Two councils are facing challenges conducting local land charge searches following last year’s cyber attacks.

Since the breach, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) and Westminster City Council have encountered issues carrying out local land charge searches.

The search process requires councils to provide information about a property to a solicitor or conveyancer on behalf of a potential buyer.

RBKC has confirmed that it is also unable to progress new planning applications beyond the validation stage at present, while Westminster City Council has implemented manual processes for applications because its usual systems are ‘temporarily unavailable’.

The latter has acknowledged that manual processing takes longer than usual, but reassured residents that applications requiring consultation will be prioritised when systems are restored.

Cllr Elizabeth Campbell, leader of RBKC, explained that the NCC Group, the Met Police and the National Cyber Security Centre are supporting the council in preparing to turn back on its systems, which are currently being checked.

Commenting on the barriers to performing local land charge searches and processing applications, Cllr Campbell said: ‘We know this is frustrating and will work as hard as possible to tackle the backlog once our systems are safely restored.’

A Westminster City Council spokesperson added that its teams had been working ‘around the clock’ to carry out the system restoration process.

‘We understand how important this service is and we are sorry for the difficulties the disruption has caused. Subject to ongoing systems work, we anticipate resuming processing as soon as possible’, they said.