit leaseholders and cut the guesswork from policy
By Paul Harrison
Paul Harrison is a Chartered Engineer (Telecommunications) with a long career at BT and O2, where he gained extensive experience in large-scale data cleansing and analysis. In one major project, he extracted, cleansed, and reconciled data from dozens of disparate IT & Network systems to build an accurate map of tens of thousands of network endpoints — the same kind of large-scale data reconciliation he later applied to HMLR’s leasehold dataset.
Between July 2024 and October 2025 he applied his accumulated expertise to HM Land Registry’s Registered Leases dataset — approximately 7.8 million records — using professional database tools to expose deep structural flaws in how the data is held.
He has worked closely with Joshua Reynolds MP, Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Leasehold and Commonhold Reform, drafting the parliamentary questions that exposed the gap between what ministers tell Parliament and what the data can actually support.
He and his wife are themselves leaseholders facing a lease extension bill of £80,000–£100,000, having never been warned about lease depreciation when they purchased their flat in 2005.
To drive forward leasehold reform quality information is needed, much of it from the Land Registry, and it is simply not good enough.
Here are some questions which should have immediate answers at this stage in reform:
- How many leasehold households are there, and where are they?
- What proportion have short leases (less than 80 years remaining – when values drop, extension premiums soar and properties become unmortgageable) ?
- How many lease extensions are completed each year, and what is the average cost?
- What is the average size of a freehold portfolio, and how much income does it generate?
- How much does each month of delay to reforms cost leaseholders?
From a more local viewpoint, the questions are just as important:
- How do my lease terms compare with others in my building or street?
- How is my property value affected by lease length
- Are my service charges better or worse than similar blocks nearby?
- When are the trigger points for me to take action on my lease?
All leasehold records for England and Wales are managed by His Majesty’s Land Registry (HMLR), which began to digitise its data 30 years ago and create an online system. The paper records still exist alongside it.
Unfortunately, some very poor decisions were made about how to do this.
Data System Design 101
In the 1990s, spreadsheets and database systems were already commonplace and the principles of good database design had been established for more than two decades by the time HM Land Registry began to digitised its register.
The relational database model dates from 1970. Oracle had been commercially available since 1979. The SQL standard had existed since 1986. Any competent IT professional working in the 1990s understood the fundamental difference between two approaches to digitising records:
The first approach transcribes documents into free text — creating, in effect, a digital piece of paper. You can store it and retrieve it, but you cannot query it, validate it, or analyse it systematically.
The second approach captures information into structured, defined fields — a date field for dates, a postcode field for postcodes, a numeric field for lease terms. You can search, validate, cross-reference, and analyse. This is what a proper database does.
The Registered Leases dataset follows the first approach. Critical facts are buried inside free text, invisible to any query.
The dataset contains errors. Typos and format inconsistencies exist in the records. Whether these originated in the paper documents or were introduced during digitisation, a properly designed system would have caught them.
Basic input validation — format checks for dates, postcode validation against the national standard, range checks for numeric fields — is standard practice that has been routine since the 1980s. None of it appears to exist here.
For a legal register with direct consequences for millions of people’s property rights, the absence of validation at any stage of the process is indefensible.
But the problems go deeper than missing validation. Three further structural absences stand out, each foundational rather than incidental. None of them exists in the dataset as currently held.
First, lease type classification. The Registered Leases dataset contains approximately 7.8 million records. The dataset makes no structured distinction between residential and commercial leases, between dwellings and garages, between apartments and land parcels and airspace rights.
All of these appear together in the same undifferentiated dataset, distinguishable only — if at all — by picking through unstructured text fields. Nobody can tell you from this dataset how many of those 7.8 million records represent the residential leasehold homes that Parliament is legislating to reform.
Second, property type. Even within residential leases, the dataset makes no distinction between a house, a maisonette, and a flat in a high-rise apartment block.
This matters because property type is essential for any meaningful analysis or policy targeting.
Service charge structures, building management obligations, cladding liability and Right to Manage practicalities all vary significantly by property type. A dataset that cannot distinguish between them cannot support the kind of granular policy analysis that leasehold reform requires.
