The Conveyancing Association (CA) has backed recommendations made by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee aimed at improving the home buying and selling process, including upfront property information and stronger regulation of estate agents.
According to the trade body, most of the committee’s recommendations reflect long-standing industry concerns around delays, failed transactions and rising costs, and provide a clear route towards a more efficient and reliable system for consumers.
The findings were shared in a letter the committee sent to housing minister Matthew Pennycook, which describes the current process as “a painful experience that reduces motivation to move and slows down the housing market”.
The CA highlights the committee’s support for upfront property information, which it says is critical to improving transaction speed and reducing failure rates. In its recommendations to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), the Select Committee recommends mandating that certain information required for property transactions be provided upfront.
“This must include information about the property, produced by suitably authoritative providers (surveys prepared by chartered surveyors, for example), and made available by the seller and the seller’s representatives when a property first goes on the market, not later during the buying process.”
According to the CA, a lack of consistent, reliable upfront data remains one of the biggest causes of friction in the system and often leads to transactions stalling or collapsing after significant time and cost has already been incurred.
“Upfront information, including searches, is essential,” the CA’s director of delivery Beth Rudolf said. “If buyers and lenders have the data they need from the outset, we can remove a significant amount of delay and uncertainty from the process. This is the foundation for any further reform and must be implemented effectively and consistently across the market.”
The membership body has also backed calls for stronger regulation of estate agents, including the introduction of a Code of Practice and mandatory qualifications, to ensure higher and more consistent standards across the sector.
The Select Committee says MHCLG must introduce a Code of Practice and mandatory qualification for each type of property agent, including estate agents, setting out minimum standards to be overseen by an independent regulator. The regulator should have the ability to enforce adoption of the Code of Practice through fines or other penalties, the committee suggests.
The CA has also highlighted the wider impact of the current system on consumer behaviour, with complexity, delays and uncertainty discouraging people from moving – particularly those looking to downsize or first-time buyers looking to get on the property ladder.
As a result, the flow of properties is reduced and overall market activity is slowed at a time when increasing supply is a key priority.
“Improving standards across the market is key,” Rudolf said. “Consumers should be able to trust the information they are given is accurate, complete and provided at the right time. A clear framework for estate agents, supported by proper oversight, would help create a more consistent experience for everyone involved in the transaction.”
A more efficient and transparent process would support greater mobility, helping to free up housing stock and improve access across all parts of the market, the CA believes.
Rudolf continued: “A number of these recommendations from the Select Committee recognise the reality of the current system and the impact it is having on consumers, conveyancing firms and the wider housing market. There is a clear need to reduce delays, cut fall-throughs and improve certainty, and many of the measures outlined here would help achieve exactly that.
“These issues go beyond individual transactions. The way the system currently operates is holding back movement across the housing market. If we can reduce friction and improve certainty, we can support more people to move when they need to, which benefits the entire market.
“The industry has engaged fully with the consultation process and we await the roadmap for implementation. While it is vital Government now sets out how and when these reforms will be delivered, all of the solutions are already available to sellers and buyers as well the property industry today, we just need to grasp the nettle and get on with it.
“There is clear alignment across the industry on what needs to change. The focus now has to be on delivery. We stand ready to support Government in implementing reforms that will create a faster, more certain and more cost-effective home buying and selling process.”
11 responses
The problem with much of this debate is that it continues to treat conveyancing primarily as a process problem rather than a professional standards problem.
No amount of upfront information, reservation agreements or digital process will repair a market where parts of the conveyancing sector are operating under excessive volume pressures with weakening supervision, fragmented accountability and loss of continuity for consumers.
Consumers are not simply frustrated by paperwork delays. They are frustrated because they often cannot speak to the same person twice, because issues are not identified early enough, because nobody appears to take ownership of the transaction and because communication breaks down under operational pressure.
Conveyancing is not an administrative workflow. It is a professional legal service requiring judgement, investigation, accountability and experience.
If policymakers genuinely want fewer delays, fewer failed transactions and better consumer outcomes, then the debate also needs to confront the operational realities of the modern conveyancing market itself, not simply redesign the process around it.
There is an old saying about ‘putting the fox in charge of the hen house’.
A group of well‑meaning MPs, few of whom have ever carried the legal responsibility for a property transaction, have taken evidence largely from those with the strongest commercial incentives to reshape homebuying in their own image. The result is a narrative that looks less like reform in the public interest and more like an opportunity for vested interests to tighten their grip on homebuying and reinforce their balance sheets.
Ironically, it is the government itself that has created many of the bottlenecks, such as a ridiculously time-consuming AML regime, an over-engineered tax adviser registration scheme, and layer upon layer of red tape, that often slows the system to a demoralising crawl. Busy, conscientious conveyancers are not the problem. They are the ones holding the system together.
Until policymakers confront the real sources of delay and the real motivations of those lobbying for structural change, the public will continue to be promised simplicity while being delivered something very different.
The fact that the CA in this article refers to conveyancing as an “industry” says it all – that this is focused on money and is about outsiders looking for a new way of making money from something they have no place to be involved in and know very little about and creating a narrative that is flawed or false ( just like our governments do day in day out).
