Ed Lester
Chief Executive of the Land Registry
What were your biggest delivery challenges in 2013, and how did you handle them?
Encouragingly for the economy, the property market took a bit of an upturn recently; and it has been important for us to respond to that, ensuring our core business operation continues to meet quality and efficiency targets whilst delivering new products and services in line with what our customers want. We’ve been able to achieve all this because of the quality of our people, from the bottom up. I’m relatively new to the organisation and have been hugely impressed by the attitude and commitment of Land Registry staff, so I have every confidence that we can continue as we have been doing in the months ahead.
Where have you made the most progress in implementing the Civil Service Reform Plan, and what are your reform priorities for 2014?
Perhaps the greatest progress we’ve made has been in the delivery of existing and new services digitally. Our electronic Document Registration System (eDRS) has been available since December 2012, allowing professional customers a facility to lodge a wide range of applications electronically. Removing post and printing from the application process, this helps the Land Registry and its customer to reduce costs and process applications more quickly. Uptake has been very encouraging: currently, around 65% of post-purchase completion registration applications are carried out on day one. One of the most recent developments has been the launch of our counter-fraud Property Alert service, which allows people to monitor activity on properties in which they have an interest: we email them when we receive an application relating to the property. For 2014, we’ll continue to focus on e-service delivery, which is key to our future success.
What are your key challenges in the last year of the Parliament? How will you tackle them?
There’s still plenty more we want to do if we are to achieve our vision to be recognised as a world leader in the digital delivery of land registration services, and in the management and reuse of land and property data. That is central to our five-year business strategy. For example, we’re currently working with local authorities to develop a prototype system to provide a central point of access to local land charge searches, currently provided by over 350 individual local authorities. This would involve digitising all local land charge records and would lead to the standardisation of local authority searches and improved service levels in terms of quality, speed and cost. The Local Land Charges prototype is supported by the Government Digital Service as one of the transformational programmes in their digital strategy. It is an exciting opportunity, but still early days.
More significantly, we’re now looking at our commercial model and developing a target operating model setting out the future structure for Land Registry. Both of these are highly complex and challenging areas of work, but are fundamental to the future success of Land Registry. Implementing the delivery of those models will be the biggest challenge for us as an organisation in the year ahead.
What would you most like Santa to bring you this year? And what would you like him to take away?
I’d be very happy if Arsenal won the Premiership. As to what I’d like him to take away, it would have to be global unrest. I appreciate there is very little chance of either happening!