I am grateful for that. I think that I heard the words “during this Parliament” and I understand that that is as far as the Minister can go.
This is not about preserving inefficiency; it is about working out the best way to create efficiency. The Minister talked about services remaining split as they are at the moment. That is precisely what is going to happen under these proposals; there will be a separation of the local land charges and the CON29. We have heard that a feasibility study is going to be done. We have to address the possibility of bringing in CON29 in a responsible and incremental way. When I heard the phrase “responsible and incremental”, I immediately thought of universal credit.
The reality is that the Land Registry has looked at this for three years. Its original concept was to have both bits of the service in—was it not?—but it has decided that it does not know how to deal with CON29 and, therefore, to move ahead with the other bits without knowing or indeed caring what is going to happen to the separated bit left with local authorities. That seems to be foolhardy, at the very least.
The Minister made the point that this should not be revenue-generating. I accept the point that people involved in local land registries may have other duties—they may spend time on electoral registration, for example—but that does not mean that the loss of a fee does not have a financial consequence. If you are using only one-third of a person’s time, you still cannot get rid of one-third of a person, although you can cut hours down in some circumstances, so the contribution to the overhead is going to be less. There is a potential ramification there.
With regard to timing, it would be interesting to know how aware the people who buy, sell or mortgage a house are of how much of the conveyancing time is actually taken up with the search process. Certainly the Law Society’s convention is that it is just a part of the total conveyancing process, which on average takes between six and eight weeks. The Minister quoted the amount of time that Camden council takes, and I am sure that there are areas where people are outside the norm, but the Government’s own impact assessment shows the general speed with which searches are returned.
I well understand the concern and growing anxiety of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, the more that he considered this matter. He raised the issue of the £1 million fine that was imposed. I do not necessarily want to dig into that except that to say that for an organisation that is looking to digitalise, modernise and so on, it does not seem to bode well that it does not have the management systems in place to avoid these catastrophes.
It is right that the previous Government looked at the prospect of privatising the Land Registry. My noble friend Lord Wills was the Minister involved at the time; I spoke to him about it, and he said that it was knocked back pretty sharply. One of the driving forces behind that idea is that, frankly, it could be a nice little earner. Who knows what that database is worth? There are suggestions of £1 billion-plus, which, in an election year, obviously would not go amiss.
The users of the service, including the Law Society, the conveyancing firms and the search firms, are not supportive of this approach. From the Government’s press release when they moved back from changing the model, we know that they recognised that they have embarked on complex applications online and automating processes. They are going through that journey in respect of their existing business, without adding local land charges and the interface with around 350 authorities to it.
I accept that there should be a move towards digitisation. Many local authorities have done it and many are in the process of doing it. Some have started that process and I understand from the impact assessment that, if they have to pull the plug, there will not be any recompense for the investment that they have made in trying to do it. Can the Minister give any assurance on that? The real fear in all this is that this was considered in the context of a change of model. One of the changes would have quite readily led to privatisation. I think that there are some other background papers which clearly indicate that this was the path that some in the Land Registry were moving along. It seems to me that that has coloured the assessment of much of what has gone on.
The point made about the impact assessment and the consultation being undertaken by the Land Registry or the Chief Land Registrar is exactly right. Surely, if we were going to contemplate and revisit opportunities or proposals such as this, there should be an independent assessment on which this is based. Ultimately, whether they agree with it or not, people should have confidence that no ulterior motive was driving what was going on.
As ever, the noble Lord, Lord Tope, was trying to be helpful to his Government. I had to get my mind around the Land Registry as did the noble Lord. He made reference to 15 years but I understand that the Government consultation may knock that on the head and that that will not now be a cut-off point. Some of the fears that his colleagues in local government expressed are real fears. The fear that the loss of local knowledge may be dismissed as being not important is a real issue.
I am not sure that we will have a meeting of minds this afternoon. I am sure that we will have another discussion about it at a later stage. There is a substantial head of steam opposed to these proposals, as I am sure the Minister is aware. Perhaps we could hang on to the point that the Law Society, as well as others, is saying that this is not the issue that needs to be addressed. If we are worried about conveyancing issues and the time that that takes, we should look elsewhere to the process and not be looking at this. It acknowledges that processing times have speeded up and that in recent times there has been greater standardisation of response. There has been a reduction in fees and the Government’s impact assessment has recognised the productivity gains that have been made and passed on to customers. Local land charges is not the problem that is creating concerns about conveyancing.