Lenders want to control our business

A group of banks including Lloyds, Santander and Royal Bank of Scotland, with the backing of the Council of Mortgage Lenders, have hatched a scheme operative from next year involving a centralised computer to hold the details of all panel firms.

Lender Exchange, due to go live in February 2014, will be a one-stop shop for participating lenders with information on all signatory solicitors. At present, we all register separately with the lenders we work with, providing our own individual credentials. From next year, if you want to continue to work with Lender Exchange lenders, registration via the new centralised panel will be compulsory. If you don't subscribe, you will be considered to be off all lenders' lists. For the average high ?street firm with two to four partners, the cost is just under £500 per annum.

Does anyone out there understand that fees in the conveyancing world have been monumentally unprofitable for years? If you billed every minute on every conveyancing file, you would be charging three times the fees that we have allowed the market and estate agents to dictate. That would only be to make a profit!

We have agents demanding referral fees for work: they seem to think that introducing clients to cheap lawyers is in their clients' best interests ignoring the goodwill of the existing lawyer; we have been implored to join the conveyancing quality kitemark '“ another sop to lenders who seem to demand that you can only do your job if you subscribe to a club. Now we have this nonsense.

Simple maths tells you that if 2,000 firms pay £500 per year, £1m is generated to fund a system that is already effective. Where does the money go? Well, to the banks; and our profit is further eroded despite taking all the professional risks. Where is our Law Society batting our corner for once? And there isn't much the SRA can do about this either: a colleague was told he should write to his MP. Fat lot of help that would be.

This is the thin end of the wedge for all lawyers dealing ?in property. The banks now ?want to control consumers' choice on property matters. If you are not on the panel, you won't get the work because it will require increased fees, as lender and purchaser will be separately represented.

The insurance industry now dictates who has practising certificates at a cost that is becoming prohibitive. The lenders are going down the ?same route.