CLC holds first consumer issues round table

3 March, 2025

A key tenet of the Legal Services Act 2007 – as reflected in one of the core regulatory principles – is that the legal market operates in the interests of consumers. This may appear obvious but at times there have been justified complaints that it may seem to operate more in favour of lawyers in some parts of the sector. It is vital that the consumer voice is heard in the regulation of legal services and demonstrably so.

It is why the Act created the Legal Services Consumer Panel to advise the Legal Services Board, and also why the CLC has established its own Consumer Reference Group.

The CLC has been running annual industry roundtables for some years, and in 2024 held its first futures roundtable, hearing from the next generation of licensed conveyancers. So it was high time to have a consumer roundtable.

Teresa Perchard, who chairs the CLC’s Consumer Reference Group, began by highlighting the most recent survey by the Legal Services Consumer Panel, which recorded high levels of satisfaction with legal services generally, and among consumers who had used CLC‑regulated firms even higher.

While this was “reassuring”, she noted recent HomeOwners Alliance research showing that, while people may be happy with the outcome, they were less pleased with the process that got them there. The complaints will be familiar to any conveyancer, starting with speed (or lack of it), followed by poor communication and lack of explanations.

Rob Hailstone, founder of the Bold Legal Group, acknowledged that conveyancers were “seen as the ringmasters”, which meant they were often blamed for everything that goes wrong or every delay that hinders progress, irrespective of whether it was actually their fault.

Paula Higgins, founder and chief executive of the HomeOwners Alliance, suggested complaints were less about speed and more about certainty. “People do not really care about conveyancing. They just want to buy and sell houses and that is it. They are quite shocked at how protracted the procedures are when they only go and buy and sell every once in a while.”

Noel Hunter, chair of the Consumer Code for Homebuilders, agreed that consumers “very much feel they are being done to as opposed to doing. This is the largest purchase of a lifetime and access to appropriate information at the time of purchase would help to give more control to the buyer”.

Of course, as Rob Hailstone explained, this reflected in part how the role of the conveyancer has changed in recent years, having to carry out so many more tasks than they once did. “Also, are we dealing with two different types of client? There are the more mature clients, who may expect a more patient, slower service, and the 21st century client, the Amazon buyers, the TikTok generation, who just want it carried out speedily and they do not really want to know how that is done. They just want it done as quickly as possible.”

For Emma Toms, chief executive of the New Homes Quality Board, consumers do not understand the value of conveyancing either and it would be helpful if this was better explained, especially given that – as Paula Higgins said – they are often the bearer of bad news. “In a way, showing what disaster has been avoided could be quite useful to explain,” she said. A further problem, though, was that where something does go wrong, “it is very hard to figure out who to go to, who to blame, who to go to for compensation, who can get things put right. You have so many different codes and ombudsmen”.

Noel Hunter said a single definitive information portal for consumers would make a lot of sense. “If we all worked together, we might get there.”

Paul Crook, a member of the Legal Services Consumer Panel, said he was hearing “a lot of solutioning without knowing whether consumers will value it”. Do consumers, who may only move house two or three times in their lives, actually want to be educated? “Why should they invest their time in learning about something that can seem complex, hard to navigate and where often the language is difficult to understand?”

He argued that what was missing was behavioural research to understand the motivations and interests of consumers.

There are other solutions to ease and speed the process. Teresa Perchard talked about the Scottish system, where sellers cannot put their property on the market without a home report, “which has a very rudimentary condition rating of all the elements, but it also has an estimate of the value”.

Scotland has more information upfront, and a less complex conveyancing process, as well as little leasehold. Plus many solicitors become involved earlier because they are also running the estate agency – solicitor property selling is a major feature of the market north of the border.

Charlotte Local, legal director of leading CLC-regulated firm Enact, said: “There have been many valiant efforts to try and get more done upfront, but I think we have about 4,000 firms that practise conveyancing in this country, and trying to get them all aligned and doing the same thing is not easy.”

Often there has been “a lot of pain before people even get to us”, she continued. “The process of getting an offer accepted on that and finding somewhere to buy can be really challenging. They get to us, and they are already on edge, and then you have to break it to them that they are going to need their lease extending or whatever it might be.

“They ask how long it will take and we say ‘How long is a piece of string?’. It is anything from 12 to 20 weeks, or by the way, it might be longer now. You can imagine how that message goes down, although it is always better to be as upfront as you possibly can.”

