§ Mr. Clifton-BrownTo ask the Deputy Prime Minister what assessment he has made of the effect of electronic application to land searches and registration on the speed of housing market transactions; and what further improvements in the speed of these transactions will result from the introduction of sellers' packs. [168376]
§ Keith HillI refer the hon. Member to the answer given to him on 23 April 2004. For electronic searches of land registers to be possible, local authorities must first have set up electronic Local Land and Property Gazetteers (LLPGs). Such gazetteers form an integral part of local e-government, and the benefits arising from them have not been separately estimated or assessed. The overall savings from local e-government, and in particular achieving the Prime Minister's target of all priority services being electronically enabled by 2005, were estimated by local authorities them;elves in 2003 as being about £80 million per annum by 2005–06. As well as efficiency savings, there will be significant benefits to authorities' customers, through improvement of service delivery including quicker land charge searches.
Electronic processing of local land search inquiries offers the prospect of securing search information in minutes and hours rather than days and weeks. To maximise the benefits for housing transactions, local search and other information that is important to home buying and selling decisions needs to be available at the start of the transaction process. Home information packs will secure this. They will enable buyers and sellers to negotiate from an informed position and help them commit more quickly to the transaction. This will increase certainty, reduce failure and wasted costs, and help shorten the overall transaction timescale.