seeping poison

Conveyancing practitioners are bombarded with sales brochures from contaminated land search providers or insurers, all competing with one another to frighten us into commissioning their products by using pictures of toxic waste barrels, landfill sites and dead fish.From my experience, these searches only open up a can of worms and the Council of Mortgage Lenders has now made it clear that it does not wish to receive such searches as they do not enable the lender to make a judgement about risk (see [2001] Gazette, 31 August, 38).We must also not lose sight of what the Law Society's warning card actually stated and the view that the making of a contaminated land search upon every single occasion without consideration as to its efficacy would seem to be an abrogation of professional judgement, rather than an exercise of it.As the largest provider of residential conveyancing services, our firm is determined that these searches should not become regarded as 'usual searches' by default, and I would urge fellow professionals to reconsider the issue.Roger Wilson, technical director, Countrywide Property Lawyers