Third, and most fundamentally, there is no mechanism to group leases by their associated freehold. Individual lease records float free of their building context entirely. You cannot use this dataset to identify all the leases in a single block of flats, aggregate their terms, or compare one building’s leasehold structure against another’s.
Yet the building — not the individual lease — is the level at which almost every meaningful leasehold question operates: How is a block managed? What are its service charges relative to comparable buildings nearby? Who owns the freehold and how many units does that freeholder control?
The dataset cannot answer any of these questions, because it was designed around individual title records rather than the blocks those titles describe.
These are not gaps that developed gradually through years of incremental neglect.
They are foundational absences — the kind that would normally be addressed before the first record was ever entered, not patched in afterwards.
Comparison that makes the failure inexplicable
If there were any doubt that this was a design choice rather than a limitation of the era, HMLR’s own records remove it.
HMLR also manages the Price Paid Dataset — a record of every residential property sale in England and Wales, covering transactions back to 1995.
Since its release as open data between 2012 and 2013, it has existed in properly structured, discrete, queryable fields: sale price, date, property type, and tenure. It is openly available and functions exactly as a well-designed database should: anyone can query it, filter it, and aggregate it without first parsing free text.
HMLR has therefore demonstrated, for over a decade, that it is capable of holding and publishing data of this kind in properly structured, queryable form.
The Registered Leases dataset has not been given the same treatment, despite covering information of a similar character — lease dates, lease terms, property type.
This is not a question of whether the technology exists; HMLR’s own published dataset proves that it does, and has for over a decade.
No parliamentary question, no ministerial answer, and no HMLR strategy document has ever addressed why one register was built to a professional standard and the other was not.
For around 30 years, administrators and data analysts at HMLR have used this system every working day.
Every parliamentary question about leasehold data has been answered using it. Every policy analysis has drawn on it. Every ministerial briefing has been informed by it.
No public acknowledgement of the system’s structural inadequacy for these purposes has been identified in HMLR’s published strategy documents, ministerial answers, or correspondence reviewed for this article, prior to the Strategy 2025+ document discussed below.
In June 2025, while conducting the analysis that underpins this article, I wrote to HMLR offering to assist in improving the structure of the dataset, without charge. The offer to help fix a 30-year structural failure, at no cost to the public purse, was declined.
What Parliament has been told
The parliamentary questions that follow emerged from a collaboration between myself and Joshua Reynolds, LibDem MP for Maidenhead, who has brought both personal commitment and considerable parliamentary expertise to this work.
Mr Reynolds became Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Leasehold and Commonhold Reform on 18 June 2025, a role that reflects the seriousness with which he has engaged with these issues.
The specific questions were developed from 15 months of technical analysis of the HMLR dataset conducted by me between July 2024 and October 2025, and translated into parliamentary language before tabling. Despite that precision, the answers received did not engage with a single specific technical point raised.
Between October 2025 and March 2026, Mr Reynolds tabled five written questions specifically targeting the adequacy of HMLR’s leasehold data.
The questions were precise and escalating: whether leaseholders approaching the 80-85 year bracket could be notified of the implications for extension costs (UIN 82219, October 2025); whether HMLR could provide annual updates on lease terms (UIN 81017, October 2025); whether the £7 fee for title information should be reduced or abolished (UIN 81020, October 2025); whether the data structure was adequate for enabling leaseholders to access meaningful information (UIN 117037, March 2026); and whether the Government planned to add structured fields for property type, freehold title number, service charge and ground rent (UIN 117176, March 2026).
The responses, all from Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook, followed a consistent pattern. Each deflected to the existing dataset. Each implied the dataset was adequate.
Two responses from March 2026 — to different questions tabled on the same day — were word for word identical, suggesting they originated not from ministerial assessment but from a prepared HMLR briefing line.
The March 2026 responses are particularly significant. In answer to a question about data structure adequacy (UIN 117037), the Minister told Parliament that the dataset “includes structured address data, along with information on lease details including dates, terms, registration order and property descriptions.”
Fifteen months of independent analysis of that dataset — conducted using professional database tools on the full 7.8 million records — demonstrates this is not accurate.
