Conveyancers often blame councils for delays in property transactions, and now a comparison site has named and shamed the councils taking longest to respond to local searches.

Compare My Move has analysed the speed of local council search operations by submitting Freedom of Information requests to over 400 UK councils. It says Plymouth City Council takes the longest time to complete a local land search, with the local authority taking on average 36 days to complete a local land search. This is 24 days longer than it took Plymouth City Council to process searches in 2020, when only an 11-day turnaround was the average. One reason behind the rising delays could be the number of local land searches Plymouth City Council undertakes every month, which is up 80% year-on-year.

Following closely in second place is Lewes District Council taking an average of 35 days to complete a local land search – up from 19 days in 2020 – despite only receiving an average of 261 search requests a month.

Wiltshire Council (33 days), Salford City Council (33 days) and Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council (25 days) complete the top five councils most likely to delay a property completion due to their long turnaround times for local land searches.

At the other end of the scale, over 60% of the councils analysed fall under the eight-day average to complete a local land search. Impressively, 11 councils take just one working day to complete a local land search – including North Devon Council, Cardiff Council and City of York Council.