Land Registry

Debate between Alan Johnson and Liz Kendall

Thursday 30th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) on securing this debate. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson), who has demonstrated its cross-party nature. I shall not keep the House for long as my right hon. Friend has done such a good job and covered practically every point.

The Land Registry office in Hull represents our only success in securing Government business in many years by bringing that business out of London. It came to Hull in the 1980s specifically because the Government of the time wanted to bring good, decent, well-paid jobs to an area that had been devastated by the collapse of the fishing industry. Incidentally, the collapse of that industry had nothing to do with the EU; it was the outcome of the cod wars with Iceland, for which Iceland gained retribution earlier this week on the football field.

The Hull office has taken its share of the overall two-thirds reduction in staffing that has taken place in an attempt to make the Land Registry more efficient. During my 20 years as an MP, I can almost plot my time in that role by the number of inquiries, examinations and investigations into the Land Registry. They come up about every two to three years. My right hon. Friend mentioned the wonderfully named quinquennial review of 2001, when I was a junior Minister at the old Department of Trade and Industry. Quinquennial reviews took place across Whitehall and I was responsible for the quinquennial review of the Patent Office in Cardiff. One of my bright young civil servants—obviously hugely qualified—asked me why quinquennial reviews only took place every five years, so I explained it to him. That review, as my right hon. Friend said, concluded by saying that

“privatisation should be firmly rejected”

and that it would

“be an act of considerable folly”.

Three quinquenniums later, we are being asked to commit this act of considerable folly by a Government whose motivation seems to be not to improve the service, but to raise a quick buck—and a fairly insubstantial buck in the scheme of things.

[Liz Kendall]

My right hon. Friend mentioned the quinquennial review, one of the most important findings of which was that the registry’s core functions—maintaining the land register, providing services to customers and operating its guarantees and indemnities scheme—hang together

“like the particles in an atom”

and that it would be “a great mistake” to contract out or split any of those core functions and threaten the whole enterprise. Does he believe that that argument remains true today?

[Alan Johnson]

I do indeed. The quinquennial review, like all quinquennial reviews, had to be carried out by a neutral Minister from a different Department and the procedure was quite rigorous. That conclusion has been said in different words in practically every other examination.

Since the quinquennial review, the Land Registry has been subjected to an accelerated transformation programme, a feasibility study, a proposal for public bodies reform and, a little over two years ago, a plan to make it a service delivery company which was supported by just 5% of those consulted. Never has an organisation been scrutinised so often to such little purpose.

In the meantime, the Land Registry has got on with its crucial work with unimpeachable integrity, registering 87% of the land mass of England and Wales, paying large dollops of cash to the Exchequer—over £119 million last year—building up its digital capability and achieving customer satisfaction ratings close to 100%. It was 95% last year and everyone was reaching for the Kleenex because it had gone down from 98%. That is an extraordinary level of customer satisfaction.