The Gazette 1991

april 1991

g a z e t t e

The Future of the Land Registry and the Registry of Deeds

by Catherine Treacy, Registrar of Titles

delivered by The Registrar of Titles

to cope satisfactorily with the multiplicity of demand. Our business in the Registries is therefore tailor-made for taking advantage of the speedy access and multi-access facilities which technology offers. This has been proved in the Dublin Region of the Land Registry where all of the folios are now computerised. The computerised programme has been extended to the Western Region where all new folios opened since January 1987 are computerised. Being a firm believer in proper planning and research so that implementation can then take place smoothly and efficiently and also believing totally that technology can only succeed in increasing efficiency when it is linked into and co-ordinated wi th the proper organisation of a business, one of my first acts on taking up office in April of this year was to set about drawing up a Strategic Plan to determine future strategy in the

The following is the text of a lector to the Lawtech Exhibition, 1990. I am delighted to be here today participating in this very useful exercise which has been, as one has come to expect, so well planned and organized by the Law Society. The combined Registries, ue. Land Registry and Registry of Deeds, have been the subject of various criticisms over the last number of years which highlighted the negative aspects of the Registries, such as the arrears situation and the consequent delays in registration. I do not propose to dwell on such matters, except to say that signi- ficant effort has been directed towards the elimination of these arrears in key areas, the benefits of which I would hope some of you are experiencing already. My brief, however, is to look ahead and convey to you what I see as the future role of the Registries. The fact that I am here to talk about the future of the Registries is a definite indication of my con- " . . . significant effort has been directed towards the elimination o f . . . arrears in key areas fidence that there is a future for the Registries and a good one at that. I consider also that a Seminar which is part of a technology exhibition is an appropriate forum for this ex- ercise in looking ahead as it is my firm belief that the successfulfuture of the Registries lies in their ability to adapt to the technological era. The services which the Regis- tries provide are record-based. Every application made for registra- tion involves the retrieval and updating of the folio. It may also

involve the retrieval of a map or previous instruments. There are approximately 100,000 applications for registrations made in the Land Registry yearly. Many of these would involve a number of folios. This statistic gives a clear indication of the enormity of the task of retrieval alone. That, however, is only part of the picture Before an actual application for registration is made, or indeed in some cases where no application is subsequently made, folios and instruments are requested by our clients for inspection, copying purposes etc. When the demand in this area is added to the actual applications, the total demand for folios comes to approximately 2,500 per day. Even if the error rate in the manual re-filing of these folios was kept to a half of 1%, that would involve the misfiling of around 12 folios per day. With a record base of 1.25 million manual folios and growing at the rate of approximately 20,000 per year, finding these possibly misfiled 12 folios per day would reduce the task of finding the proverbial needle in the haystack to child's play by comparison. It is not just a problem of volume that we have to cope with however; there is a continuous problem caused by the multiplicity of demand. It is not just that these 2,500 folios are needed daily in one area alone; many of these folios will have been requested simul- taneously for a number of purposes e£. copy folio, land certificate, inspection etc. The paper folio like other physical objects can however only be in one place at any given time, and it is impossible therefore

Catherine Treacy

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