Dates and terms are not held as structured fields. They are buried in unstructured text, invisible to any query, and impossible to validate or aggregate systematically. The Minister’s response describes capabilities the dataset does not possess.
One response did contain a partial concession.
In October 2025 (UIN 81020), the Minister acknowledged that HMLR fees should be reviewed and that he wanted HMLR to “prioritise free access to data, minimising the cost of information services wherever possible.”
That acknowledgement of the access problem makes the continued acceptance of HMLR’s account of the data structure problem more, not less, troubling.
The Minister recognised that access to leasehold information was inadequate, while simultaneously receiving and repeating HMLR’s assurance that the data itself was fit for purpose.
The scale of this problem is documented in the government’s own Impact Assessment for the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 — the document cited by the Minister in a subsequent Parliamentary Question about short lease premiums.
The Assessment explicitly states that “HM Land Registry data does not record the premium paid by those that extend their leases in a way that can be retrieved across all leases.”
The entire financial analysis underpinning the Act — billions of pounds of calculated costs and benefits to leaseholders and freeholders — was therefore built on modelled estimates, not measured data.
Parliament passed primary legislation on the basis of figures that had to be modelled because the actual numbers do not exist in the register that is supposed to hold them.
HMLR is not unaware of this problem.
Their own Strategy 2025+ document, published in November 2025, states plainly that “our information is still mainly text-based, and it is not structured in a way that allows us to get to and use the underlying data.”
They acknowledge this stops them automating services, taking advantage of AI, and providing accurate information.
What the strategy does not contain is any specific commitment to fixing the Registered Leases dataset — the one Parliament relies on for leasehold policy.
There is no mention of lease type classification, no mention of validation, no mention of freehold grouping, and no mention of pre-extension record retention.
The strategy promises a geospatial future register by 2035. The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill will become law long before then, built on data HMLR’s own strategy acknowledges is structurally inadequate.
This matters beyond the immediate policy debate.
The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill will create new statutory rights and new compliance obligations.
If Parliament does not understand that the data infrastructure to monitor those obligations does not currently exist, it will pass legislation into an informational void — for the second time.
Questions the Housing Select Committee has not yet asked
On 10 March 2026 the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee took oral evidence from Emily d’Albuquerque, HM Land Registry’s General Counsel and Director of the Data & Register Integrity Group, as part of its pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill.
The questions put to her concerned HMLR’s application backlogs and its readiness to design new processes for commonhold conversion.
She acknowledged that HMLR’s service is “not where we want it to be” on backlogs, and that the detailed design of commonhold processes is still being worked through with the sponsoring department.
That exchange was not about the Registered Leases dataset described in this article.
No question put to HMLR on the record asks whether the dataset can currently answer the most basic policy question of all — how many residential leases in England and Wales have fewer than 80 years remaining — or why a dataset built to a properly structured standard exists for Price Paid transactions while the Registered Leases dataset does not.
That comparison has not yet been put to HMLR by this Committee, on the record, and it should be.
Questions the Land Registry cannot answer
The consequences of this design failure are not abstract. They are felt every time someone tries to use HMLR data to understand the leasehold market.
The 1993 Leasehold Reform Act gives qualifying leaseholders the right to extend their lease. The premium payable is determined by a statutory formula — one that depends on the original lease start date, the original lease term and the remaining term at the point of extension.
This is often the largest single financial transaction a leaseholder will undertake outside of the original purchase, commonly running to tens of thousands of pounds.
HMLR’s register cannot tell you whether any individual premium complied with that formula.
The data required to make that calculation does not exist as structured, queryable information. It exists, if at all, as text buried within document fields that no automated system can reliably read.
The government’s own Impact Assessment confirms this — and then proceeds to model the figures instead.
When a lease is extended, the record of the original lease is removed from the Registered Leases dataset — the same dataset that Ministers and HMLR consistently cite as the authoritative source of leasehold information.
Whether that data is retained elsewhere in HMLR’s systems is not known. What is known is that it is absent from the only record Parliament is ever pointed to.
