WIREDGOV

The restrictions of the Covid crisis have prompted four major conveyancing sector players to look into using digital and biometric tools to check identities when buying...

For any business involved in property transactions, arguably one of the most important tasks is to be certain of the legitimacy of those you are dealing with: any fraud could be very costly. Yet the systems used in the conveyancing world to date have made little use of modern identity technologies.

The Covid 19 crisis, as in many industries, has shone a light on the drawbacks of relying on paper-based and face-to face identity checks. The Land Registry therefore, has now teamed up with the Law Society, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) and the Chartered Institute for Legal Executives (CILEx) to look into more tech-savvy ways of making sure buyers and sellers are who they say they are. In a recent blog post, the organisations noted that they were considering a system similar to that used for applicants to the Home Office’s EU settlement scheme.

The recognition, by sectors such as conveyancing, that there is a real need for an ‘easy-to-use, modestly-priced, remote and digitally secure way’ of proving identity is extremely good news. It highlights the fact that identity is crucial to most commercial transactions; that current systems are out-dated and that it is high time we updated the current wasteful and long-winded processes to be fit for a digital world.

To this, techUK would add three significant additional points:

• It is not only home-working in the short term or current requirements for social distancing that make establishing digital identity usage a crucial step: it is the long-term future health of our economy. A system where identity is checked and rechecked for multiple purposes by a multiplicity of players in the economy is painfully wasteful.
• Technology is now leading economic progress, which is feeding on data. Access to and the ability to use and re-use this data will be the basis of innovation to come. We must acknowledge that a system of interoperable digital identities will be integral to the emergence of such a connected digital economy.
• The emergence of digital IDs should, in our view, be a central government concern. While steps such as this one, for conveyancing, are welcome, we must avoid the emergence of a tangle of disconnected solutions for identity, which does not serve the needs of citizens. We call for a centrally coordinated response to the digital identity need.