What, When & Where?
On 22nd November, members of the ScotLIS team travelled down to Liverpool to attend the HMLR’s Annual Local Land Charges National Conference, an event that brings together stakeholders from various sectors including Local Authorities, Searchers and Conveyancers.
The conference took place in the beautiful St. George’s Hall, in the centre of the city, and attracted over 300 delegates from across the country all interested in the latest updates on the Local Land Charges project.
The LLC conference was an opportunity for the HMLR to showcase their new digital LLC service which is currently under development, a central, digital service for LLC which will consolidate local authority registers into a single register.
This involves digitising more than 20 million records currently held in a range of formats so that the whole register will be accessible online.
Rundown of the Day
The day started off with a keynote speech from HM Land Registry’s Chief Executive Graham Farrant talking to delegates about the ongoing Digital Transformation programme at HMLR. This was followed by a presentation on the challenges of 21st century conveyancing by Eddie Goldsmith, a founding partner at GWlegal, a leading law firm in North West England.
One of the participating Local Authorities, Liverpool City Council spoke very positively about their experience of working on the Local Land Charges project to date, highlighting that early, one to one engagement and collaboration had been key to progressing this piece of work.
This was followed up by an introduction to the LLC Senior Leadership team and overview of the progress made since last year’s conference. After the mid-morning break, the day was broken down into two different syndicate sessions for Customers and Local Authorities, focusing on pertinent subject areas for each of the stakeholder groups – customer insights and data.
What were RoS doing there?
The ScotLIS team were invited to participate in the syndicate sessions and also had an exhibition stand in the Great Hall along with other exhibitors from HMLR and fellow external organisations who were showcasing their products and services.
HMLR were showcasing a number of their services including their Digital service – Find Property Information, Property Alert Service, a Casework demonstration to name but a few.
There was a lot of interest in ScotLIS from delegates attending the Conference, who were keen to find out more about us (RoS), HMLR’s Scottish counterparts, and asked about similarities and differences north of the border.
Lots of visitors to the stand were interested to learn about the General Registers of Sasines, how it’s differs from the Land Register and many were surprised to hear that it was 400 years old.
With regard to ScotLIS, stakeholders liked what they saw with the map based interface being a huge hit. They saw a lot of similarities with how HMLR’s digital services were being designed.
For us at Registers of Scotland, it was a great opportunity to speak to HMLR colleagues who are also designing, developing and delivering digital products and services. It was also an opportunity to share our knowledge and learning particularly as both organisations progress their Digital Transformation programmes.
Events like these are a great way to make connections with people, in this instance with people from different business areas within HMLR. We spoke to Liz Taylder, Product Owner for HMLR’s Property Alerts Service, an area of business that RoS are currently exploring, Eileen Morrison from Policy and Anton Hunt from Customer Accounts and Data Products.
Our stand was consistently busy throughout the day, with lots of interested parties and we were delighted when we got a visit from HM Land Registry’s Chief Executive Graham Farrant who tried out ScotLIS for himself with our Service Design Lead, Hilary Brownlie.
The Conference was brought to a close by Karina Singh, Director of Transformation at HMLR following a Q&A with delegates.
Find out more!
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