When a solicitor chases you about a slow search, the easy answer is the council.
Sometimes that's true. Sometimes a council is slow and there's nothing to be done about it. But if you're regularly losing days — or if your turnaround times are inconsistent, or if solicitors are chasing more than you'd like — the council is probably not the only reason.
In twenty years of processing searches and watching how firms operate, the delays that are fixable are almost always inside the firm. The council wait is what it is. What happens before you send the request, and after you get the response back, is where you have control.
The time nobody counts
Draw a line through a typical search. There are four phases:
- Order arrives → request sent to council
- Waiting on council
- Response received → report built
- Report issued → invoice out
Everyone watches phase two. It's visible, it's someone else's fault, and there's not much you can do about it.
Phases one, three, and four? That's where most search firms are quietly losing hours.
Phase one: before the request goes out
The address
The solicitor sends an order. The address isn't always clean. "14 Victoria Road" isn't good enough — you need the UPRN confirmed before anything else moves.
90% of addresses resolve automatically with decent lookup tools. The other 10% don't. And in most firms, each one that doesn't resolve automatically gets handed to the most experienced person to sort out, because they're the only one who knows how.
That's 10% of your order volume going through a single bottleneck. At 100 searches a week, that's ten searches every week that sit waiting for one person to have a moment. Each exception can eat 20 minutes if the process isn't clean.
The council request
Do you know, without looking it up, what Rossendale Borough Council needs on a search request? That you have to include the admin ward? That if you don't include it, they'll reject the request and you won't find out for three days?
Most experienced search processors know this. What happens when they're off sick?
The council-specific knowledge that lives in your team's heads is an operational risk every time someone's not there. And building a request manually, even when you do know what's needed, takes time — time that should be automatic.
The boundary plan
The property boundary plan goes with every council request. Pulling it from HM Land Registry's INSPIRE data, getting it in the right format for the right provider, attaching it — this should take seconds. In a manual workflow it often takes minutes. At scale, minutes per order is significant.
Providers
Drainage and environmental searches go to Martello or Landmark. That means a separate portal, a separate login, and manually entering data you already have. Every time. For every order.
It's one of the most obvious inefficiencies in the industry and it's so routine that most firms don't notice it anymore.
Phase three: after the response comes back
You get the council response. In a busy day, it goes into the inbox and waits while someone works through other things. The search is technically done. The solicitor doesn't know that.
When it does get picked up, the report has to be built. If that means opening a Word template and typing in answers from the council's email, that's slow and it's where errors happen — not because anyone's careless, but because transcription is inherently imperfect. A blank field or a transposed figure is easy to miss.
A review step helps. But if the review is "someone reads it before it goes out" rather than "the system checks it against what was expected," you're relying on attention that has a lot of competing demands.
Phase four: invoice
The report goes out. The invoice gets raised when someone has a minute.
In a week where the team is stretched, that might be at the end of the week. Sometimes longer. That's a gap between doing the work and asking to be paid for it — and at month-end, someone has to reconcile all of it.
At 20 searches a week that's manageable. At 100 it's a recurring overhead that shouldn't exist.
What the numbers actually look like
Take a firm doing 100 searches a week and losing, say, 15 minutes per order to avoidable process friction across the intake and report stages. That's around 25 hours a week. Every week.
That's most of a full-time role, spent on friction rather than work. It doesn't get better when volume increases — it gets worse.
"The thing that surprises people when they actually measure it is how much time goes before the council ever gets involved. You send the request on day three instead of day one because something wasn't clean or someone was busy. The council takes their four days. The solicitor thinks it took seven. And you blamed the council."
— Valerie Bennett, Personal Search Veteran · June 2026
The highest-return changes
You don't need to fix everything at once. The changes that return the most are:
Good UPRN lookup tooling. Reduce the time each address exception takes. Make the exception process something any team member can handle, not just the most experienced one.
Council requirements in the system, not in people's heads. Every council's submission details, format requirements, and known quirks should be documented, current, and available to everyone — not assembled from memory each time.
Automatic request generation. The council request should be built from the order data already in your system. Not typed from scratch. Not assembled from a template by hand.
Proactive chase management. A system that flags approaching deadlines, not one that relies on someone noticing an email hasn't arrived.
Invoicing at point of completion. Not when someone gets round to it. Automatically, when the report is marked as issued.
None of these are revolutionary. They're just the difference between a firm that scales and one that hits a ceiling.
How Valio handles this end to end → · The full order workflow → · Council knowledge in Valio →