On a sweltering day in August, the walk from East Croydon station to HM Land Registry’s office takes you past the lunchtime crowd at a trendy Boxpark. Some of the patrons – who are being blasted by person-sized fans as they eat street food from the shipping-container stalls – presumably work in numbers 1 and 2 Ruskin Square just down the road. These buildings have become beacons of the government hubs programme: since 2017 and 2024 respectively, HM Revenue and Customs and the Home Office have had major bases here. HM Land Registry got to Croydon first, however: its HQ moved here from central London in 2011.
Giant fans are apparently the order of the day. As CSW settles down to meet Simon Hayes in a humid boardroom in HMLR’s office on Bedford Park, a huge whirring contraption on wheels – rather than air conditioning – offers scant relief from the heat.
It might seem fitting that one of the world’s biggest buyers of microfiche readers (of which more later) wouldn’t have aircon. But don’t be fooled – this 160-year-old organisation has recently undergone a huge transformation programme. Hayes has spent the last few years leading reforms that he says have improved the Land Registry’s quality and outputs, as well as staff engagement. A sizeable programme of work to digitise its records is also now under way.
When he began his civil service career nearly three decades ago, Hayes wasn’t thinking about title deeds and safeguarding property ownership. “I had quite a traditional Whitehall introduction to the civil service,” he says. He began life as a fast streamer in the Home Office, where he remained for years, working in policy and private office roles and ultimately some very senior operational delivery roles.
“I think 20-plus years in the Home Office is character forming… in lots and lots of ways,” he says with a smile.
His time there wasn’t always easy, he adds: “I dealt with an incredibly challenging operational environment in immigration that is made harder by the strength of feeling around it – your room to operate within that is heavily influenced by the politics of the day. That doesn't always marry up with the most straightforward long-term planning on how to deliver.”
But he also remembers this as a time when he “achieved a great deal in some really quite difficult circumstances”. As director of visas and citizenship at UK Visas and Immigration following the Brexit referendum – another “highly politically charged situation” – he set up the EU Settlement Scheme for European citizens living in the UK, which was successfully launched in 2019.
"If I had my time again, I would spend more time communicating to people exactly why we were doing what we were doing"
Later that year, Hayes left to become chief executive of HMLR. Asked what drew him to the non-ministerial department after so long in homeland security, he points to its uniqueness, its “fantastic heritage” and its “history of achievement”.
Land registration plays a fundamental role in the economic and financial structure of the country, he says. “We are a part of the critical national infrastructure of the financial system. And more than that, it gives real security to homeowners in England and Wales. For the vast majority of people, this is the biggest asset they will own in their lives.”
Beyond that, he was attracted to HMLR’s reputation as having a good working culture with staff who are passionate about their work, he says.
“I was looking for a CEO role – it was what I wanted to do next in my career. And so the opportunity came up, and it felt like a good match in terms of the skills and experience I could bring around performance improvement, particularly. But it also suited where I wanted to go next in my career.”
When Hayes arrived at HM Land Registry, he inherited what could diplomatically be called a lean organisation. “It was clear we didn’t have enough people,” he says. HMLR had long relied on a shrinking pool of seasoned staff, while waves of redundancies during housing downturns meant there was no new generation coming through.
Then, just as Hayes had familiarised himself with the quirks of his new brief and was gearing up to launch a variety of initiatives to increase capacity and productivity, the pandemic hit, forcing civil servants to work from home. Lockdown was “very challenging” for HMLR, he says: the organisation had never processed a case outside of one of its offices and before 2020, very few employees worked from home.
“We were so unprepared that we spent the first three months literally driving computers around to people’s houses,” Hayes says. At the same time, a Covid-fuelled housing boom – prompted by people rethinking their lives and relocating – sent demand soaring.
“The challenge was compounded by the nature of our government funding, with any surplus going back to the exchequer rather than being carried over for us to use the following year,” Hayes adds. Recruitment typically halted when the property market slowed, leaving the organisation scrambling to rebuild every time it picked up. “By then you’re already too late – and you’ve let your most experienced people go.”
