Report comment

The Land Registry must ensure they have their own house in order BEFORE they start blaming others for the identical failings. Mistakes. The Land Registry are a Government body, where they want conveyancers to meet THEIR requirements and procedures, yet how can THEY make so many mistakes? Understandable if lawyers don’t always (or at all) understand all the dozens and dozens of Land Registry Practice Guides, many running to dozens of pages each. But the Land Registry making mistakes - it’s THEIR OWN rules and procedures that they are making mistakes with!? But they want conveyancers to abide by them pitch perfect!?

But true, accept blame where it is due, conveyancers do make so many careless mistakes, but…. where is the banner on the Land Registry website saying "CLICK HERE FOR AVOIDABLE REQUISITIONS - LET'S WORK TOGETHER"

Instead will we face "CLICK HERE FOR THE CONVEYANCERS WE FIND MAKE MOST MISTAKES" - not at condusive of the necessary relationship the public need between conveyancer and Land Registry.

Gone are the days where the Land Registry would telephone the conveyancer to say ‘we think you have made a mistake, do you mean…..’

Instead, here are the days where their own LRDirect portal goes offline, where scanned documents are missing from their records and they simply ‘apologise’, where leases have pages missed scanned, where covenants are registered yet never had Land Charge protection, where it depends on whose desk the application lands on to know if they will accept/reject/requisition, where they can over night suddenly go from decades of accepting something to now rejecting (e.g single witness attestation for joint owners, demanding you state ‘as executors for’ in a TR1 attestation cause despite sending them Probate, requiring a postcode for a witness…..the list goes on).

Again, they MUST ensure their own house in order BEFORE they start having a pop at others. The Government are seemingly going to allow them to publish requisition states, yet they too, simply do not focus on the right things to help conveyancing quality - they allowed anyone to prepare HIPs, they have pointless EPCs, they allow anyone to be badged as a conveyancer (not a single qualification needed) , they should require lenders to disband mortgage panel managers and allow the buyer's lawyer to also be the lender’s lawyer on simple production of an SRA number and matching address (or CILEX / CLC number too) , they poisitively allow leasehold property to be sold without mandatory (and enforced) key fact documents at any stage, they punish putting a roof over our heads with nasty stamp duty tax, they have Help2Buy literature that needs a lawyer to even understand the duplicating mess that was rushed through at that Budget and never improved (costing buyers on average an additional £400 if they need H2B)…another list that goes on.

And yet, I hear the requirement of the Land Registry is to always offer value to the public……so they halve their fees, and yet we are currently facing:

1. 3-4 months to first register a property.
2. all the above Land Registry errors each and every conveyer can attest to (that is a huge amount of errors but the way if across all practising conveyancers)
3. less Land Registry employees

Again, conveyancers do make silly mistakes - but pressured ones, not wilful, and not done simply between a voluntary decision between playing game of cards with a colleague or being accurate - but suggesting the number of requisitions is synonymous with 'conveyancer fault’ is misleading. There should indeed be a 'name and shame' of lenders who take so long to deal with the discharge of their security despite charging for repayment in most cases and having money in the account the whole time in full payment. The Land Registry then blame the conveyancer, and worse still, they double-count that blame - a requisition for a discharge is counted as two: one for their being no evidence of discharge, and another for the lender's restriction. Nothing to do with the conveyancer, or the conveyancer’s fault - in fact it is a back-handed compliment that they got their AP1 off sharpish.

And before anyone suggests "but their rules are their rules and lawyers are not getting them right", the Land Registry staff should petition a change to how inflexible they are - work with conveyancers on a change to the rules, as the goal is the same - get that property registered! Do that, and they will regain the lost chunk of conveyancers' respect. Tell tales about who receives what and how many requisitions, and the necessary relationship simply becomes strained and no one wins.