Vale Land Charges Backlog Down to 40 Searches

The number of local land charges searches still outstanding at Vale of White Horse District Council has fallen from 205 to 40. The figure is in a report going to councillors at Abbey House in Abingdon on Monday 7 September.

Those searches are the council-held part of a conveyancing search. Almost every home sale in Abingdon, Wantage and Faringdon needs one, and a buyer’s solicitor will not normally let a sale complete without it.

The report, from the council’s Director of Legal and Democratic Services, counts:

• 205 Vale searches outstanding on 13 July 2026, the day the new system launched
• 40 Vale searches outstanding on 27 August 2026
• 271 outstanding at neighbouring South Oxfordshire on 13 July, down to 64

The two councils share the service. The report says the extended downtime “was unacceptable and had significant impact on residents, businesses, solicitors, councillors and the local property market”.

The service was off for three months

Searches stopped on 8 April, when the councils stopped entering data into the old Ocella system ahead of a migration. Ocella had been running for more than a decade at the Vale and more than three decades at South Oxfordshire. The plan was for land charges to return shortly after the planning system, which went live on 23 April.

It did not. Land charges did not come back until Monday 13 July, just over three months after it went down.

The report gives the reason. The council had hired a consultant to configure the new MasterGov land charges module, and had been assured the work was nearly finished when it committed to the April shutdown. It was not. Officers eventually took the configuration off the consultant and handed it to the councils’ own IT development team, who had to build up the MasterGov coding expertise as they went.

The report is blunt about why nobody spotted it earlier. The land charges service itself is run by Capita under a four-council contract. After decades of outsourcing, the councils had “limited organisational knowledge” of how their own service worked. They could not always say which data a given search question was pulling from.

This was the second failed attempt at a replacement. The councils signed with Idox in August 2023, then terminated that contract in July 2024 after concluding the product could not support two separate councils. Ocella’s supplier had already told them, in March 2023, that it was closing the business on 31 December 2026.

There is no legal deadline for a search

The council’s published promise is to return official searches within eight working days, and it says it aims for five. It is not there yet. Its Local Land Charges page, last updated on 20 August, says April, May and June searches are done and that July requests have only just started being processed.

If your search is late, the report is candid that there is very little you can do about it. Land charges law has a compensation scheme for searches that come back wrong, but none for searches that come back late. The Secretary of State had the power to set a maximum response time and chose not to. In the report’s words, “there is no defined specific deadline which councils were required to deliver land charges search results”.

Some people have told the councils they are considering claims. The report says none has been submitted, and that any claim would have to go through the council’s own complaints procedure and then the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman first. Officers’ research on the Ombudsman’s website suggests no council has been reported over this kind of delay, despite other authorities running far longer ones.

One group is getting something. The report says provision has been made “for households where additional Council tax liability has been identified as a direct result of the downtime of the land charges system”. It does not say how many households that is, or how the extra liability arose.

What it means for you

• If you are selling in the Vale and your search was submitted in July, it is only now being processed. There is no published date for when the eight-day turnaround returns.
• Do not resubmit. The council says searches sent by email before 13 July are already recorded, and sending the same request again through the new portal will not speed it up.
• A personal search is different. Those are done by your own search agent against the public register, not by the council, so the council cannot tell you where yours is. Ask the agent.
• The new public mapping system, Cadcorp WebMap at maps.southandvale.gov.uk, was still returning a 404 error when we checked it on 28 August. The council’s own FAQ, last updated on 23 July, says the old mapping system has not been updated since 10 April. Treat anything you read off it as more than four months out of date.
• The Joint Scrutiny Committee takes the report at 6.30pm on Monday 7 September at Abbey House, Abbey Close, Abingdon. It is open to the public and streamed on the councils’ YouTube channel. Members of the public can only speak if they have registered in advance; the agenda gives democratic services officer Candida Basilio on 01235 422524.

Planning is still catching up too. The council’s system FAQ warns that some applications will take longer than usual to determine and that officers “cannot commit to specific dates”. If you are waiting on a decision, our Abingdon planning news page tracks what is coming through, and the house prices page has what homes in the district are actually selling for.