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I am a Partner in a general practice firm who specialises in conveyancing. For reasons entirely out of our control the firm has been removed from a very large lender's Conveyancing Panel and been the subject of an SRA Investigation following a complaint to them by the lender.

After a 2 day on site Investigation we were given a clean bill of health by the SRA and the Investigator was entirely dumbfounded as to why the lender raised any concerns on the files which the complaint concerned.

We now have to employ the services of a third party law firm to act on behalf of this particular lender's cases and having streamlined this system find that it adds no more to the timescale of transactions, (or cost to our Clients as we bear the costs of the third party firm).

It is clear that the large lenders want to continue to reduce their legal panels which are obviously expensive for them to maintain. If the trend continues, the genuinely excellent conveyancing practitioners who don't want to work in Conveyancing factories will have no choice as nobody other than these large factories will be left on the lender's panels.

The answer is simple, seperate representation for the lender, the additional cost of which is borne by the lender out of the savings they make from not now having to manage a large conveyancing panel.

From practice, the timescale arguement against seperate respresentation is weak and through proper file management does not need to add any additional time to a transaction.

In order to protect smaller, specialised conveyancing practices from being squeezed out of the market one by one then this has to be the way forward, sooner rather than later.