Government department responsible for operating the national register of tens of millions of property titles believes that 300,000 hours of citizens’ time will be saved in the next three years

HM Land Registry is to deploy automation technology to help detect and flag up errors made during property registration and prevent users from submitting inaccurate applications.

From autumn, the registry’s Business Gateway and Digital Registration Service platforms will be upgraded to an “enhanced” version in which tech will be embedded to detect “simple administrative errors, such as name or title number errors”.

If users then attempt to submit applications containing these errors, they will be stopped from doing so. Detected mistakes will then be highlighted and the user will be prompted to address them before filing their application.

Within three years, HM Land Registry is forecasting that this technology will save citizens up to 300,000 hours that would otherwise be spent “waiting for an unnecessary, manual, administrative process, and [will] end annoying requisitions that can be resolved much earlier”.

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Over the coming months, HMLR “will be working with our existing third-party integrators to migrate to the new service in the following months”.

Mark Gray, the registry’s chief transformation and technology officer, said: “This is another key milestone in improving our customer service and our processing times. By preventing errors up-front, automating routine tasks and removing unnecessary correspondence, we will save time for our customers and our caseworkers alike. And this is just the next step in modernising and automating more of our work, there is much more to come.”

The organisation intends to further “enhance the registration service by introducing further checks on the data contained in transfer and charge deeds in late 2026”, the registry added.

Operating as a non-ministerial department, HM Land Registry is responsible for maintaining and operating the register of land property across England and Wales. The agency oversees a database of 26.5 million ownership documents, representing property worth about £8 trillion.