People looking to sell or buy a home in Gloucestershire could face delays due to cyber incident

File photo of estate agents boards
-Credit: (Image: PA)


People looking to sell or buy a home in Gloucestershire could face delays due to a cyber incident affecting a council. Tewkesbury Borough Council shut down its online services earlier this month and declared a major incident amid concerns it was being targeted by hackers.

The authority redeployed staff to towns and large villages across the Borough to ensure the most vulnerable have access to the services they rely on. Council leaders said at the time they did not know the full extent of the cyber security incident.

But now cyber security specialists have assured them their systems are safe and have confirmed no data has been lost as a result of the incident. The council has begun to slowly and securely bring their systems back up.

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But it is currently unable to issue property search responses in Tewkesbury Borough. This could lead to delays for people looking to buy a home in the area.

When neighbouring Gloucester City Council was hit by a cyber attack in 2021 many people faced delays when trying to move home. People affected by this had to take out indemnity insurance as a workaround to ensure the sale of their properties.

There were fears the cyber incident affecting Tewkesbury could impact neighbouring authorities due to One Legal, the shared legal service between Cheltenham, Tewkesbury, Gloucester and Stroud district councils, being based there. However, this is not the case.

A Tewkesbury Borough Council spokesperson said: “Our search responses are issued by our land charges team, which is part of our development management service, and not a part of One Legal’s remit.

“However, due to our cyber incident, our development management team is currently unable to issue search responses for Tewkesbury Borough, but these will remain in the system and will be dealt with as soon as possible once systems have been brought online.

“Other districts are unaffected in relation to issuing their own search responses.”