Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps her Department has taken to merge highway records into a single digital record to simplify conveyancing highways searches.

The Department for Transport (DfT) recognises the value of improving access to highways information for the purposes of conveyancing.

For the Strategic Road Network, National Highways has taken significant steps to simplify its own land ownership records. Conveyancing highways searches are received through the National Highways Customer Contact Centre, before being directed to the relevant regional spatial planning team. To further support transparency, National Highways has created a spatial highway boundary dataset, updated weekly using data from HM Land Registry, Ordnance Survey, and its own asset data. This assured dataset is available to the public through the National Highways Open Data Portal and allows users to easily identify National Highways’ land ownership.

For local roads, the records most relevant to conveyancing searches are owned, maintained and published by local highway authorities. At present, DfT has no plans to consolidate this data into a single digital record.