I am a 34-year-old who was an associate at a medium-sized commercial law firm, but I have now stopped practising in this area to take a massive salary drop and work in a university.

I was prepared to spend a lifetime explaining to people the reason why property transactions took so long and were so complicated because, by and large, most things (with the exception of the absence of an industry standard lease) had some utilitarian element.


Today, however, because the unwarranted meddling of government agencies, commercial property processes often cease to have any explicable basis.


The Land Registry changes have translated into off-loading many of its absurd forms onto us. Try doing a pension fund transaction and delegate an RX1 form to someone else - it's impossible and I did not study the intricacies of land law to waste my life filling in complicated forms so that the Land Registry can do less work.


I can't see why the registry reduced the registrable requirement to leases for seven years (or nearly all reversionary leases). No client ever came to me saying, 'I really want to see the terms of other people's leases'. Look at the knock-on effects when it is also read with restrictions on the title that may (or not) affect leases.


All of this is a waste of time. Sure, I can put my prices up to compensate. If other solicitors did the same it would be fine - but even so, no one really wants to spend their life amassing pointless information for the register, which no one really wants, and then spending an equally harassed time at the other end removing it. There is tremendous additional stress from an unduly complicated process.


More important are the appalling stamp duty land tax forms, which seem to have been designed by Franz Kafka's older brother. If you want an elaborate job creation scheme, then at least have people planting trees or doing something useful.


That's it for me; I have had enough. I am off to do some research into fisheries where the government's approach, when regulating someone for the very good reason that they have knackered their environment, seems to be to offer them compensation.


Tom Appleby, Bristol