Land Registry surcharge could fund free OS data surprisingly cheaply
Thursday, March 27th, 2008One suggestion that has been made by Robert Barr (of Manchester Geomatics) and echoed recently by Ed Parsons on his blog (though I think Ed came up with it independently) is that Ordnance Survey’s non-refined data (that is, the stuff it does as part of its public task, which the Cambridge economics study of trading funds interpreted to be its MasterMap and Large Scale Topo) could be made available for free by making up any funding shortfall from a surcharge on Land Registry transactions.
The reasoning: most LR transactions involve OS mapping.
According to the study, that would cost between £12m and £30m in foregone revenue.
So how much would you have to add to Land Registry transactions to make up that amount? It sounds like an awful lot of money to generate.
Here are the figures I’ve culled from the Land Registry’s performance data for the past three years on the number of transactions.
Number of registrations | 2004/5 | 2005/6 | 2006/7 | Mean 04-06 | As % of total |
first registrations | 297,405 | 309,609 | 304,391 | 303,802 | 4.3 |
discharges | 2,486,875 | 2,502,318 | 2,605,620 | 2,531,604 | 35.8 |
mortgages | 2,680,128 | 2,627,999 | 2,723,530 | 2,677,219 | 37.9 |
transfers for value | 1,378,200 | 1,270,867 | 1,480,819 | 1,376,629 | 19.5 |
leases | 167,234 | 173,610 | 197,546 | 179,463 | 2.5 |
Total | 7,009,842 | 6,884,403 | 7,311,906 | 7,068,717 | 100 |
Total w/o discharges | 4,522,967 | 4,382,085 | 4,706,286 | 4,537,113 | 64.2 |
With millions of transactions, it looks like raising £12m – £30m wouldn’t actually be too hard. “Discharges” are the ending of a claim to a legal title – generally, though not always, the end of a mortgage. They attract no fee at present. Other LR charges range from £2 (for a search) to £700 (for first non-voluntary registration of a pricey parcel of land). Most of the charges, though, are £20 – £40 and upwards.
So to find the £12m that the trading funds report suggests OS would lose solely from non-discharge transactions would mean adding £2.65 to the cost of each LR transaction.
If we take the loss in revenue to OS as £30m, then it means adding £6.61 to each transaction. It’s not more than the cost of any transaction (except searches – which aren’t the same as the “searches” one does when buying a house; those go through your local authority), and compared to the cost of the typical transaction – say, the average £180,000 house purchase – it’s peanuts.
Right – that’s the analysis done. Now we just need to find a minister who is in charge of Land Registry and Ordnance Survey and can tweak the legislation (it doesn’t need primary legislation, surely?) to make these changes. And we’re done.
This analysis also appears (without the fun table) in today’s Guardian: Land Registry holds key to free OS.