Ms Marie Hunt:

I think that would be great. There have been, I suppose, some efforts to improve it recently. We have had provisions such as the property price register on the residential side which is hugely helpful. We have the residential property price index now. Both need some modifications to improve them even further, but they are a step in the right direction.

We have a commercial lease database, created by the Property Services Regulatory Authority, PSRA, but it is not really fit for purpose. It does not really help us, from a transactional point of view. What we need is a central clearing house where all the big firms supply their transactional information into one clearing house and the aggregate is brought back. There are models for that right across Europe. My colleagues in Paris tell me that they have a very good system working, for example, in the Paris region. It would be quite easy to do. It would avoid all of the major firms counting the same numbers and coming up with slightly different results because of definitions.