§ Mrs. RoeTo ask the Attorney-General what steps the Lord Chancellor is taking to reduce the risk of mortgage fraud arising from delays in the Land Registry; what is the current backlog; what is his target for the interval between receipt and completion of inquiries; when he expects this to be achieved; and how long he plans to maintain that performance once achieved.
§ The Attorney-GeneralThere does not appear to be any evidence that mortgage fraud occurs because of delays in completing applications at the Land Registry. Such frauds occur in areas of the conveyancing process with which the Land Registry is not directly involved.
The Land Registry has target completion times of 14 weeks for first registrations, 12 weeks for dealings with part of the land in a title and four weeks for dealings with the whole title. The present backlog of applications which have not been dealt with within these target completion times is 586,000.
The targets referred to will be achieved within the next year if activity levels in the property and financial markets do not increase. Once they are achieved the chief land registrar will look to improve the service further.