The pre-extension data — the only basis on which compliance with the statutory formula could ever be verified — disappears from the authoritative record at precisely the moment it becomes most significant.
No leaseholder, no regulator, no parliamentary body can establish from that record whether they were overcharged. The evidence is simply not there.
This is not an administrative quirk. It is the removal of the audit trail for a statutory process that Parliament created specifically to protect leaseholders — from the only dataset Parliament is told to look at.
What good data could do
To understand what is being lost by HMLR’s failure, consider what became possible when someone actually worked with the data properly.
As part of the collaboration with Mr Reynolds, I extracted and manually analysed all 8,000-plus leasehold entries for the Maidenhead constituency.
Each record was examined individually to identify properties approaching the critical lease length thresholds — those with fewer than 80 years remaining, where marriage value becomes payable and extension costs escalate sharply, and those in the 80-90 year bracket where leaseholders need to act urgently to avoid falling into that trap.
The result was a list of approximately 1,770 households whose leaseholders were likely unaware of their position and the financial consequences approaching them.
Letters went out from Mr Reynolds’ office to each of those households, ensuring that they understood their leasehold situation and the reforms available to them.
Some letters were returned undelivered. Some recipients responded to say they had already extended their lease — evidence in itself that the HMLR dataset is not current, since those extensions were not reflected in the records.
This is what leasehold data should be able to do as a matter of routine, for every constituency in England and Wales — not as a months-long manual exercise by me working in my own time.
The reason it cannot, at scale, is not technical complexity; it is the structural failure described throughout this article.
The Maidenhead exercise also points to what a properly structured register could become, beyond simply being queryable.
Once lease duration exists as a machine-readable field, the same query that produced the Maidenhead list could run automatically, every year, for every constituency — and could trigger a routine reminder to each affected leaseholder of their years remaining and where to find advice.
A repository that can only be queried is already a major improvement on the dataset as it stands. A repository that can act on what it holds is the next step, and one that only becomes possible once the underlying structural failure is fixed.
A two-tier information market
Access to HMLR’s leasehold data costs £7 per individual record.
Want to check your own lease terms? £7. Want to find the contact details of neighbouring leaseholders so you can even begin a conversation about Right to Manage, Share of Freehold, or moving to Commonhold? £7 per neighbour, before anyone has said a word about whether they are interested. A block of twenty flats means £140 simply to find out who to ask.
There is a further practical barrier that HMLR does not advertise.
The dataset files made publicly available are so large that they cannot be opened using standard office software — Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and equivalent tools used by the vast majority of people are simply unable to handle files of this size.
Professional database software is required just to open them, let alone analyse them.
HMLR could address this by splitting the dataset into manageable regional or local authority files. They have chosen not to. The result is that the open public access offered by the dataset is accessible in practice only to those with professional technical resources.
The practical effect is straightforward.
Freeholders and other commercial organisations can pay for bulk access and employ professionals to process it; an individual leaseholder, paying per record on a register riddled with the structural deficiencies described above, cannot.
The public API exists as a fig leaf of open access while delivering something that is practically unusable without professional resources.
This information asymmetry is not incidental. It mirrors and reinforces the power imbalance that leasehold reform is supposed to correct.
And it is being maintained by a body that is simultaneously assuring Parliament that adequate information exists — while its own data underpins government assessments that openly admit the figures had to be modelled because the real ones cannot be retrieved.
The Minister has acknowledged, in response to a direct parliamentary question, that HMLR fees should be reviewed and that free access to data should be prioritised.
That acknowledgement has not yet translated into action.
Meanwhile the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill moves forward, and the information asymmetry that has always favoured freeholders over leaseholders remains structurally embedded in the only register Parliament relies on.
Land Register needs to be rebuilt, not patched
The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill cannot achieve its stated purpose if the data infrastructure remains in its current state.
You cannot monitor compliance with statutory extension premiums without structured lease term data. You cannot enforce transparency obligations without reliable freeholder and managing agent identification data. You cannot empower leaseholders to exercise their statutory rights on the basis of a register that cannot answer basic questions about their own tenure.
And you cannot answer the most basic political question of all — how much does each month of delay cost leaseholders — without data that does not currently exist in retrievable form.
