I recently received a copy valuation report from a client buying a nearly new property. It consists of six brief lines, confirming blindingly obvious things such as the number of bedrooms and the roof materials, and giving the value of the house (miraculously, the same figure as the actual sale price). For this, which cannot have taken more than an hour's work, including travelling time, my client has been charged £535.

For very little more, I am undertaking the conveyancing on the purchase that will cover, over a period of anything between one and three months, innumerable letters, faxes, e-mails, telephone calls, searches, reports, checking and completing of documents, negotiating, explaining, cajoling, chasing and interpreting. Yet my livelihood as a high street solicitor is being threatened by the Clementi proposals and by the advent of home information packs, because of the tired old mantra that solicitors are slow and uncompetitive (incidentally, I am scheduled to exchange on the purchase less than two weeks after my client's offer was accepted).


I trust the big companies that seem to think that the conveyancing market is a potential goldmine realise their mistake before I and other hardworking and underpaid conveyancers are forced out of business by the unfair competition.


Nick Hutchinson, Cheltenham