Carolyn Harris – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Carolyn Harris on 2015-12-14.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, how much the Exchequer received from the HM Land Registry trading fund in 2014-15.

Anna Soubry

Land Registry total revenue for 2014/15 was £297.1m. Land Registry paid a dividend of £19.1m to the Exchequer.

As a Trading Fund, Land Registry is subject to government rules set out in Managing Public Money. This specifies that the charges it makes for its core statutory functions should cover its full costs, 3.5% to reflect the cost of capital used in providing services. As a Trading Fund, Land Registry is required to return the charge for cost of capital to the Consolidated Fund as a dividend. In 2014/15 this ordinary dividend was £19.1million.

In 2014/15 Land Registry also paid a special dividend of £100million to the Exchequer. This reflected over-recovery from customers in previous years as a result of higher than forecast volume of transactions.