From Paper to Portal: How Planning Migrated Local Land Charges to New National Digital System

15 October 2025

Over the past four years, colleagues from Land Charges and Planning have played a central role in a complex, multi-year project migrating the council’s Local Land Charges data to HM Land Registry’s (HMLR) new national digital register.

We sat down with Business Support Manager Fiona Lambert to get the inside story on what the project involved, what it means for the public, and the massive effort the team undertook behind the scenes.

“The Land Charges section responds to land search requests from solicitors and search companies for conveyancing and related purposes,” Fiona explained.

“As part of that, we maintain a Local Land Charges register - which includes any legal restrictions or obligations that apply to land or property.”

Roughly 80% of these charges relate to planning – things like conditions attached to planning permissions.

Previously, the council would respond to these searches manually. But HMLR launched a new national digital register to centralise and simplify the process – aiming to make conveyancing a simpler and more accessible process.

“One of the biggest challenges was converting all our land charge records from purely textual (written records) to include spatial data (physical spaces) such as a mapped boundary, and HMLR required this spatial data to be able to build their national map-based system” Fiona said.

The planning team had to go back as far as 1977 – digging through decades of records, many of which were not digitised, and some of which were stored only on microfiche.

She added: “If you know microfiche – those little film cards – that’s where a lot of our data lived. HMLR took them, scanned them, and then returned digital versions to us. But it wasn’t a complete fix, we still had to manually match and fill in gaps.

“We had to go through all of that, cross-reference, fill in what was missing - and make sure everything lined up properly.”

Fiona said the work to get the project over the line before the deadline was very much a team-effort: “Benji Jenkins and Aaron Flanigan from Land Charges, were absolute troopers - they did a lot of the legwork on drawing, backfilling data, and cross-checking - for example, if the spatial boundary didn’t match the address , we’d receive error logs to fix it. Sometimes it was small things like odd-shaped boundaries or missing data, but it meant a lot of back and forth”.

After four years of work, the project finally crossed the finish line in August 2025: “All our approved planning records – both textual and spatial – are now available through the national register along with other charges such as Highways Agreements and Environmental Health notices. That means the public can access them directly, without needing to go through us.

“It’s definitely relieved pressure on our team and on Land Charges, we still respond directly to more complex searches and though the work is more detailed, it’s less frequent.

Fiona added: “It was a huge task and was stressful at times – especially toward the end when we were under tight deadlines from HMLR. But I’m really proud of what the team achieved.

“It was one of those projects where you start thinking ‘how are we ever going to do this?’ – and then you actually get it done. It’s been a great example of teamwork.”