HMLR holds the only original records and the only direct customer relationships with applicants and conveyancers.
Third parties have already shown what can be done from outside — systems such as the Leasehold Advisory Service and LMG Logistics scrape HMLR’s public dataset and re-output fields such as lease start date and duration in structured form, and I have used this approach directly.
But however well processed, that work can only ever produce a derivative copy, not a fix to the underlying register.
The master record has to be put right at source. Even then, a structured link from each lease record to a Freehold Block ID only gets you grouping: the ability to see which leases belong to the same building.
It does not, by itself, deliver a Freehold Block register — a separate, linked dataset holding freeholder identity, managing agent information, service charges, and aggregated lease terms at building level. That is a significant undertaking in its own right, to be built on top of a fixed Registered Leases dataset rather than instead of it, and a necessary next step rather than a claim this article makes on its own account.
The register needs to be rebuilt. Not patched — rebuilt. As a minimum HMLR must:
- Replace free-text transcription with properly structured fields, including validated entries for lease start date, lease term, lease end date, standardised address and postcode.
- Implement input validation at point of entry — format checks for dates, postcodes, and numeric fields against established national standards. This is standard practice that should have been in place from day one.
- Introduce structured classification fields for lease type and property type, so that residential leases can be distinguished from commercial ones, and houses from flats from maisonettes. The current dataset cannot tell you what it is actually describing.
- Introduce a structured link between each lease record and its associated freehold title, so that leases can be grouped and analysed at building level — the level at which almost every meaningful leasehold question operates.
- Retain pre-extension lease records permanently within the Registered Leases dataset as an auditable legal history. Removal of records relating to statutory transactions from the authoritative public record must stop immediately.
- Provide free public access to leaseholder-relevant data for the property a leaseholder occupies. Charging £7 per record to access a defective register of your own legal tenure is indefensible — and the Minister has already acknowledged it should change.
- Split the publicly available dataset into manageable regional or local authority files so that it can be accessed using standard software by the people it is supposed to serve.
Use UPRN — Ordnance Survey’s national property identifier, already present in most leasehold records — to link the Leasehold dataset to Price Paid Data.
HMLR’s own 2022 data strategy blog named this exact step as a priority, citing UPRN as “a way to link a wide range of datasets together” — yet four years on, Price Paid still does not have it.
The implementation detail is for HMLR’s data scientists; the fact that HMLR identified this gap itself, and still has not closed it, is disappointing.
The relationship this would create is shown below. A Freehold aggregation view is included for context as a future prospect only — it is not a recommendation this article makes.
Once data exists as structured fields it can be used proactively — for example, by notifying leaseholders annually of their years remaining and where to find advice — rather than leaving the register as a passive repository that only answers questions when someone already knows to ask them.
The Registered Leases dataset has functioned for decades as a digital filing cabinet rather than a database. The institution has used it every day, cited it to Parliament, and has not, to date, acknowledged its limitations publicly.
Parliament passed the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 on the basis of figures that had to be modelled because that filing cabinet cannot produce the real ones.
It is now preparing to pass the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill on the same inadequate foundation — having been told repeatedly, in answer to specific parliamentary questions grounded in 15 months of independent technical analysis, that the data is adequate.
It is not adequate. The foundations are rotten. It is time to stop covering them up.
