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"Digitising home buying is a step forward but, without transparency and accountability, it won’t fix the real problem"

ended 10. February 2025

Over the weekend, the Government has announced major new plans to modernise home buying and selling to save people time and money and further measures to improve the lives of leaseholders. One of the key reasons the buying and selling process can be long and frustrating, it says, is a lack of digitalisation and join up in the sector, which is why the government is opening up key property information, ensuring this data can be shared between trusted professionals more easily, and driving forward plans for digital identity services to slash transaction times. These reforms will make home buying fit for the 21st Century and give much-needed certainty to everyone involved in property transactions, with one million taking place in the UK every year. Newspage asked property, mortgage and GDPR experts for their views, which will appear below until 10am.

8 responses from the Newspage community

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Chris Barry
Director at Thomas Legal
The UK has one of the most outdated and lengthy property purchasing process in the world, partly due to having varying tenures such as leasehold, which isn’t replicated elsewhere but also due to a lack of innovation across all aspects of the process. I welcome any attempts to make the process quicker and easier for clients but no sooner had the government plans broke on Sunday morning, the Property Lawyers Alliance rejected it stating the proposed changes are not tackling the real delays. Examples like the Building Safety Act are causing huge issues for the industry right now and fixing this would arguably have a more impactful benefit for clients and property professionals in the short term. Having information available upfront will certainly help but it is by no means the root cause of what is a real problem for all those involved with property.
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Keith Budden
Managing Director at Ensurety
While details are still sketchy at this stage, taken overall any improvement to the often clunky system of information gathering for property transactions has to be a good thing. However, firstly it is important that all safeguards are put in place to ensure the security of this information but also care over how much sight of the data is given to central Government. I can see how having every housing transaction process digitised via a common platform could perhaps justifiably be used to detect money laundering, for example, but I'm not so sure I would be happy with Central Government having one place to go to check who was buying/leasing property in a certain area, where they'd proved their identity and income, etc. It starts to get a real feeling of Big Brother is watching you.
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Ranald Mitchell
Director at bad credit mortgage specialists Charwin Mortgages
In 2025, it’s astonishing that we’re only now addressing the glaring inefficiencies in the home-buying process. Digitalisation and data sharing should have been a priority years ago. Buying a home should be transparent, efficient and less stressful, yet we’ve been stuck in an outdated and fragmented system for too long. If these reforms truly streamline transactions and reduce fall-throughs, they’re not just welcome, they’re essential.
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Michelle Lawson
Director at Lawson Financial
This is long overdue and should be much welcomed and supported. We have more technology now than ever before yet the process is the slowest it’s ever been. How can that be? A complete overhaul of an archaic process will benefit everyone.
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Mike Staton
Director at Staton Mortgages
There is one simple way to help home buying and selling become quicker and cheaper and many people in the industry have been screaming out for it for years: egulate the Estate Agents. It is not rocket science, whilst estate agents have Carte Blanche in this process, the process will never be quick and cheap. At the moment cheap prices means cheap quality. Make the estate agents accountable for their actions and give them serious consequences if they fail a customer. Having visited the coal authority on numerous occasions, I can confirm we have been in a position for years to digitise local searches. The problem is the local councils make too much money out of the current long winded and drawn out process and are reluctant to use any new process that reduces their income, whether or not it improves the process.
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Dariusz Karpowicz
Director at Albion Financial Advice
Isn't it rather ironic that in an age where we can order a pizza with a finger tap, buying a house in the UK still feels like we're stuck in the Victorian era? While the government's latest digitalisation plans sound promising, they're rather like putting a smart doorbell on a house with creaky floorboards. It's a start, but it hardly fixes the fundamental issues.
The real elephant in the room is about accountability, not just technology. When solicitors have somehow managed to double their average case times from two to four months over the past 15 years (despite all our technological advances), you has to wonder whether simply digitising the process will be enough without proper regulation and consequences for those causing delays.
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Elliott Culley
Director at Switch Mortgage Finance
A more joined-up approach across all parts of the buying process is welcome news and, if actioned correctly, will save time and money. At the moment there are many hoops a potential buyer has to jump through, with some of these being repetitive and the person being asked to provide the same information on numerous occasions.
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Patricia McGirr
Founder at Repossession Rescue Network
Digitising home buying is a step forward but, without transparency and accountability, it won’t fix the real problem: delays that leave buyers hanging, with no consequences for those who cause them. Making property data accessible will help, but what buyers really need is a system where solicitors, lenders and agents are held to account. Deals collapse, chains break and people lose thousands because no one takes responsibility for the bottlenecks. And for leaseholders? Digital reforms won’t fix cladding nightmares or exploitative ground rents. If the government wants a truly modern property market, it’s not just about better tech, it’s about real accountability for those who slow the process down.