
Today’s Conveyancer has published an article today on the cyber attack on Hackney Council, which has brought the local housing market to a near stand still as the council recovers from the impact of having its systems severely disrupted.
Our MD, Liz Jarvis, comments:
“At the moment our current turnaround for Hackney regulated searches is 55 days, however, as there’s still no update on when Hackney will resume searches, we anticipate this may rise. This has clearly been a severe cyber-attack, but they’ve been able to mitigate the wider human impact by setting up new services quickly using cloud services, for things like benefits payments, safeguarding referrals and establishing a system to pay for free school meals over the half term.
“We can only hope they adopt the same quick thinking and use of technology to create a more robust system for returning searches, instead of reverting to a vulnerable system that’s proving quite so difficult to restore. In the meantime, we are working closely with all local authorities to achieve the quickest turnaround times, and the latest updates can be found on the regulated searches turnaround table on our website.”
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