Groundhog day

How exciting to hear the media trailing ‘major new plans to modernise home buying and selling’, involving digital data. Have we finally cracked e-conveyancing?

It seems not. On the surface, this week’s ‘major new plans’ are disappointingly light on detail. The main announcement appears to be a 12-week project ‘to identify the design and implementation of agreed rules on data for the sector, so that it can easily be shared between conveyancers, lenders and other parties involved in a transaction’. We’re talking here about such things as building control and highways information; not exactly state secrets.

That ‘agreed rules’ still need to be set is depressing. The current housing minister probably doesn’t know this, but the principle that public sector information could and should be shareable was set by the EU’s PSI Directive in 2003, adopted by Gordon Brown’s government under an initiative called the Power of Information in 2007. It was picked up again by the Cabinet Office under the 2010 coalition government.

The fact we’re only now starting to work on the ‘design and implementation of agreed rules’ says much about UK public policy.

Further down the announcement is a line which kicks us back to another moment in Groundhog Day. This brings up the government’s plans for ‘digital identity verification services’. This is a modernised version of Tony Blair’s identity card scheme, abandoned by the coalition government on civil liberties grounds.

In the current iteration, digital identities will not be issued by a single big brother but by commercial providers under the ‘UK digital identity and attributes trust framework’. According to the responsible quango, the Office for Digital Identities and Attributes (yes, OfDIA), 55 such providers currently have services at beta release. We can expect OfDIA’s public profile to grow rapidly.

But back to property transactions. If we can finally crack the sharing of data along the conveyancing process, secured by robust digital identity checks, perhaps we will be able finally to enter e-conveyancing nirvana. Whether this will mitigate the cost and anxiety of buying or selling a home remains to be seen.