Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)
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421. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, and Local Government his plans to improve the efficiency of the Property Registration Authority to deal with its current backlog; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [5074/22]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal, Fianna Fail)
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The Property Registration Authority (PRA) provides essential services to support the property market. Although the National Land Register and its mapping base are fully digitised, and legal and spatial searches may be carried out through the landdirect.ie portal, the registration process itself remains paper-based because of legislative provisions prohibiting the use of digital signatures in property transactions.

Levels of completion of applications for registration in 2020 and 2021 were at circa 90 per cent of those achieved pre-pandemic. Notwithstanding this level of activity, there has been an accumulation of arrears in the period.

I recently approved the new PRA Statement of Strategy for 2022-2024, Resilience in a Changing Environment , which includes high-level objectives relating to the strategic management of case processing, the reduction of arrears in such casework, and customer–centric planning and delivery of services.

The PRA has secured additional funding for 2022 to address business continuity and arrears reduction. A new Arrears Clearance Programme has already been set in train, and cross organisational multi-disciplinary teams will be established to focus on the elimination of arrears. This programme, underpinned by project management discipline, envisages a radical, structured approach to implementation, with an emphasis on data analysis, innovation and business process improvement. The PRA intends to communicate this intent, and ongoing progress achieved, to both its internal and external stakeholders.