The news that the Land Registry Online has removed scanned copies of mortgage deeds from houses is certainly good news. From an Identity Theft point of view such documents would be invaluable and should not be freely available to all and sundry.
However, it's worth noting that for £3 you can still do a search and find out the full names of the people in a given address, how much they paid for their house and who their mortgage provider is.
3 comments:
There is a very good reason for that. One of the principles inherent in any system of property law is publicity - this makes clear to third parties (ie prospective creditors and prospective purchasers) whether a person owns property and whether there are securities affecting the property - which can influence the decision to buy or to lend. No purchaser would happily buy a property unless satisfied that the seller owns it.
Such an approach - of a public rgeister - may be relatively novel in English law (which did not properly introduce land registration until the twentieth century (and even then a large number of properties remain unregistered) influenced by the Torrens system in Australia which was introduced in the late nineteenth century) but in other countries (such as Scotland where land registration was introduced in 1617, or Germany where it was introduced in the early 19th century). The publicity of the owner and the existence of securities, and who has the securities, is an important part of the system. The alternative is to provide that the register is not searchable - which can have implications for the provision of finance to individuals, as creditors would have to rely on the word of the borrower (which experience from former cabinet ministers indicates may not be reliable) - or that it is freely searchable only by designated individuals, which would require state intervention in deciding who had an interest to look.
What there was no excuse for was the reprinting of account details on the deeds, although the problem there lies with the lenders who required the details on the security deed for their own administrative purposes. This is not an inherent problem in the Land Register, but in the practice of those that use it.
If I may could I link to this post and repeat the comment in my blog - as I had been going to write on this later today from a Scottish legal perspective. I completely understand your data protection concerns, but there are purposes behind the public register that require ppolic makers to balance the respective interests.
feel free, although I should add that having a publicly available record does not need to be quite so easy.
The website http://www.uk-landregistry.co.uk has an account with Land registry Direct and they can still get hold of copies of mortgages and leases as long as they are for a genuine purpose.
Post a Comment