References
- HMLR Registered Leases Dataset — publicly available at use-land-property-data.service.gov.uk
- Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill Impact Assessment, DLUHC, 31 October 2023 (IA No: DLUHC-5311) — available at publications.parliament.uk
- HM Land Registry Strategy 2025+, published November 2025 — available at gov.uk
- Written Question UIN 82219, tabled 14 October 2025, answered 24 October 2025 — questions-statements.parliament.uk
- Written Question UIN 81017, tabled 10 October 2025, answered 20 October 2025 — questions-statements.parliament.uk
- Written Question UIN 81020, tabled 10 October 2025, answered 20 October 2025 — questions-statements.parliament.uk
- Written Question UIN 117037, tabled 2 March 2026, answered 10 March 2026 — questions-statements.parliament.uk
- Written Question UIN 117176, tabled 2 March 2026, answered 10 March 2026 — questions-statements.parliament.uk
- Written Question UIN 1053, tabled 13 May 2026, answered 26 May 2026 — questions-statements.parliament.uk
- Leasehold and Commonhold Reform APPG — parallelparliament.co.uk/APPG/leasehold-and-commonhold-reform
- HMLR correspondence, reference 250616-4803119, response dated 15 July 2025
- Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993
- Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, introduced following King’s Speech 13 May 2026
- Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, Pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, First Report of Session 2026–27, HC 40, published 27 May 2026; Oral evidence, 10 March 2026, Q93–Q106 (Emily d’Albuquerque, HM Land Registry)
- House of Commons debate on commonhold and leasehold reform and the regulation of property managing agents, scheduled for 2 July 2026 — committees.parliament.uk
- Andrew Trigg, Chief Geospatial & Data Officer, “How our new data strategy will support the UK economy”, HM Land Registry blog, 25 October 2022 — hmlandregistry.blog.gov.uk
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Ministers want leaseholders to gain control. So why has collective enfranchisement collapsed?
Wonderful effort on all our behalf .
Thanks.
I’m pressuring my local M.P every 3 months or so about the importance of this legislation being completed before 2029 election and would urge everyone to do the same.
Good work. My own experiences with HMLR, the DCLG, and local government indicate that our civil service and political leaders neither understand Land Law nor Information Technology, nor do they WANT to understand it. Individuals must comply with the systemic inertia of their public sector employer. Senior staff can only wait for the large severance package they can typically expect, so that the system can gloss over its endemic wilful incompetence. As a solicitor friend rather generously put it, ‘you don’t get the best lawyers working in government’. As the above research shows, you don’t get the best IT people either.
It is all too easy for unscrupulous conveyancers (as in our local case) to deceive homeowners by running rings round the Registry to make secretive, evasive transfers of freehold so-called ‘reversions’, to evade liability for Lessor covenants that were originally needed to effect sales. If the covenants were needed then, for safety and structural reasons, they are still needed now. Current registry systems thus defeat ownership of the contract-and-estate hybrid that such long residential leaseholds were designed to be.
In our case a CILEX transferred the freehold of nine houses to himself for a mere £2,500 from the Local Authority (a decision the latter had ‘delegated’ theoretically to officials, due to the low notional land value to the LA developer). No-one flagged it. No-one thought WHY houses had originally been sold with contractual leasehold covenants rather than freehold. No-one thought to ask the present 999-year registered legal owners if they had been informed. No-one thought to comply with HMLR’s own Practice Guide 47 by checking whether the proposed disposal of a Local Authority developer’s Housing Land had the necessary consent from then Secretary of State, Eric Pickles.
As I proved in court, lack of consent made the transfer void at law by s.44 of the HA 1985. But what do you think Eric Pickles’ officials did, to correct the error? Just weeks after my FOI request about consent, and before the case came to court, they issued the General Consents 2013. Whereas previous general consents allowed LAs to transfer the reversionary interest only to the leasehold owners of an individual home, the 2013 version STILL consents to transfers of ANY local authority housing land at ANY price to ANYbody. We are paying Council Tax and Income Tax for this derisory treatment! We and all other LA leaseholders remain to this day under threat in spite of the years of struggle to achieve the 2013 court order.
The majority voted for change at the last general election, but we still have the same government cover-up systems run by specialist complaints handlers; the same assymetric justice system whereby officials know they can just tell you ‘it must go to a court’ and ‘we are only administrators’. They rely on the same prohibitive economics of litigation to warp reality, not merely justice and English law. We have already BEEN to court. Such is the current state of our supposed justice and governmental systems.
Conspiracy to defraud is of course still a criminal offence at common law. But who will prosecute? No public body will, at least without a ‘police investigation’, they write (although none is needed since the offence has been committed repeatedly in writing). And who will investigate? No-one at present of course.
One answer to the present unlawful impasse would be to organise a mass withholding of taxes until English civil servants comply with TRUE English law, not the versions currently made up through greed and defensively-maintained malpractice.
