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How do we accelerate/simplify the conveyancing process?

Let me count the ways:

Planning
Abolish planning agreements, containing those nasty planning obligations protecting the community and securing payments by wicked developers. Abolish planning consents, containing those tiresome planning conditions ensuring that the community is also protected.

Chancel Repair
Abolish mediaeval concepts of paying for church repairs.

Environment
Abolish green legislation, protecting both the land and the aquatic environments.

Leaseholds
Abolish retrospectively those tiresome leasehold concepts, which regulate the repair of common parts and replace with a modern statutory strata title concept set out on one page of A4.

Building Control
Abolish the need for building standards to be maintained.

Money Laundering
Abolish the need for lengthy and time consuming forensic checks to be undertaken by lawyers on their clients and others.

Chain Conveyancing
Abolish the ability of clients to sell and buy at the same time, which is so tiresome, and inhibits the adoption of a Scottish style system of conveyancing.

Greed
Advise clients to get counselling, to wean them of being so obsessed with getting every last penny out of their properties and/or acting badly towards the other party.

Consumer protection
Abolish recent legislation, reversing the “Caveat Emptor” principle complicating the process even further.

Taxation.
Abolish the ridiculous and Byzantine tax known as SDLT, designed to punish the unwary, and generate an unfair windfall for the Treasury.

Jurisprudence
Lobby the Judiciary, to stop lawyers automatically being held culpable in negligence, merely by virtue of their presence in any conveyancing matter.

So successive governments, having passed numerous measures to control, milk and regulate the transfer of land, now say that the process should be “accelerated” and simplified.

We have gone from an abandoned “traffic light e-conveyancing” concept to “blockchain”, but the last thing the huge UK property market wants at this time, are meaningless sound bites, put together in a veil of ignorance by politicians desperate to create a smokescreen for policy difficulties elsewhere.

The Law Society MUST lead the debate as to how evolving technology can aid due diligence to protect the public interest otherwise we will all suffer.