HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey signed a three-year memorandum of understanding in August, aimed at making their data easier to use together. The government's framing put some scale on it: property in England and Wales worth close to £9 trillion, more than half the nation's wealth, with around £1.66 trillion of lending secured against it.
Two public bodies have held adjacent halves of the same picture for decades. One knows who owns what and on what terms. The other knows where everything is and what shape it is. Almost every question a lender, a conveyancer or a valuer actually needs answered requires both.
Joining them has been left to whoever needed the answer. I build products on both datasets, so I can tell you it gets done thousands of times over, separately, at cost, with slightly different results each time.
The part I would watch is not the announcement. It is the distribution. The plan includes putting Land Registry data through the OS Data Hub, which is a decision about how data leaves the building rather than what is in it. Those decisions matter more than they sound like they do, because they determine whether the joining happens once, centrally, or gets re-done by every organisation downstream.
A memorandum of understanding is a statement of intent with a three-year shelf life, and plenty of them quietly expire. But if you are a lender, a conveyancer, or anyone underwriting property risk at volume, this is the kind of change that removes a cost you have stopped noticing you pay.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
