Land Registry to shed 1,500 jobs ahead of possible sale

Published 22nd Oct 2009

The Land Registry will announce plans today to cut 1,500 jobs and close a quarter of its national offices before a possible sale of the government department to the private sector, The Times has learnt.

The Registry will call its 7,700 staff in 20 offices around the country to a meeting today to explain the cuts, which are expected to affect all grades, from administration assistants to more senior civil servants.

Registry executives are expected to tell staff that the downturn in the housing market is to blame for plans to reduce costs, which will be subject to a 12-week consultation period that is due to end in January.

Union bosses are thought to be mounting a programme of sustained industrial action in response to the “accelerated transformation programme”, which will also involve outsourcing non-core functions and leave open the possibility of further cuts.

The Land Registry, which registers all land ownership transactions in England and Wales, reported a £130 million loss last year.

It has cut 1,000 jobs and merged a number of offices during what was a torrid 12 months for property transactions.

It is understood that an expensive IT project to introduce a new system of online conveyancing contributed to cost pressures.

The Land Registry introduced a system called Chain Matrix to increase the transparency of sales online but sources said that the multimillion-pound innovation had failed to take off as planned, and had not resulted in the forecast increase in revenue since its launch in March.

Today’s announcement is likely to aggravate pay negotiations with unions. The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) is already in discussions over suggested belowinflation pay rises for employees this year, amid anger among staff over executive salaries published for the last financial year, when the group was losing money.

Peter Collis, chief executive and chief land registrar, earned between £175,000 and £180,000 for 2008-09, a rise of nearly 13 per cent on the previous year.

The job cuts come soon after the department was earmarked for disposal under the Government’s £16 billion asset “car-boot sale”.

The Government has said that it hoped to raise about £3 billion from the sale of state-owned or part state-owned companies, although if a sale does not go ahead, Treasury officials plan to scrutinise the department to see how they can make more money.

Mr Collis made clear in April that the group planned to cut costs, but the scale of job cuts to be announced today was not previously known.

In its annual report to March 31, the Registry announced plans to merge offices in Birkenhead, Durham, Lytham, Nottingham and Swansea and to close offices in York and Harrow next year.

It said that more than 1,000 employees had chosen to take voluntary redundancy, with 120 transferred to the Department for Work and Pensions.

In the business plan for this year Mr Collis said: “The year to March 31, 2009, was a challenging year. The credit crunch and the resulting impact on the property and mortgage markets hit Land Registry hard, and we cannot assume that our trading position will improve rapidly.”

The Registry’s latest house price index put the number of property sales in the three months to June at 41,911 a month, 31 per cent lower than the 60,997 sales a month recorded over the same period a year earlier.

The group increased fees for its services by up to 30 per cent in July in response.

Source: ' Times '

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