NLIS History

The genesis of NLIS can be traced back to the late eighties and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors' (RICS) Doomsday 2000 project, which aimed to catalogue all land and property data in the UK. It was a central theme of the government's 1992 Citizens Charter White Paper, which stated that the creation of a "national land information system may be one way to allow the citizen faster and easier access to an authoritative and comprehensive public record of all land and property". Speed, quality, reliability and value-for-money were the key benefits that NLIS was established to offer.

The NLIS project was led initially by HM Land Registry (HMLR) until after the 'proof of concept' pilot in Bristol, which commenced in April 1998. Later that same year in December, the project was awarded £2.3 million from the Government's Invest to Save Budget (ISB) to enable the delivery of NLIS as one of the first examples of 'joined-up government'. The NLIS Channel Implementation Project was launched to help to achieve the targets set by the Modernising Government White Paper of 1999 and the private sector was invited to provide the necessary IT infrastructure and on-line services.

In August 2000 NLIS received an Award for Technical Excellence from the British Computer Society. The Bristol pilot was so successful that it continued in operation, until the NLIS Hub and channels went live in 2001.

A joint partnership between HMLR and the Improvement & Development Agency (I&DeA), the body representing the interests of local government, took the project forward. Local Government Information House (LGIH), a wholly owned subsidiary of I&DeA, was assigned the task of managing the NLIS assets including local authority relationships, the NLIS brand and licenses, on behalf of local government under the agreement (Concordat).

I&DeA established C-NLIS (later renamed Land Data) to serve the interests of the general public by making authoritative property search information accessible to all, whilst at the same time improving the home buying and selling process.