Sorry, I meant asymmetric, not ‘assymetric’ justice system. It’s not the law itself that is an ass, Every one of us is incompetent to some degree. The test of honest character comes when we are confronted by our mistakes.
Great article.
Poor data means a lack of understanding of issues and wrong policy decisions. I used to work with Database systems back in the early 1990s. My father ran a small business, we used a software package called Dataease which was much easier to use compared to the Microsoft offering at the time. Dad only got into computing in his 60s, he was more used to typewriters and slide rules, although he was a qualified engineer. He was able to do basic queries himself using Dataease, and more with my assistance.
Just transposing a paper based system to a computer system without thinking about later requirements leads to the restrictions and limitations described well in the article. Conveyancing time and complexity are greatly increased because of this badly designed system, fraud is more likely, not to mention difficulty with Enfranchisement and Right to Manage claims. As the author suggests, the land registry system needs a total rebuild, it was not fit for purpose in the 1990s, certainly not 30+ years later. It is unforgiveable.
Excellent article Paul. I will disagree with just one point. Departments in government adopting a relational database approach in the 80’s tended to use Ingres and Informix in preference to Oracle which was seen as a “me to” product at the time.
In those days spreadsheets were sometimes used to circumvent the cost of report production from a main database but the concept of using a spreadsheet approach to hold any volume of substantive data has always been seen as flawed. It should also be remembered Excel is a product derived from Multiplan developed and grown many times over the years. However even Microsoft has never accepted a spreadsheet is a replacement for a database even in the PC market. A spreadsheet by design is not intended to provide an audit trail.
Thank you an interesting and
Informative article. Am I surprised that the digital data is text based rather than a structured relational database. No. It will have been cheaper to implement, and the legal profession is much happier with text than data.
From my limited use of AI it seems it can read and deal with text from websites so hopefully it may be possible to overcome some of the data limitations.
This should however not be an excuse to not create and use database labels to create useable data for policy , compliance and addressing lack if transparency for leaseholders.
Yes, this would be an excellent test as to whether AI really works!
Now here is an interesting response from HMLR. I applied for a copy of registered title to an Underlease to a flat in a block in which the RMC holds the residue of the Superior Lease on land held by or in trust for the transferors who are exempt charities and a Deed of Trust to this Underlease states the demised premises are also held by or in trust for the Lessor who is an exempt charity. According to AI the property does not belong to the beneficiaries.
HMLR increased the charge for the title from £7 to £11 without explanation
They clearly built a document management system, presumably to streamline and support the paper-based system that solicitors and conveyancers understood and used, rather than a database that could also be used for other purposes including those that didn’t yet exist..
Was that because they didn’t know how to do the latter? No, as the article explains. But, as with all IT projects, you get what the client asks and pays for.
The criticisms of HMLR are misplaced and are based on a misunderstanding of the Registry’s function. Land registration is a conveyancing mechanism and the Registry’s systems are quite properly designed to fulfil its statutory purpose. It is not the purpose of the Registry to act as an information database to provide the sort of information described in the article.
Thank you for the challenge, Martin. My article contrasts HMLR’s statutory conveyancing function with the broader role their own Strategy 2025+ document describes — specifically its commitment to making data open and accessible and enabling third-party use. Could you point me to the source that defines land registration as purely a conveyancing mechanism? I ask because publications such as the English Housing Survey demonstrate clear policy reliance on leasehold data that the Registered Leases dataset, as currently structured, cannot support — and HMLR’s own strategy acknowledges this gap. If their remit genuinely excludes that analytical purpose, the question becomes: whose responsibility is it, and why has no one said so?
There is also a specific parliamentary record worth examining. Between October 2025 and May 2026, six written questions asked directly about the analytical capability of the Registered Leases dataset. If land registration is purely a conveyancing mechanism and providing this information falls outside HMLR’s remit, the straightforward ministerial answer would have been to say so. Instead, every answer asserted that the dataset does include structured information on dates and terms — a claim my analysis demonstrates is not accurate. The issue is not that HMLR declined to provide information outside their scope; it is that they are asserting a capability they do not have and have made no public commitment to remedy.