Reducing costs, not client choice

The goal of any new scheme in the conveyancing market should be to reduce time and costs, and increase the level of service. It may be that if there are more schemes such as the Conveyancing Quality Scheme or Lender Exchange, they may compete with each other and reduce the costs as conveyancers could choose which one to subscribe to. On the other hand it creates a middle market which is totally unnecessary.

As it is, the new scheme is likely to undermine CQS. If solicitors can get more mortgage instructions via Lender Exchange more quickly and cheaply then they won’t bother with CQS. Clients are not interested in any of this, there is no consumer driven demand for the CQS, it is (or was) coming from the lenders. Lender Exchange doesn’t seem to have a conveyancing code or deal with conveyancing quality standards, so it seems strange that the banks agreed the CQS scheme to raise standards and then agree another new scheme which does not.

Solicitors may also be reluctant to sign up for both if they can’t cope with the additional cost and administration. The purpose of any such scheme is to eliminate firms that perform poorly, but we suspect it will be excluding many good firms and increasing costs for those that comply. Not all the firms on the CQS are very good at conveyancing. More regulation of this nature would therefore seem to reduce client choice and increase the costs for the firms that are included (and therefore clients’ legal bills). The Law Society and Solicitors Regulation Authority already hold most, if not all, the relevant data which lenders ask for on the mySRA website; they need to look at how to get this data to the lenders. They could give them limited access to mySRA for example
with some simple changes to
the website.

This, unfortunately, appears to be a further attempt at controlling solicitors directly – and create profit from running panels. We’ve have already come under some pressure from one lender who threatened our panel status when they lost some unregistered deeds; we were told we were being ‘unhelpful’. It may have been a one-off case but it demonstrates how being on a lender panel can create a conflict of interest. Lenders and buyers should really be independently represented, this would avoid conveyancers acting under a conflict between the banks and the buyers. SJ

David Buchanan is a partner at Clifford Smith and Buchanan Solicitors

www.cs-b.co.uk