Rob Hailstone added: “Of course, most clients do not realise that a conveyancer often has two clients at the same time – the lay client and the lender as well. While your client might say, ‘Fine, do not worry about the extension being knocked down, I am happy with that’, the lender may not be happy with it.”

Charlotte Local agreed. “The lender dynamic is something that consumers could do with being educated on.”

The main complaint of conveyancers today, added Rob Hailstone, was the number of interruptions through the day, in terms of phone calls, emails, etc. “The second one is the number of additional enquiries that are now being raised by some firms. The third one is probably the delay with managing agents and getting the leasehold pack from them.”

What else could be done? Another feature of the Scottish system is locking the parties in earlier. Reservation agreements have been mooted down south but not taken off. Stephen Ward, the CLC’s director of strategy and communications, said he had been told that, where a reservation agreement is entered into in England and Wales, the fall-through rate is very small, something like 6%.

“It certainly removes from the market the toe-dippers and the time wasters. Everybody is then clearly committed. That is something that perhaps we should look at collectively as an industry and as regulators.”

Rob Hailstone said what is now the Home Buying and Selling Council looked at them a while ago but could not get consensus on one standard reservation agreement. “Different clients have different ideas and timescales, etc. Then you give the agreement to your lawyer and they say, ‘This is not for you because of this, this and this’, and start negotiating. It is very difficult.”

Paula Higgins is an advocate of reservation agreements “but I think it probably has to be regulated, where both sides put in £1,000 each and you lose it if you pull out”.

It would undoubtedly not be popular with some consumers, although she noted that people already put down money to reserve a new home, “One of our most popular products at the moment is home buyer’s protection insurance for transactions falling through.”

Noel Hunter reckoned reservation agreements could be considered as part of the regulation of estate agents, which is being examined by the government at the moment.

The bigger change is upfront information, which is arguably top of the current reform agenda. Everyone agrees that this is a good thing, so how to achieve the market shift where consumers will accept having to do it?

It is about getting the agents to buy in, said Rob Hailstone. “I do not think the consumer would worry too much if it was sold to them in the right way. It might cost you £150 to £200 upfront to instruct your conveyancer, but they would do this, this, and this, and then, when you find a buyer you hit the ground running. You can save two or three weeks or even more.

“But the agents are nervous about recommending that kind of process to their seller client in case they say, ‘We are going to the agent down the road because he is not saying I have to pay £150 or £200 upfront’.”

Charlotte Local saw home information packs as a good starting point, although she felt they needed more in them. “I don’t understand how people can say they wouldn’t save time. If you have information on day one that you would not have until day 21, how can that not save time?” Searches may go out of date but they can be refreshed or insured.

“I never understood why the HIPs were so controversial,” agreed Teresa Perchard. “The sky was not going to fall in. It was just about bringing forward information that should have already existed.”

For all that many of the moving parts in the home-buying process are not the conveyancers’ fault when they seize up, the profession cannot be absolved of all blame, acknowledged Charlotte Local.

“Cases do turn over so much slower now that conveyancers feel like they need to have a bigger caseload to get the same amount of income. Do you then end up in a vicious cycle where you cannot pay enough attention to the cases? And you are having to do more on the cases too.”

While large operations like Enact do some things quicker than smaller practices, often through the use of technology, “there is only so far that you can take it”, she continued. “I am not convinced that anybody can get particular gains on anybody else because you are always reliant on the next firm.” This might breed apathy among some firms, who are resigned to the fact that transactions are taking longer.

“In my ideal world, you would have your Land Registry title number and then next to that you have everything else that you need. It is just all there ready for you to take away.”

Charlotte, like Paula Higgins, argued that ultimately the only way to drive forward such a fragmented industry would be to make changes like upfront information mandatory.

The CLC is among the members of the Digital Property Market Steering Group, a Land Registry-convened group of key regulators and representative bodies looking at how to remove the barriers to progress. Stephen Ward said it remains reluctant to madate market change, such as dictating tools that should be used.

The market arguably needs to start moving first before mandation can come in to drive it home. For example, the pandemic massively accelerated the take-up of digital ID, leaving “a little rump of firms that are still using old methods”, he explained. “But I think we are now in a situation where we could say to those firms, ‘That is no longer an option for you. Serving your client correctly means that you have to do it this way now, and there are solutions in the marketplace for you to choose from’.”

The bigger challenge is digitising the data, he went on. There was a strong ‘invest to save’ argument for it but with property data held “all over the place”, it would be an expensive process, even with the rapid development of large language models of artificial intelligence to help with the heavy lifting. “The big win in digitisation is that Charlotte’s ideal world, where all the conveyancing data is available to the lawyer at the beginning of the transaction, becomes a reality. The conveyancer can look at that and then spend their time advising the consumer, having understood what the buyer really wants out of this transaction. You can highlight the things that really matter to them and engage them fully on those points.”