Although his plan had always been to rebuild capacity and productivity, doing so during a lockdown meant recruiting and training remotely. (“Very hard” is Hayes’s understated verdict on that). Progress was slower than hoped, leaving HMLR battling a perfect storm of staff shortages and record demand. “The last few years have been about fighting back against that,” Hayes says.
Unsurprisingly, staff engagement fell during that period because – as Hayes says – “it’s very demoralising to feel like you’re getting behind”.
It took a concerted effort and several operational adjustments to improve morale at the Land Registry – along with its quality and output. “Those are the three things I'm really happy about,” he says.
Two major changes were recruiting “a huge number of people”, aided by the launch of a Land Registration Academy as a new central training function; and a large-scale restructure that enabled the department to use its 14 existing offices as business units.
“The analogy I've been using with staff is: it felt like we were cycling uphill and the summit seemed further and further away at times. We're not [yet] freewheeling downhill but I do feel like we are now on flatter ground, and building momentum,” Hayes says.
“Now that we're in that position, it is a really good foundation to go on to the next stage, which is about keeping that capability and that level of performance, and accelerating the transformation.”
Would he approach those changes differently if he were to do it again? “I think that I would spend more time communicating to people exactly where we were and why we were doing what we were doing,” he says.
“It became clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that we didn't get the communication around it right, and people didn't understand as clearly as they needed to why we were doing it.”
And what advice would he give other leaders facing backlogs or a surge in demand? Having good data is important, he says: “You've got to have a really good understanding of the scale of the issue and the scale of the demand.
“That can be hard, especially when that information could be quite sensitive or reputationally challenging, or cause potential political problems.”
Then, “almost invariably”, there is the need for “more people, more knowledge and more traditional experience, because it's very hard to transform from a position of weakness.
“You haven't got the time to develop whilst you've got customers metaphorically banging the door down to say: ‘Where's my case, where's my decision, where's my registration?’
Another, more recent, challenge came after HMLR tried to enforce a rule stating that staff must spend three days a week in the office. Starting in January, PCS union members at the organisation spent six months working-to-rule following a ballot in which 69% of those who voted backed strikes and action short of strike.
The industrial action was called off in July after managers agreed to increase flexibility, with office attendance being measured over three-month periods instead of weekly. They also committed to running a consultation should government back down on its cross-civil service 60% in-office demand.
Reflecting on the dispute, Hayes says he doesn’t think “we should be aiming to go back to a time where everybody came into the office for a certain period of time every day.
“I do, though, believe it's important for an organisation like ours, where collaboration and learning from colleagues is important, that people spend time together face to face in an office to help with that.” Hybrid working is, therefore, “the way forward”, he says.
“The challenge comes around how prescriptive you are,” he adds, before admitting that there are real challenges in balancing the needs of the organisation with the best deal for employees.
“I think that the action taken in Land Registry could have happened in other places as well, it wasn’t specifically about HMLR, and I'm pleased that the dispute has finished. We managed through it. But I don't think it's quite the end of the story, because we are all learning about what the best way forward is.”
When its members voted to end the action, PCS criticised what it called “arbitrary and interfering management decisions” and “micromanagement through access and misuse of staff data” at HMLR.
Asked whether that is a culture that he recognises, Hayes says it’s “perfectly legitimate” to track when people are on site or not. “In fact, I think it's a responsibility of management to know where their staff are,” he adds.
“The issue of micromanagement refers to both the management of attendance and the management of performance. And we are still on a journey around performance management – if I'm being completely frank, I think HMLR still has some way to go on that. I think other organisations are further down that track, including the Home Office. But I hope we can work with the unions on that, and not in a way that's simply being in a constant dispute with them.”
“It felt like we were cycling uphill and the summit seemed further and further away. We're now on flatter ground, and building momentum”
After some discussion about whether leaving the Land Registry to lead Sport England means his days as a civil servant are over (technically, they are, at least for now – Hayes will now be classified as a public servant), CSW is curious what he would change about the civil service as a whole, given the chance.
“First of all, I think it moves too slowly,” he says. “It is not prepared to make decisions fast enough, partly because everybody is justifiably concerned with thinking through every aspect of what we're doing, because we carry a huge amount of responsibility.”
He gives the example of the Land Registry underwriting more than £9tn worth of property, which means that making mistakes is “potentially catastrophic”. A low-risk appetite “around some of the things you do” is therefore appropriate.
