The Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) has outlined its growing concern that post completion work is not being done properly and promptly, and has been outlined as a new risk in their agenda.
The organisation says in it’s 2024 risk agenda that conveyancers can fall into the trap of ignoring the need to finish off a transaction after it has been completed and they have taken their fee.
The annual publication brings together a list of the biggest risks faced by the CLC’s regulated community, which emerge during the regulator’s monitoring and inspection work throughout the year, along with advice to help practices stay on the right side of compliance. Bosses say that the new risk agenda is ‘good news for consumers’.
CLC chief executive Sheila Kumar says: “The good news for consumers is that licensed conveyancers are dedicated professionals who our monitoring shows provide excellent services under often stressful circumstances. But trip wires abound in the modern legal landscape and the Risk Agenda is part of our work to ensure the lawyers the CLC regulates not fall over them.”
Other areas covered include anti-money laundering, sanctions, conflicts of interest, the Accounts Code and complaints handling.
Post-completion work is a new addition to the Risk Agenda this year. It is becoming a growing concern for the CLC as these failures are sometimes only identified years later, causing significant risk, stress and delays to consumers and other interested parties.
While there may be delays at HM Land Registry, these are made worse by slow or sloppy title change applications from conveyancers, say the CLC.
The Risk Agenda says: “The data that the CLC receives from HM Land Registry on requisition rates gives cause for concern that some practices are not taking their responsibility seriously or are using HM Land Registry to check their work rather than making an effort to ensure that it is accurate to begin with.
“Some seem to treat post-completion matters as an afterthought as it is undertaken after they collect their fee. The reality is that clients have been charged for this work and there is an obligation to perform it promptly and with diligence. Taking the fee and not completing the work is a breach of the Accounts Code and demonstrates a lack of integrity.”
An absence of post-completion processes could potentially be feeding into the problem identified for the first time last year of failures to comply with undertakings. The CLC has recently published a new Advisory Note on the subject.
“While we understand that sometimes an individual breach is due to the action/inaction of a third party – such as a lender or management company – the CLC is increasing its activity on this issue and tracking practices where we are seeing repeated or systemic breaches,” the Risk Agenda says. “Problems can emerge from practices not having proper processes in place post-completion or even to provide undertakings in the first place.”
The CLC will this year be reviewing the Complaints Code in light of new guidance from the Legal Services Board and also conducting a deep dive on complaints handling in 2024, focused on those practices that are responsible for a disproportionate number of referrals to the Legal Ombudsman (LeO).
Complaints handling is important in and of itself but practitioners need to remember that it also impacts on the cost of regulation; last year it made up just shy of £1m of the CLC’s budget of £3.56m, even though more than six in ten CLC practices do not generate complaints to LeO.
4 responses
What a way to show support to your Conveyancers. Well done CLC*
Personally I would prefer that the CLC ensured its members showed a greater degree of competence, knowledge and professionalism in transactions to ensure they proceed smoothly and with a greater speed than at present. In my view, the Licenced Conveyancer qualification is another of the great mistakes in the legal profession over recent times.
Sort it CLC.
Instead of berating hard working conveyancers who are under enormous pressure, it might be an idea to focus attention upon applying pressure to the Land Registry and forming action steering group to make some headway in cutting their down times for registration. 2 years+ for a Transfer of Part it quite ridiculous and leaves poor consumers with further delays in trying to sell their homes.
I have a few thoughts on this:
a) The delays from the Land Registry are getting worse and worse. Anything other than freehold no mortgage to me is now being seen as complicated even down to Probate, LPA and Co-Trustee matters.
b) Despite what they say, I still think that the Land Registry are prioritising easy matters to get their figures up i.e. amount of completed registrations on a daily basis and are leaving everything else for someone else.
c) Everything should be done in date order wherever possible. There is a huge amount of inconsistency.
e) The Land Registry are not consistent on requisitions i.e. I have requisitions raised of me on a Transfer for no consideration; where is the SDLT return?!
f) Sellers solicitors are particularly lazy at getting registers up to date; We should not be completing on incorrect property descriptions, incorrect names on titles, deceased persons not removed. The excuse of ‘rely on a statement of truth’ and ‘send the death certificate to the Land Registry on completion’ does not stack up. It is lazy.
g) HTB especially needs to get a grip of discharging mortgages quicker.
h) Managers of law firms do need to get a grip of their Conveyancing departments and sort out their post completion obligations. There is a lot I see which is not good enough.
i) The Land Registry should be limited to 6 months to get a registration completed from when sent to them. They should not be allowed to go over that limit.
j) Even simple things such as network services is slow, trying to update a property description can take 2 weeks. I see why lawyers tell other lawyers to sort it out post completion but we shouldn’t be doing that to each other.
I see very little input from the CLC/SRA to help support Conveyancers in their jobs. It is not as simple as saying ‘get a grip’ when there are so many other stakeholders involved.