Mortgage deals collapse as civil servants allowed 60 days off a year
Sales are falling through and chains breaking down while Land Registry staff rewarded with ‘flexi-time’
HOMEOWNERS have been left unable to remortgage their properties as it emerged that civil servants responsible for the paperwork are able to take up to 60 days off a year.
Chronic delays at His Majesty’s Land Registry (HMLR) have resulted in a sevenfold increase in waiting times since 2019 for “complex” registrations such as for new-build properties, from an average of 52 days to 14 months.
It means some homeowners cannot refinance their properties after their fixed-term mortgage comes to an end because they are not recorded as the legal owners.
Conveyancing lawyers and mortgage brokers said thousands of people would potentially be left out of pocket because of the delays, as they will be subjected to variable mortgages which often have higher interest rates.
The bottleneck has resulted in sales falling through and chains breaking down, experts claim.
Despite the delays, The Daily Telegraph can reveal some officials employed by HMLR are rewarded with a “flexi-time” scheme that permits them to choose their hours and offers up to 24 days “flexi-leave” per year on top of their annual allowance in return for working overtime. This means they could take three months’ worth of time off per year. HMLR says this is in line with that offered across the Civil Service.
Meanwhile, complaints to HMLR, which registers the ownership of land in England and Wales, increased by 85 per cent to 9,566 last year compared with 2020. Of the 50 per cent that were upheld, almost a third related to delays with registration applications.
Jacob Rees-mogg, the Conservative MP, said he was “most concerned” with the quango’s working practices and “failure to deliver” while he was Business Secretary.
Steph Lyke, partner at SAS Daniels Solicitors, said “thousands of homeowners” could be stuck on high mortgage rates in the coming months because of the delays, which have been “exacerbated by people working remotely”.
Although HMLR offers customers the option to expedite applications within a target 10-day deadline, this is not always met, with one lawyer claiming one expedited application took seven months to complete.
Johnny Drysdale, partner at Keystone Law, said: “Because of the delays I’ve had people lose mortgage offers, chain transactions break down.”
HMLR staff are given “input and choice” about how and when they work from the office, and are able to “vary” their start, finish and break times to suit their needs. Some staff working for the quango are given 28.5 days annual leave plus eight days for bank holidays and a possible further 24 days in flexi-leave in exchange for working extra hours.
HMLR, which has 14 offices and employs around 6,000 staff, shared a post on its blog in which a civil servant describes how flexi-time allowed her to take extended lunch breaks so she could continue volunteering without “interrupting my day job”. While HMLR is not taxpayer-funded, in the 2021 Spending Review the body was handed more than £1.3billion over three years for “modernisation”.
Meanwhile, the firm’s annual accounts reveal the interim official in charge of the quango’s digital, data and technology earns up to £380,000 per year, while the chief executive earns around £170,000 in salary and pension benefits.
Duncan Simpson, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Flexi-working quangocrats, dragging their feet on delivering basic services, are causing misery for thousands of worried homeowners.”
A HMLR spokesman said despite “unprecedented” demand the department’s output this year increased by a fifth.
He said the majority of about 40million annual requests are automated while manual updates take on average three weeks. He added that more complex cases “are taking longer than this”.