David Lammy says £1bn privatisation of property registry is politically led and harmful to public purse and transparency

The government’s plan to privatise the Land Registry is “a purely political exercise” that will bring higher fees for consumers and undermine efforts to make the housing market more transparent, says David Lammy, a former Labour minister.

The MP for Tottenham, north London, will lead a debate in parliament on Thursday arguing against the proposed £1bn-plus sale of the registry, which records and keeps details of property ownership across England and Wales.

Lammy will say the government is “looking to sell off the family silver to turn a short-term profit, to try and make their sums add up”.

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He will say the sale has no economic rationale, adding: “This privatisation is a purely political exercise, with absolutely no regard for what is right for the Land Registry or the people of this country.”

The wording of a consultation document that was released on the eve of the Easter break had been “very much focused on how and not if” Land Registry operations should be moved to the private sector, he says.

He will cite the recent Panama Papers investigation, which highlighted the use of UK property by offshore companies to harbour money, as a reason why more transparency over property ownership is needed. “Privatising the Land Registry would achieve the complete opposite,” he will say.

A previously planned sale of the registry was abandoned in 2014 after the intervention of Vince Cable, who was then business secretary.

The new consultation has received negative responses from a wide range of organisations, including media groups, solicitors and the Competition and Markets Authority. The competition regulator said consumers and the economy would be best served by a model that promoted wide access to data at “cost-reflective” prices.

Selling off assets such as Land Registry 'will leave government worse off' Read more

Lammy will argue that the short-term profit derived from any sale will be dwarfed by increased costs ultimately paid by all in the form of increased fees, and dwarfed by “the lost revenue to the public purse in the medium to long term”.

At the moment people are asked to pay £3 to check property ownership records. The registry made a surplus of £100m in 2012-13.



A recent letter by Lammy to the business secretary, Sajid Javid, urging the government to abandon its sale plans, was signed by 65 MPs. An early-day motion secured more signatures, and opposition to the sale gained the backing of more than 100 MPs from eight political parties. Speakers at Thursday’s debate will include the Conservative MPs Richard Drax and John Stevenson.

A public petition on the 38 Degrees website attracted more than 300,000 signatures and was handed in to the business secretary in May. The team behind the Save the Land Registry campaign has gone to London to meet MPs ahead of the debate.

One of the campaign’s founders, Joy Bassett, from AP Bassett solicitors, said: “The public have known very little about the plans, but when they find out about what is going on they are outraged. This is no ordinary piece of family silver that is being sold off. This piece has our names engraved on it by way of our title deeds and mortgage deeds.”

Lammy said: “I have called for this debate because it is simply not in the public interest for the government to sell off the family silver to turn a short-term profit.

“This privatisation would be a huge step backwards in tackling the large-scale institutional corruption and tax avoidance brought to light by the Panama Papers.”