The recent King’s Speech covered a wide range of topics, and in this blog we look behind the headlines and summarise why it could prove to be significant for the way we buy and sell homes in the UK.
When looking at the speech through a property lens, it connected the three ingredients required to modernise the home buying process:
- Digital identity
- Smart Data
- Regulatory support for innovation and sandbox testing
The conversation around improving home buying tends to focus on the front end of the transaction, covering topics such as: better listings, more upfront information, digital property packs and improved data sharing.
This is all important. but the reality is that the home buying process does not ultimately fail because the data does not exist, it fails because trusted data cannot move efficiently across the system at the moment when it needs to.
This is why the Digital Access to Services Bill and the Regulating for Growth Bill together could become highly significant for the future of property transactions, as explained below.
Digital Access to Services Bill
“My Ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID that will modernise how citizens interact with public services”
The Digital Access to Services Bill establishes the legal foundations for reusable digital identity across the UK economy, creating a trusted framework for individuals to verify themselves once and securely reuse that verification across multiple interactions.
In property transactions today, buyers are routinely asked to prove who they are multiple times to multiple parties estate agents, conveyancers, lenders and brokers despite all operating under similar anti-money laundering obligations. This duplication creates friction, delay and unnecessary risk.
A trusted, reusable digital identity framework has the potential to remove a significant portion of this duplication, enabling identity verification to travel securely through the transaction rather than being recreated at every stage.
But identity is only part of the challenge in the property transaction process.
Regulating for Growth Bill
“Legislation will be introduced to… reduce the burden of unnecessary regulation through innovation”
Our second key takeaway from the King’s Speech was the Regulating for Growth Bill, particularly its proposed cross-economy sandboxing powers. These provisions could become critically important because they create the ability for regulators and industry to safely test new digital transaction models in live environments under controlled conditions.
The UK property transaction process remains fragmented, paper-heavy and disconnected. At the same time, government-backed initiatives such as the Smart Property Data Trust Framework Sandbox are now actively exploring how trusted property data can be securely shared across the ecosystem using principles similar to Open Banking.
The concept is simple but has the potential to be transformative when the following are combined within a secure digital transaction environment:
- Verified identity
- Verified property data
- Verified financial information
- Trusted interoperability between systems
The Department for Business and Trade has already identified digital information for home buying as the single highest-value Smart Data use case in the UK economy, with an estimated £14.1 billion net social value opportunity and £2.06 billion annual GDP contribution by 2043.
There is also increasing recognition that better data alone will not solve the problem. The recent Property Smart Data Clinic involving stakeholders across property, finance and technology concluded that while better information enables readiness and better decision-making, the “last mile” of the transaction still depends on coordinated execution, funding, timing and trust.
This is significant, because the UK has spent years discussing how to improve property information at the start of the transaction. The next phase of reform is increasingly about how the ecosystem executes and coordinates completion itself, which is where digital infrastructure becomes critical.
Australia provides a clear example of what this can look like when digital settlement, digital identity and trusted data infrastructure are aligned. PEXA’s Australian platform now facilitates around 90% of all property transactions nationally, contributing an estimated AUD $3.02 billion to GDP between 2015 and 2025.
Of course, the UK is not Australia and no market can simply replicate another jurisdiction’s model, but but the direction of travel is becoming increasingly clear and has many parallels.
The King’s Speech signals that government now understands that modernising major sectors of the economy is not simply about digitising existing paperwork. It is about creating trusted digital infrastructure that allows data, identity and financial execution to operate together seamlessly.
For property, that may finally create the conditions needed to move from fragmented digitisation toward a genuinely connected home buying ecosystem.
The challenge for the property sector is to move fast enough to take advantage of this opportunity.