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My small legal practice has been in operation for over 35 years during which time we have been members of the conveyancing panel of the Britannia (now owned by the Co-op) and the Co-op and nearly all the other major lenders. We have never had a claim nor a complaint from them, nor indeed from anyone else for that matter, in all that time. Indeed, to my knowledge, we have never had a bad borrower on our books although we have acted on very many occasions for all these lenders in connection with residential mortgages for all those years. Notwithstanding this 100% track record over such a long period, we were unceremoniously dumped a year or two ago by a number of lenders, including the Britannia and the Co-op, for no other reason than that I am a sole practitioner and therefore, presumably considered too dangerous or too dodgy to trust with their precious mortgage funds. I repeat, we are highly experienced and have never had a claim nor a complaint, yet we now find ourselves in an unenviable position particularly so far as residential conveyancing is concerned. Transactions can be well nigh impossible to deal with because we are often obliged to Kowtow and follow the ludicrous machinations of some of these lenders' lawyers 'factory' conveyancing processes, often clearly conducted by unqualified staff who will rigidly follow a set procedure irrespective of the actual need and, indeed, irrespective of common sense.

However, despite all the aggro we get from this, the PI debacle, and the sometimes unbelievably inapplicable rules set by the SRA, we have very loyal clients and always manage somehow to make a modest profit - and we NEVER spend more than that profit.

Wow!! How much did you say Co-op legal services lost? £22m was it? I guess Mr SRA has no interest in such a trivial snippet of information at all? Egg on face and all that! I guess it's comparatively unimportant anyway compared to the urgency of the SRA to penalise those who haven't completed their diversity data reports on time or chase up sole practitioners for COLP and COFA reports? Or do they just like to spend their time trying to force people to understand that black is, in fact, white.

LB