Design Highlights
- The cyberattack targeted Westminster City Council and Kensington and Chelsea, disrupting critical property search processes and planning applications.
- Homebuyers faced significant delays, unable to secure mortgages without local authority searches, leading to stalled transactions.
- The luxury property market is experiencing a downturn, with property tax revenues projected to decline significantly due to transaction disruptions.
- Local councils are working with law enforcement and cybersecurity experts to recover systems, but a backlog of applications is anticipated post-restoration.
- The incident highlights vulnerabilities in shared technology infrastructure, raising concerns about cyber resilience for local governments in future operations.
In a twist that nobody saw coming—except maybe the cybercriminals—London found itself hamstrung by a sophisticated cyberattack, targeting the Westminster City Council and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This wasn’t just a little hiccup; it was a full-blown disaster. Systems were shut down in November 2025 to contain the breach, and local authority searches came to a grinding halt. Talk about a mess.
To make matters worse, these boroughs shared a technology infrastructure, which meant that when one was hit, the other was dragged down too. The London Metropolitan Police are still scratching their heads, fumbling through investigations, but no one has claimed responsibility. It’s like a bad crime movie without a villain. Meanwhile, local authorities are left to pick up the pieces, and they’re not doing it fast.
Westminster couldn’t process property searches for months. Kensington and Chelsea? Their systems were either offline or limping along, creating chaos. Even the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham jumped into the fray, joining the ranks of those affected. The wealthiest areas of London, home to high-value transactions, were suddenly in a bind.
Planning applications were delayed, and developers were left twiddling their thumbs. Thousands of home sales were now teetering on the edge. Buyers couldn’t secure mortgages without those mandatory local authority searches. Even cash buyers were stuck, forced to execute searches to avoid potential landmines like flood risks or surprise developments. The disruption in local authority searches has caused significant delays in the homebuying process. This incident highlights the importance of understanding shared infrastructure risk, as local governments face disruptions in fee and tax revenue.
High-value transactions? Frozen. Capital chains? Disrupted. And the revenue from property taxes? About to take a nosedive. Local authority searches are essential. They cover flood risks, new developments, and all that important property info. Without them, the due diligence step in the homebuying process was stripped away.
Turnaround times slowed to a crawl, and legal uncertainty loomed over conveyancers like a dark cloud. The backlog after restoration is going to be a nightmare. The economic fallout is staggering. The combined boroughs averaged 350 home sales per month from 2021 to 2024. Kensington and Chelsea alone raked in around $728 million in property sale taxes in 2024-25.
But with the luxury market taking a hit and rising transaction taxes, the long-term impacts on property markets and taxation revenue are going to sting. Councils are scrambling, working with police and cybersecurity experts, but there’s no clear timeline for when things will get back to normal. Similar to how coverage starts on an effective date for insurance policies, system restoration will only begin addressing the mounting backlog once services are fully operational again. The incident shines a bright light on the risks of shared infrastructures and the glaring limits of cyber resilience. Welcome to the future of homebuying in London.
