While IT offers many benefits, pretending that e-conveyancing will radically ease the trials of moving house is misguided, says Raymond Perry

The belief that technology offers a magic bullet which will solve the problems experienced by users of public services remains an attractive one for the government.

Health, education and transport are all seen as areas where problems with the delivery of public services can be solved by investment in IT.

The government's plan to introduce electronic conveyancing is another example of this confidence in the power of technology.

Conveyancing in England and Wales might have low transactional costs compared with elsewhere in Europe, but most people think that the emotional cost involved is too high.

IT is seen as the solution.

Such thinking is encouraged by the IT industry whose profits depend on selling and maintaining new technology.

In itself there is nothing unreasonable in this, the tendency of those who work in the technology sector to exaggerate the benefits of their products is hardly unique and is widely understood.

In the late 1990s, that was temporarily forgotten and the dot-com bubble showed the problems caused when the promise of IT outweighs the reality.

The reaction to the bursting of the bubble and the anticlimax of Y2K and the millennium bug has meant that a degree of scepticism about the benefits of IT has developed.

Oddly, the government has remained immune to this.

The promotion of technology as a solution is accompanied by a failure to appreciate the degree to which the human element remains essential in realising the benefits of IT.

To the disciple of technology, computers are seen, mistakenly, as existing in isolation, rather than as a mechanism that people use to carry out their jobs.

This way of thinking results in the human part of conveyancing being disregarded.

It would be foolish to ignore the improvements that IT has brought to the law.

Solicitors have been able to take advantage of new technology in a multitude of ways.

But there are limits to what IT can achieve.

Although this should be self-evident, the influence of the technophile means that it is all too often forgotten.

This article was dictated into a word-processing program using speech recognition software and then e-mailed directly to the Gazette over a high-speed broadband connection.

Useful though all these things undoubtedly are, ultimately, they remain peripheral to the actual task of producing the text itself.

The problem is that investment in IT is not a realistic way of solving complex problems.

It is also far from clear that IT can radically improve productivity in the service sector.

Improvements in healthcare and education, as a direct result of increased IT spending, have been elusive.

The most noticeable outcome of the introduction of e-conveyancing in other jurisdictions seems to be to speed up post-completion registration.

This is something that the average homeowner is unlikely to notice.

Many, perhaps most, of the factors that cause so much stress and upset when moving house will remain untouched by e-conveyancing.

This does not mean that solicitors should not embrace new technology.

IT offers many benefits and should be used to its full potential.

However, unless challenged, the perpetuation of an exaggerated belief in the capacity of IT to improve conveyancing holds dangers for solicitors.

The idea that the conveyancing process will be markedly improved in some way once e-conveyancing is introduced has taken hold outside the profession.

If, as seems certain, such improvements fail to materialise, the danger is that conveyancers may get the blame.

The truth is that e-conveyancing is unlikely to make the experience of buying a house measurably less stressful for those involved.

The profession should stop pretending that it will.

Solicitor Raymond Perry is a writer on legal IT issues and a partner at Davies & Partners in Gloucester