But this caution can lead to inertia, he says, “because you simply find reasons not to do things all the time.
“It's something I spend quite a lot of time talking to our non-executive directors about – the vast majority of whom have come from private sector backgrounds. They struggle with that, understandably,” he says.
“They're pushing us all the time: ‘Can we move faster on this?’ And I agree with them. It's a hard mindset to address when people are dealing with so much responsibility, and the weight of that responsibility is emphasised so strongly.”
He says that with insufficient reward for innovation and “enormous downsides” to getting things wrong, “the incentives are skewed so that people will always take the conservative option”. “At different times in my career I've pushed for innovation, and it's not been particularly well received. That, I think, is something that would need to change if we're really going to change the level of performance significantly.”
Speaking of innovation, the hot topic of the moment is artificial intelligence, and whether civil servants can use it to radically improve productivity. Could AI help the Land Registry achieve its goals?
Hayes points to an all-too-common hurdle in public services: “I think AI is a massive opportunity for us, but one of the big challenges is around the data.”
The Land Registry holds records on 88% of all the land ownership in England and Wales – and while some of these documents are fully digital, some are in formats that are difficult to use, like PDFs. Meanwhile, some of its historical records are on paper, and HMLR is still one of the world’s leading consumers of microfiche readers.
“We also have two types of information, which makes it particularly challenging. We have textual information, which is reasonably straightforward. But we have geospatial information as well: maps and title plans and so on,” he explains.
“We've got to make those digital and readable to do all of our work. So that's the next phase – and the truth is, that’s probably a 10-year or even 20-year programme. And if you come back to customer expectation now, which is very much, ‘It should be immediate, it should be online, why isn't it?’, we need to communicate that to people and explain why we're doing it and why it will take that time.”
That long-term work to digitise information, and to digitise the register as a whole, will have another major benefit, Hayes says. Land registration “provides an incredible dataset in terms of the landscape of England and Wales: how land is used, who owns it, where the opportunities for development are, and how we could drive more economic growth off the back of that”. Adding more records to that will enable the data to be “used and exploited by more and more people – that will unlock even more opportunity”, he says.
"Bringing people from the sports sector and trying to improve those partnerships across government is a really big part of the role"
That work will have to continue without Hayes, however: from September onwards, he will be fully ensconced in his new organisation. CSW wonders out loud how many of his friends have remarked that he is going to work for the Ministry of Fun.
Laughing, he replies that while sport is, of course, a fun leisure activity, it's also a powerful agent for change in society and in people's lives. “I've always felt that. So the job has quite a personal element for me around doing everything we can to promote the benefits of sport and activity in England. The benefits for health, for wellbeing, for resilience, for education, for community, are all very well understood.”
If it was the Land Registry’s uniqueness and heritage that drew him to the non-ministerial department, one of the things that appealed to him this time around was the consensus around Sport England’s mission: unlike emotive policy areas such as immigration, sport is not – if the pun can be forgiven – a political football.
“So it's really about how we can maximise that impact,” he says.
Sport England already has a long-term strategy in place that is “well regarded and supported by the sector”, Hayes says. “So I don't think it's a case of rethinking those strategic aims, but I think there is an opportunity to really focus on outcomes, on making the organisation as efficient as it can be… and becoming more of a delivery-focused organisation than it might have been in the past.”
He’s also excited about the opportunities to work with other organisations “more effectively and dynamically”, pointing to the health and education departments in particular, where he says there is “huge opportunity” for partnership working.
“That already happens, but can we take that to the next level? Because I think there is so much that happens there that can benefit other government missions… bringing people from the sports sector and trying to improve those partnerships across government is a really big part of the role,” he says.
And what of Hayes’s own favourite sport? “I'll watch anything, but ultimately, like so many people, it's probably football,” he says. Nottingham Forest is his team and – like “every young boy”, he dreamed of being a footballer. “I would have loved to play cricket as well; that's another great passion of mine,” he adds.
Does he still play any sports?
He smiles wryly. “Well, I think that changes as you get older. I've always played football – but that gets harder as you get to my age, sadly. So I'm transitioning more into older-people sports. I probably play golf more than anything else now.”