The government department responsible for overseeing housebuying and administering the national register of millions of property titles is engaged in a major transformation agenda and wishes to identify tech providers

HM Land Registry is planning to appoint commercial partners to contracts worth more than £70m and intends to support the use of digital and data in “delivering radical, permanent changes” to the organisation and its work.

The non-ministerial department has published a commercial planning notice providing details of “transformation activity [that] is currently underway in [four] areas: geospatial and data transformation; digital delivery; local land charges; [and] integrated analytics capability”.

To assist with this reform, HMLR is “now seeking two new contracts to support with specialist data expertise and knowledge that will accelerate” its transformative agenda.

The first of these will be dedicated to a “strategic partnership for achieving shared goals, improving decisions, and maximising business opportunities”.  The chosen supplier for this engagement will be asked to “work collaboratively with us to support test and learn [and] design and vision” activities in the Land Registry’s work to improve its use of geospatial data.

The second agreement will provide “a delivery partnership to undertake statements of work to develop” the organisation’s underlying data architecture, according to the procurement notice.

The deals are scheduled to come into effect in February 2026 and run for an initial term of four years, plus a potential 12-month extension. The contracts are expected to worth a total of £72m to the winning bidders.

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Between now and 15 August, HMLR is undertaking a market-engagement process intended to help the department “understand the viability” of its plans. Prospective providers with “specialist data knowledge and capability” are encouraged to take part.

The plan is current to issue a formal contract notice inviting bids for the two deals in October.

“HMLR has an exciting and ambitious vision to transform our data into interoperable, machine interpretable, geospatially enabled information to better serve our customers with digital services, expertise and accessible property information to unlock a better, faster, and less stressful property market,” the planning notice says. “HMLR has improved the maturity of our data capabilities and we have a small team of data experts, but as we move forward with our transformational aims and as data usage grows, we need wider strategic guidance with particular focus on geospatial expertise, alongside the development of additional specialist capabilities – such as data governance, data ethics, advanced analytics, data science [and] AI and data engineering.”

The document adds: “These change programmes are delivering radical, permanent changes to the way we structure, store, extract and use data. How we transform and improve access to it will have profound enabling effects for internal, operational challenges; informed policymaking across government; and unlocking wider economic growth and resilience.”

HMLR is responsible for administering the purchase and ownership of land and property throughout England and Wales. According to GOV.UK, it the Land Register it maintains contains 26.5 million titles – encompassing about 90% of the landmass of the two countries. The value of the property and land under its watch adds up to £8tn, and the organisation’s work supports £1tn’s worth of mortgages and other lending, the government website says.