Providing up front information may save a day or two here and there, but the fundamental issue is if you allow conveyancing (the legal process) to be carried out by inexperienced and unqualified people (again for reasons of making as much money as possible by deliberately not paying for professionally qualified staff, axing support staff etc), the delays being talked about will still be there.
Imagine introducing a private business into the NHS to provide, for example, more “efficient” delivery of surgical instruments and equipment to operation theatres, citing unacceptable delays in the present system – only to find that there are not enough qualified surgeons available to carry out the operations efficiently as a result of the NHS and the government deliberately reducing the number of surgeon posts and creating new ” Physician Associate” posts (again creating a fake narrative). Operation numbers and delays will remain the same but the private business will have done very nicely out of it, regardless. The net result is the public suffer and they end up paying for that private business to carry out a role that was never needed.
Of course what the proper, professional part of the conveyancing profession is desperate to see, is the Conveyancing Association taking responsibility for the shocking standards of its members. All we hear from these people is rhetoric, yet there is never any improvement in actions.
Day in, day out we all have to suffer the machinations of their members conduct causing frustration and delays to our clients (and indeed their own) through no fault of their own. My own neighbours are presently moving and they cannot understand why such a simple potential transaction is taking so long, and why there is never communication from the Solicitors on the other side. Unfortunately a factory both sides is the answer and they still have no completion dates four months in. That is the reality of dealing with mmembers of the Conveyancing Association.
No ‘trade body’ can be taken seriously when it turns a blind eye to issues we see every day. It does not matter what they bacck, or what they tell everyone. Until they take ownership of the behaviour and standards of their members, nothing will change. And the more they ignore it, the worse things become.
The Conveyancing Association ought to hang their heads in shame. They are not real lawyers and appear to be made up of a bunch of outfits that think that conveyancing is a processing line. It’s not. None of this is going to “speed up” the process, especially now that we have the Renters Rights Act where 2 months’ notice is required so we will have more and more buyers asking for 2 months between exchange and completion as they don’t want to pay rent and a mortgage at the same time.
How about actually encouragaging your members to have qualifications and handle the matter from start to finish and not line the front lines with drones?
Echo and support all the comments above.
We all know that agents gonna lie lie lie so shake it off, shake it off! Agents will say anything to get buyers to agree to something. A lot of buyers still don’t have a clue what they are doing let alone understand the difference between freehold and leasehold.
It is all neatly summed up by the Phrase – ” Problem, reaction, solution” – those who know, know.
All I ever read on forums such as these is lots of reasons why new ideas or suggestions won’t work, always negative comments and people (often Anonymous!) being quite rude about other professions, that is just not an acceptable way for professional people to behave,
The conveyancing process in E&W is a stressful, arduous and unnecessarily complex process, if that wasn’t true then people wouldn’t be trying to ‘fix it’.
Regardless of peoples qualifications, their intentions are always good, to make buying a property in this country as easy as it is in many, many countries around the world. I bought a property abroad a few years back and my goodness I couldn’t believe how easy it was (and I had a proper lawyer act for me!).
I completely agree that it is essential that Lawyers sit at the center of any change otherwise, whatever the suggestion is, will be a non-starter. But we do need change, other countries have done it successfully so why can’t we?
It’s the fact that people purporting to be lawyers keep cosying up to tech companies claiming they will be our salvation rather than actually having proper educated lawyers to resolve legal issues instead of fighting over a lack thereof of FENSA or NICEIC certificates. And yes we will stay anonymous as some of these people will attack you personally online and/or threaten to report you for having an opinion.
Data or lack of is not the problem, it is the direction we are heading in where people end up signing up to buy a property with no way out is going to end up costing the economy an even bigger fortune in the future. The fortune that is being spent now will pale in comparison to the route we are heading down but whilst Labour continue to destroy our economy, everyone can live in cuckoo land (or head to another country as the smart people are doing).
What is actually needed is root-and-branch reform of the legal and procedural issues that genuinely cause conveyancing delays. Superficial, sticking-plaster solutions risk merely masking the underlying problems. For example, “upfront marketing” may simply remove from the official timescales the time spent gathering the information needed for a supposedly comprehensive upfront information pack, rather than reducing delays overall.
The conveyancing profession itself should also be properly and widely consulted. The recent experience surrounding the TA6 and the flawed material information guidance should serve as a timely reminder of how well-intentioned reforms can go badly wrong when they are developed without sufficient practical input from those working on the front line. Meaningful reform must address the root causes of delay, rather than creating additional layers of process and administration.
I completely agree with you Stephen, ideally the reform is driven by lawyers themselves and not left to those that think they know what needs changing.
Please be respectful to those that are trying to implement change and move things forward. No one benefits from a slanging match. Be open minded and take a step back from what you do today and think about what could be possible in the short to long term.
The bottom line: freely available, machine-readable property data wouldn’t just speed up conveyancing, it would change its nature. The solicitor’s role would shift from information gatherer to risk interpreter. The surveyor’s role would become more analytical and less clerical. Lending decisions would be made nearly instantly and would be more reliable.
Crucially, buyers would make genuinely informed decisions rather than discovering material facts after they’re emotionally and financially committed. That shift in timing (information before commitment rather than after), is probably the single biggest thing that would restore consumer confidence in the process.
There are many valid points made above in the comments, but don’t dismiss the potential digitising information has and servicing it upfront. This is a problem that affects everyone the transaction and not just a legal profession.