On 15 July 2026, BBC South Today broadcast a report by Matt Graveling on the Local Land Charges search problems that have been holding up property transactions in South Oxfordshire District Council and Vale of White Horse District Council. As the report noted, Havant Borough Council and Bracknell Forest District Council had both encountered similar IT failures, with Havant first raising the alarm in September 2025.
If you missed the programme, you can play the relevant clip from the 15 July South Today below:
The failures follow each council’s replacement of a long-running legacy planning system with a new ‘cloud-based’ solution. Vale of White Horse followed South Oxfordshire’s lead and implemented a system from DEF Software, while Havant and Bracknell Forest both chose Arcus Global.
Each council gave the BBC a statement. South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse apologised for the disruption. Bracknell Forest said it was continuing to work through its backlog. Havant Borough Council said its issues “had been resolved by mid-October” [2025].
The BBC report stayed at the surface. As we have been documenting since September 2025, the problems at Havant run deeper, are more tangled, and carry greater implications than a single Local Land Charges backlog.
Checking the claim against the record
Havant’s “resolved by mid-October” line does not match what the council has itself told residents and councillors since that date.
The roots of the problem go right back to November 2023, when Cabinet approved a Full Business Case for the Arcus Global system that, a Freedom of Information request later showed, appears to have completely excluded data cleansing and migration from the programme. When the legacy Idox/Acolaid system was decommissioned at the end of August 2025 following the system’s go-live, the new database held little more than a handful of test records and the council lost its only working interface to HM Land Registry for Local Land Charges – the immediate cause of the search backlog the BBC covered.
The record since then does not support “resolved by mid-October”:
- On 6 December 2025 — seven weeks after the date Havant gave the BBC – Havant Civic Society reported that planning comments were still displaying the wrong dates, files were missing links or showing blank categories, and documents that should have been viewable in the browser were being forced into downloads instead.
- On 22 December 2025, the council’s own Information Governance Officer told Havant Civic Society that “the original comments are all still dated 6 August 2025 … we do not expect it to be ready until end of January/February” — referring to 2026. That is a council officer, in writing, describing a core data-integrity problem as unresolved more than two months after the date the council later gave the BBC.
- On 18 February 2026, at a public Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting, the council’s Strategic Programme Manager confirmed that the system had gone live as a bare-bones “minimum viable product”, that testing had only sampled records rather than checking them in full, and that the supplier’s contracted migration support had not been fully delivered as priced. Officers described the planning record as having been “compromised” and said multiple system and data fixes remained necessary. That is four months after “resolved by mid-October”.
- By April 2026, when a comparable failure at Bracknell Forest’s own Arcus deployment came to light, our position was still that “restoring confidence will require more than patches” — with no public confirmation that the underlying data problems had by then been fixed.
None of this is to say nothing has improved. The council has applied a series of patches since the September 2025 go-live and has, on its own account, restored some missing documents. But the public record does not support a claim that the matter was closed by mid-October 2025; the council’s own officers were still describing it as open work three, four and six months later.
Missing features can be fixed. Missing data cannot.
The Pareto principle is often invoked to justify minimum-viable-product rollouts: deliver 80% of the functionality at 20% of the cost and refine later. In a public-facing statutory service, though, the missing 20% is frequently the part that makes the system usable – and once historic data is lost at cutover, no amount of subsequent refinement restores it.
Havant’s Arcus deployment illustrates both problems. The loss of the Local Land Charges/HMLR interface and of in-browser document viewing are functional gaps: frustrating, but fixable given time, resources and commitment. The absence of a full data migration, because it was not costed or delivered when the system was specified and approved in 2023, is not: the historic planning archive that existed before cutover cannot simply be rebuilt, and what has since been recovered is, at best, a partial reconstruction of the original.
That weakened archive will be inherited by the new unitary authority that takes over planning after local government reorganisation, and will shape the reliability of the service it can offer residents, developers, and statutory consultees from day one.
Where things stand today
Two live, high-profile planning applications illustrate the practical effect of the points above.
The Local Plan has just gone out for public consultation on its own dedicated process. At the same time, the two largest housing allocations in the strategic green gaps at either end of the borough are both working their way through the Arcus-based planning register.
The Bloor Homes application for 1,800 homes at Southleigh is open for public consultation until 9 August — though that closing date is not displayed anywhere on the new planning system itself, a basic piece of statutory information that the previous system showed as a matter of course.
The long-running application for 628 homes at Campdown remains undecided, and its case file shows clear signs of the post-cutover data problems described above, most visibly in public comments carrying incorrect dates. With no published, auditable record of what the post-migration recovery work actually corrected, the only way to check the integrity of the Campdown file today would be a full, document-by-document review of all 440-plus items in it – and even that would only confirm whether or not titles match content, not that nothing has been lost in the migration.
The bottom line
Havant told the BBC its issues “had been resolved by mid-October”. The council’s own officers, in public committee meetings and in writing to Havant Civic Society, described core parts of the same problem as unresolved in December, in February, and arguably still in April. On the evidence of live planning applications today, the functional gaps are still being patched piecemeal, while the underlying data-integrity gap – created by a 2023 decision not to fund full migration – is permanent. Residents, councillors, and statutory consultees currently have no reliable way to be confident that the planning record they are looking at is complete and correct.
