House sale searches stopped for 96 days this year, and 64 were still unanswered on 27 August. The council's report says no law sets a deadline for them.

If your house sale stalled in Henley this spring, a council report published this month explains why. Local land charges searches, the council searches a conveyancer orders as part of a property purchase, could not be carried out in South Oxfordshire for 96 days.

The service stopped on 8 April, when the council switched off data entry into its old Ocella system. The replacement did not open until Monday 13 July.

A report to the Joint Scrutiny Committee on 7 September sets out what went wrong. Councillors had asked for it.

The numbers the council published

The report is the first time the size of the queue has been put in public. It gives two snapshots:

Backlog at 13 July 2026 Outstanding at 27 August 2026
South Oxfordshire 271 64
Vale of White Horse 205 40

Each of those 271 is a search ordered against a property in the district. The report says the disruption hit “residents, businesses, solicitors, and the local property market”, and that it caused “delays to property transactions”. The council has not published a figure since 27 August.

The target turnaround is eight working days. The council’s land charges page says it endeavours to answer within five, and that the system is now live and accepting searches.

The most useful line in the report for anyone still waiting is in the legal implications section. There is no statutory time limit at all:

“What the legislation does not include are any mechanisms for claims that arise due to delay in delivering Land Charges searches though the Secretary of State did have the opportunity to establish a statutory maximum response time and chose not to do so.”

The report adds that “there is no defined specific deadline which councils were required to deliver land charges search results”. The eight working days is a service standard the council sets itself, not a legal duty.

Land charges law does provide a compensation route for a search that contains an error. It provides none for a search that simply does not arrive.

The report says officers checked the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s published decisions and found no council reported to the Ombudsman over this kind of delay, “despite it being known to Officers that other councils have had delays of far longer”. Some complainants have said they are considering claims. None had been submitted when the report was written.

Land charges search backlog, South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse Bar chart. South Oxfordshire had 271 searches in the backlog on 13 July 2026 and 64 outstanding on 27 August 2026. Vale of White Horse had 205 on 13 July and 40 on 27 August. The service was unavailable from 8 April to 13 July 2026, a period of 96 days. The search queue, before and after Searches waiting when the new system opened on 13 July 2026, against those still outstanding on 27 August 2026. 13 July 2026 27 August 2026 South Oxfordshire Vale of White Horse 271 64 205 40 No searches at all were carried out between 8 April and 13 July 2026: 96 days. Source: Joint Scrutiny Committee report, 7 September 2026; council statement, 10 July 2026. Graphic by The Henley Post
The queue cleared quickly once the new system opened. Getting it open took three months longer than planned.

Council tax is the hidden cost

Buried in the financial implications is a line that matters to anyone caught mid-purchase:

“Some 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.”

The report does not say how many households, how much, or how the extra liability arose. South Oxfordshire’s charges are set out on our council tax bands page.

If you think you were billed more because a search was stuck, that line is worth quoting in a complaint.

What actually went wrong

The searches themselves are carried out by Capita under a four-council partnership contract, using data the councils own. The replacement of Ocella, a system in place for about 30 years and heavily customised, was the last stage of a much larger IT programme.

The report’s own account of the failure:

  • The councils had “limited organisational knowledge” of how their own land charges service worked, after years of outsourcing, and so could not properly judge the risk.
  • A first replacement, Idox, was bought in August 2023 and abandoned on 3 July 2024 because it could not support two councils as separate sovereign bodies. That left far less time for the second attempt.
  • The go-live date slipped from September 2025 to April 2026 because a new mapping system, Cadcorp, had to be installed at the same time. Only one member of IT staff held the specialist knowledge for it.
  • The planning system went live on 23 April 2026 on schedule, moving about 8.5Tb of data and 7.5 million files. Land charges went down with it and did not come back.
  • The consultant configuring the land charges module was “significantly behind the anticipated schedule”. The councils’ own IT team took the work over.
  • Integration with Socrata, the Capita platform behind online personal searches, held things up further. Going live without it was rejected after the councils found Havant Borough Council had been doing personal searches by hand since September 2025 and still had not fixed the same problem.

The conclusion says the disruption “was not the result of a single failure” but of “longstanding organisational, strategic and governance weaknesses”. The councils commit to tighter oversight at project gateways, formal change control for system configuration, and clearer lines of accountability where a supplier delivers the service.

What the leaders said

South Oxfordshire’s leader, Cllr Maggie Filipova-Rivers, and the Vale’s leader, Cllr Bethia Thomas, apologised when the system reopened in July. They said the upgrade replaced “systems that had been in place for a very long time, over three decades at South Oxfordshire”, and promised to look at “what lessons can be learned and if disruption could have been reduced”.

That is the report councillors have now seen. Announcing it on 9 September, the councils said they “fully recognise the frustration and uncertainty this has caused for residents, businesses and professionals”.

What it means for you

  • Searches are being accepted again. Official searches are submitted through the council’s online portal, by email with BACS payment, through the National Land Information Service, or via a search company.
  • Budget for the fee. From 1 April 2026 a residential LLC1 costs £98.00, a residential CON29R costs £166.80 including VAT, and the two together cost £264.80. Commercial searches cost more.
  • Eight working days is a target, not a right. If yours is late, chasing it is the only lever, because no statute sets a limit.
  • Complain in writing if you lost money. The report says claims must go through the councils’ complaints procedure first, then to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. Keep the dates your search was submitted and returned.
  • Check your council tax if a purchase stalled. The councils have set money aside for households billed extra as a direct result of the outage.
  • If you are buying or selling in the district, our Henley house prices page tracks what homes here are actually selling for.

Sources