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Anon at 09.57 I could not have put it any better myself.

The basic reason the conveyancing process takes so long today is the fact that the vast majority of the work is carried out by poorly trained staff. They are there purely to administrate and work from checklists and have no real knowledge of what they are actually doing. Once they have their file somewhere near exchange it is then passed up the hierarchy of their factory until eventually in the next week or so it lands somewhere where it can be "signed off". In the meantime all parties in the chain sit and wait. There needs to be something done to bring the conveyancing process back to qualified experts who provide a service and who the clients can actually speak to. Probably wishful thinking on my part but if the present free for all continues the whole conveyancing process will be in tatters in another ten years if not less. In my over thirty years working in conveyancing standards in the profession have never been lower, and they get worse year on year.

Two other points:-

1. Surely Agents instructing conveyancers who are effectively "in-house" is a huge conflict of interest? Certainly I have worked at a Firm who were hugely dependent on one Agent for work, and that introducer considered they themselves were the clients and expected all jobs to go through regardless. Find a defective title and they were straight on the phone to the senior partner complaining. He would then take the file and it would mysteriously proceed straight through to exchange without said defect being resolved. Pity those poor clients who tried to sell their houses. The tail cannot wag the donkey but I know it does and clients should not be placed in that position, this issue must be looked at.

2. Surely we are all supposed to be hugely aware of the potential for e-fraud? Yet here we are talking about bringing in a process that can only increase the potential for such occurences? What we should be doing is actually going back to the good old days when there were Land and Charge Certificates. Do we really think that some of the frauds resulting in recent high profile Court cases would have occurred if the owner of the property was in receipt of his own deeds? I doubt it, ask a seller to produce his Land Certificate and if he can't then he cannot sell. It isn't rocket science go back to the original system which worked for decades. Sometimes progress for the sake of it is not an improvement.