When it meets this month the Council of the Law Society will consider proposals to encourage minimum fees for conveyancing.

The conveyancing debate began in about 1992 when Tony Holland began his valiant crusade in the West County to stamp out the 'cost cutters'.

The profession looked to the Law Society to provide direction in an increasingly unstable market-place.' Adapting for the future' failed to find solutions or appease the growing sense of anger and frustration within the conveyancing community.

Statistics abound to exemplify the appalling picture in our high streets today: the loss of nearly 4000 firms since 1989 with an average voluntary closure of about four each week.

It is estimated that more than 1000 solicitors are the subject of IVAs and each week another is made bankrupt.Since July of this year the debate has assumed a greater sense of urgency.

In excess of 12,700 practitioners have lent their support to John Edge's conveyancing fee initiative.

According to Mr Edge, the Council will be asked to stand up and be counted.

He continues to encourage supporters to attend the meeting and has even suggested that the usual venue is substituted to accommodate 'spectators' and has called for individual votes by Council members to be recorded.

He plans to demand a postal ballot of the entire profession if the Council does not deliver.There are two extreme schools of thought on the conveyancing question.

At one end of the spectrum some advocate unfettered competition.

They argue that only the fittest (or perhaps the biggest) should survive.

They are in a minority.

At the other extreme, traditionalists argue passionately about all that has been shown to be wrong with the concept of 'popular capitalism'.

Where service and 'quality' are replaced by 'commodity' and 'price'.

Local chemists would have long since disappeared were it not for some governmental control over the pricing of non-prescription medicines.Is the legal profession to follow suit? It seems likely unless some way can be found to bolster the price of high street legal services.

This in essence is the conveyancing debate.

Like a Russian doll it has many layers and operates on different levels: the adequacy of fees; the role of the solicitor in the house transfer process; the behaviour of others -- notably the providers of mortgage-related financial services; the role of the Law Society; the future of small firms; and ultimately the way in which legal services will be delivered into the next century.I suspect that the majority of high street solicitors sit somewhere between the two extremes.

Many would prefer to continue in essentially the same way with perhaps some fine tuning.

Better systems for case management and greater use of information technology might improve the overall quality of the service.

But there is a cost and profit margins are almost non-existent.Those who argue against any form of price control claim that the essential problem is one of over-supply.

They point to the property collapse in 1989 and the subsequent recession.

Have they forgotten the panic that set in when licensed conveyancers first came upon the scene? This was followed quickly by a relaxation in our publicity code so that we could advertise to beat off the competition.

Unfortunately price was the only thing we did advertise.

For the first time conveyancing had become a commodity that you could buy for £99 rather than a professional service that commanded a respectable fee.

And, whilst the property boom in the late 1980s provided some relief, the subsequent 'crash' reinforced the downward trend a with vengeance.

Over-supply is undoubtedly a factor but it never was the cause.

Land Registry published statistics bear this out.

In crude terms, there were considerably more 'transactions' for each practising solicitor in 1980 than there were in 1970 and more again in 1990 than in 1980.But can we continue in our present vein? Solicitors are not ordinary commercial traders.

They are compelled to provide added value in the form of rigorous and expensive regulatory regime.

This operates to destroy the free market.

It also affords to the public a form of protection that is second to none.

Who is to pay it?In Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain v Dixon [1968] 2 All ER, Lord Upjohn stated: 'A profession is a vocation of the highest standing; it calls on the members to serve the public by offering to them highly technical and always confidential advice and services which require a different standard of conduct from the tradesman ...

those seeking the advice of a professional man are entitled to expect of him the highest standards of ethical conduct.

This means that the professional man must submit to some restraints of tread such, to take an elementary example, as a prohibition against advertising and a refusal by undercutting or otherwise to snatch work from another practitioner.

Such restraints are necessary to establish, sustain and promote the profession and particularly its ethical standards.

The restraints on professional men are justifiable in law for they are necessary not only in the interests of the profession but also in the interests of the public, who trust to the particularly high standing and integrity of a profession to serve it well.' Some 25 years later do these principles still apply? Surely some of them should.The MMC report in 1973 considered the issue of price regulation.

Whilst it concluded then that the public interest would be better served by the removal of price controls it stated at para 317 '...

as to the arguments that price regulation helps to maintain the level of remuneration of practitioners ...

we would not regard these as affording a powerful justification for the practice unless it were shown that the prof ession would otherwise be exposed to exceptional danger of a fall in incomes and that this would result in a serious deterioration in the quality or quantity of service offered.'It is not time for the Law Society to get off the fence and decide which hat it needs to wear on this particular issue.

The survival in the short term of a great many solid and respectable solicitors is at stake.

Perhaps on this occasion it needs to behave as a trade organisation and protect its members.

In doing so it could find some comfort in the obiter dictum of Lord Diplock in Swain v Law Society 1985.

He recognised that on any long term view it was unlikely that the interests of solicitors would conflict with those of the public.

There can be no better way of serving the interests of society than by preserving and then strengthening an independent network of solicitors throughout the jurisdiction.