Home owners are being made to wait close to a month and pay just shy of £100 for property searches that might take the council minutes.

Epping Forest District Council has been revealed as the third slowest in the country for returning land charge searches, with buyers having to wait 25 days.

The searches, which are mandatory for home buyers, provide information about conservation areas, tree preservation orders, conditional planning permissions and listed building information, amongst other details.

The cost in Epping Forest for a prospective buyer is £95.

According to advice site Move iQ, the searches often take mere minutes to complete and simply require a council employee to search a computer database.

Phil Spencer, TV property expert and co-founder of Move iQ, said: "Conducting a standard search can take minutes, but just eight councils across England and Wales are able to turn round a search request in a day – and a disgracefully high proportion of councils are failing to meet the Government’s 10-day target.

“Whatever the individual councils’ reasons for the delays – lack of resources or lack of staff – it’s clearly unacceptable to force buyers to wait up to three months for what should be a routine process.

"To rub salt in the wound, the arbitrary fees charged by different councils have created a postcode lottery where a search in one area can cost seven times more than it would in another.

“At times the process of buying a home can seem stacked in favour of sellers rather than buyers.

"In the current market, buyers need all the help they can get and councils should be made to end this unjustifiable red tape minefield, with a cap on fees and targets with teeth.”

At the moment the district council is falling well short of the government's target, which requires councils to complete searches in 10 days or less.

Across England, just 12 per cent of councils complete the task in three days or less.

An Epping Forest District Council spokesperson said: "A Council Spokesperson said: “Epping Forest District Council receive and process 2,500 Local Land Charge searches per year.

"In the last 6 months, local land charge searches had peaked to 25 days – but we have been working hard to reduce the turnaround time, which is now down to 17 days.

"Our aim is to reduce the turnaround time to 10 – 12 days with a longer term objective to further reduce our turnaround time to 5 – 6 days by June 2019.

“We are working with HM Land Registry on a programme to migrate the Local Land Charges Register to the HM Land Registry with the hope that this will take place in 2019.

"Part of this process includes the move from a paper based system to an electronic one."