Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the amount of manual processing on paper that it carries out and to make such processing digital.

As stated in the Government’s Transformation Strategy and the Conservative Manifesto, this government is committed to providing services that are digital by default - reducing paper and manual processing, reducing cost and improving user satisfaction.

BEIS is actively working with all its Arm’s Length Bodies, internal teams and contracted service providers to reduce the amount of paper processing by delivering services digitally wherever possible. There will always be some exceptions where, for legal reasons, paper processing is required but we will continue to explore how new technologies can overcome these barriers and implement them as soon as possible.

Some examples of what the BEIS Group has already delivered or are in the process of delivering include:

Land Registry has developed a new Local Land Charge Register Service to digitise existing paper records from 326 Local Authorities and migrate them to a single national Local Land Charge register. This will improve resilience, improve the customer experience of using this service and introduce standardise fees.

The Innovation Funding Service has developed a new digital service to replace a previously paper based process to submit online applications for research and development funding. Innovate UK run approximately 100 competitions per year and receives in excess of 4,000 applications.

Finally, the Intellectual Property Office has designed a new digital service that enables customers to apply for a patent design online. This includes the implementation of a new back office system that will deliver a more efficient, cost effective service that will lower operating costs and reduce the fees for customers registering a design.