Lending platform calls on Treasury to privatise land registry

Lending platform Brydg has urged the Chancellor to consider the privatisation of the HM Land Registry.

The registry’s digitisation plans are “lagging”, according to the firm, which wrote to Rishi Sunak ahead of the Budget on October 27.

Brydg called for a funding boost for the service as well as for ministers to consider privatising it.

Inefficient data availability had had a negative knock-on effect on the property market, it said.

It has made a formal submission to HM Treasury and written to the secretary of state for business, Kwasi Kwarteng, as well as to Sunak.

Director of Brydg, Peter Matthews, said: “We aim to double our lending in the next two years and this expansion could be achieved even faster with more efficient availability of official data which we use to underpin our lending.

“No one can lend against a property until ownership can be authenticated and Land Registry holds the key to investment in the real estate sector, but its digitisation plans are lagging and not meeting its own KPIs.”

He added: “Helping Land Registry to meet its capabilities more swiftly will tackle housing shortages and will be enormously beneifical to the real estate industry as well as to the wider economy.

“Greater knowledge more swiftly delivered about real estate transactions will help transparency, reduce fraud and allow more efficient capital allocation.”