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I've just been asked by a largish multi-branch firm of Solicitors acting for buyers to say that if required by a relevant authority (e.g. Land Registry or the Police) to produce the evidence of identity I've obtained. This is a new one on me, presumably dreamed up by someone in the firm or recommended/suggested by a seminar speaker. The answer will be 'No'. Like a lot of these things, it hasn’t been thought through. There are a variety of issues, for example (a) getting involved later post-completion for a protracted period; (b) drafting an irrevocable authority for my client to sign to produce this evidence later when the buyer's Solicitors have only given examples of 'relevant authorities'; (c) getting my PI insurers to agree to the handing over of evidence; (d) helping out the Land Registry to identify someone when, according to accounts about the Mishcon case, it was the Land Registry who uncovered that a fraud had occurred using, presumably, the means at their disposal far in excess of those available to me to definitively identify someone - basically I have no resources available to me to positively ID a determined fraudster; (e) helping out the police for heavens sake who must have infinitely more resources available to them to establish someone's ID than a firm of Solicitors has. If proceedings were to come about later, then I could be ordered to produce documentation in my possession and/or answer questions if I couldn't do so voluntarily - or wouldn't, given the time the exercise might take.

I've posed already to the Land Registry and the Law Society that we should be given proper assistance by, for example, the Land Registry, a public government body, to identify our clients before a fraud has taken place, not wait until afterwards. I've also suggested a mutual fund be set up to bail out Solicitors in these specific cases when the Solicitors have done nothing wrong and haven't been negligent (depending on the way Mishcon goes). Neither of them has sent a substantive reply despite saying they would.

Whether judges have got it in for Solicitors or not, the problems need tackling somehow (i) that most clients of most Solicitors are not personally known to the Solicitors who therefore can never absolutely vouch for their identity and (ii) that value of residential properties makes it eminently worthwhile for criminals to attempt to commit property frauds and (iii) mortgage lenders and other large organisations or just conveyancing procedure generally place far too high a burden on individual relatively small firms of Solicitors to assume responsibility for the consequences of occurrences over which the Solicitors have no control and insufficient time to cover effectively (e.g. buildings insurance, the holding to order of exchange deposits which we aren't actually holding because they're held somewhere else remotely down the chain and yet the compulsory CQS courses say that on such a deposit being demanded, we've simply got to come up with it immediately, the absolute requirement of some parts of the Council of Mortgage Lenders Handbook - now of course renamed but I haven't got an autocorrect for the new name yet, and so on).

I see that the Land Registry have issued fresh requirements about proving ID when submitting an AP1. I haven't looked at them yet but no doubt they'll require Solicitors to provide some sort of cast-iron guarantee.

Is this catalogue of our woesome position too long? Of course it is, there's lots more… Hey don’t turn me off; I'd just got started.