Rob Hailstone cautioned that it was “a small rump of firms pushing back against digitisation”, lawyers who feel it “takes away the skill, the knowledge from the job. It possibly threatens their job in the future. They distrust technology, a lot of them”. He has some sympathy, thinking back to the way conveyancing was carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, “when I would sit my client down, go through a few papers and say, ‘There is this problem, that problem, but I personally would not worry about it. I would buy this property myself’, and they would simply say, ‘That is good enough for me then. Thank you’. There was nothing in writing, and no one ever came back and complained that something went wrong. But, and I fully appreciate this, you cannot do that now.”

For Stephen Ward, this was exactly the point – digitisation actually put the conveyancer back into “the trusted advisor position, rather than de‑skilling”. He said: “AI, whether next year or in five years’ time, is going to be doing all of this, all of the data collection and sorting and even the flagging of some of the key points. This will free up the conveyancer to bring their skill and experience to bear on the work done by the machine, really understand the client’s needs, and give the appropriate advice on that basis with empathy.”

Charlotte Local agreed that this fear of dumbing down the conveyancer’s role, or even making it obsolete, was misplaced “when you consider all of the elements that a conveyancer has to do”. She added that “title insurance probably does have more of a place in this as well. There are certain risks that you can insure”.

“We do some work solely for lenders and they take out title insurance policies that mean that we do not have to check X, Y and Z. This is a risk-based decision they make, saying ‘This probably will not come up in the vast majority of transactions, so we are just going to insure it and move on and save the cost and time of you having to check that on our behalf’.”

For Paul Crook, indicators that show which firms provide a good or bad service, plus price transparency, were important information for consumers and produce “a dynamic that can potentially drive up profitability for the best firms”.

Stephen Ward outlined research on quality indicators that the CLC, Solicitors Regulation Authority and CILEX Regulation published in 2023, which found consumers wanted online reviews, “because they can understand that, and they assume that the reviewers value the same things that they do in the service”. That is not about quality of the advice, of course. Land Registry data about how many mistakes firms make in applications, or their disciplinary record could point to that. “But that is perhaps less useful, because that tends to focus on very serious infringements rather than things that might affect consumer experience more on a more day‑to‑day basis, or complaints that make it to the Legal Ombudsman, the second-tier complaints, as we call them.

“Then the issue with second-tier complaints is that the numbers are quite small if you look at numbers of complaints per conveyancing transaction. How reflective is it? Is it really a proxy for quality?”

And, of course, a good number of home buyers will simply go along with their estate agent’s recommendation anyway, even with the likes of the HomeOwners Alliance and the regulators urging them to shop around.

“We need a shocking advert on TV where you see a bulldozer going through an extension. ‘Bloggs & Co did not pick up this, choose your conveyancer carefully’,” said Rob Hailstone.

Stephen Ward said the problem was that “you have a very, very short window in which to address the purchaser of these legal services, and it is approximately between telling the estate agent, ‘Yes, I am going to buy that’, and the estate agent saying, ‘Here is my recommendation’. So really a very few minutes”.

Rob Hailstone harked back to a time when estate agents and conveyancers worked together better. “In the days before everything was online, you would meet your estate agent regularly. They would come into your office. You would go to their office. They were there to help you, not hinder you. Now it is more that they are seen to be there to hinder you. They pick up the phone or they email 10 times a day, but they do not offer any help. That relationship could be enhanced if the two professions worked more closely together.”

It is, after all, in everyone’s interests to speed up transaction times but Paula Higgins said some agents were more motivated by the referral fee – and by the time the conveyancer discloses that they have paid one, it is effectively too late.

Teresa Perchard commended the proposal in the new homes quality code for earlier disclosure of any referral fee. This reflected the greater pressure for disclosure seen in other areas too – most recently a major Court of Appeal ruling over car finance commissions – “and perhaps then it should also be an expected norm for estate agents”.

One final point was about the need for more information about the chains people are in. This was another area where the structure of the conveyancing market mitigated against the uniform approach that would be needed to achieve this, said Charlotte Local. Try telling small high street firms that they have to build an API to interface with a portal that tracks a chain.

Could the Land Registry’s once trumpeted chain matrix come back to save us? Said Rob Hailstone: “It must be possible. If we can build a rocket to go to Mars, surely we can build a chain matrix?”