Guest post by Rob Hailstone, founder, Bold Legal Group and the Conveyancing Improvement Collective
Hailstone: Trying to agree what ‘enough’ looks like
I’ve spent more than 50 years in conveyancing, 30 of them at the coal face, and founded the Bold Legal Group along the way.
When I qualified, a conveyancer had perhaps 10 or 12 plates to keep spinning. Today’s conveyancers have 20 or 30, and almost none of the room for error I had starting out.
The regulatory load keeps climbing. The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) carried out 935 proactive anti-money laundering (AML) engagements last year, nearly double the 545 the year before, and combined AML penalties topped £1.5m, the highest on record.
Conveyancing remains the single highest-risk practice area on the SRA’s books, and supervision is about to shift again, with AML oversight due to transfer from the SRA to the Financial Conduct Authority.
AML requirements, identity checks, source of funds and source of wealth investigations, leasehold reforms, complicated stamp duty responsibilities, lender requirements: every one of these exists for a good reason. All of them land on the same desk.
A roundtable of conveyancers and compliance leads convened this summer put the consequence bluntly: documentation has become a substitute for judgement. Practitioners are collecting more evidence not because it clarifies risk, but because a thick file is easier to defend to a regulator than a thin one, even when the extra pages add nothing to the client’s protection.
That’s not a knowledge gap or a competence problem. It’s what happens when the downside of asking one enquiry too few is a regulatory finding, and the downside of asking one too many is just an irritated buyer’s solicitor.
I saw the result of that logic recently. A contract pack went out to a firm acting for a buyer, and six enquiries came back. The sale then fell through for entirely unrelated reasons, and the same pack went to a different firm. Forty-six enquiries came back.
Same papers, same property, two competent teams, a sevenfold difference in what they judged necessary.
That gap isn’t evidence either firm got it wrong. It’s evidence that, as a profession, we’ve never agreed on what’s actually required.
What this is costing
The cost shows up in the transaction data. Connells Group reported in May that the average sale is now taking more than 100 days from offer to exchange, the slowest ever recorded. Leasehold transactions take around 155 days, 58 days longer than freehold, the widest gap on record. Nearly a quarter of fall-throughs now happen more than three months in, up from under a fifth in 2019.
None of that is because lawyers have become worse at conveyancing. It’s what happens when a process built for 10 or 12 variables is carrying 20 or 30, with no shared answer for how much of each is enough.
That load isn’t about to lighten. The government’s home buying and selling reform roadmap, published in June, will add mandatory upfront sales packs, earlier binding agreements and new digital verification requirements on top of what already exists.
Every one of those changes is aimed at fixing the process. None of them touches what’s actually costing deals right now: two competent firms, working from the same information in the same regulatory environment, producing wildly different files.
What we’re doing about it
That’s why I’ve launched the Conveyancing Improvement Collective (CIC): a practitioner-led group bringing together experienced conveyancers from firms of all sizes – small, medium and large – to agree practical fixes rather than wait for the next round of top-down reform.
We’re not trying to strip out compliance. We’re trying to agree, as a profession, what ‘enough’ looks like, so a file doesn’t need 46 enquiries in one office when six covers it in another.
We’ve started with two objectives. The first is the enquiries problem: building consensus on what’s genuinely necessary versus defensive padding, so firms can stop treating file thickness as a proxy for compliance.
The second speaks to that 58-day leasehold gap: confusion around mortgagee protection clauses in leases, which we’re working through with lenders and other stakeholders.
More issues will follow. The approach stays the same every time: identify a specific problem that’s slowing transactions down in practice, build consensus among practitioners, solve it, and move on to the next one.
This is no grand relaunch of the whole system, and no waiting for a regulator or a ministry to tell us how.
I need your help
This isn’t meant to be one firm’s view imposed on everyone else. If you’ve watched the same file produce a fraction of the enquiries at a different firm, or you’re still waiting for a straight answer on mortgagee protection clauses from a lender, I want to hear from you.
The CIC is inviting conveyancers, from sole practitioners to national firms, to help decide what we tackle next, because the problems worth fixing are the ones on your desk right now, not the ones making headlines.
What’s actually at stake
Every transaction is someone’s life moving forward. A family growing. A retirement beginning. A relationship ending. A fresh start, finally within reach. Get the process right, and we clear the way for that. Get it wrong, for reasons that have nothing to do with the deal itself, and we hold it up.
Some years ago, I helped a stranger resolve a complex issue that was blocking the sale of their property. I assumed that was the end of it. About a year later, an email arrived out of the blue: completing that sale had let them and their child leave a highly unsafe situation and start a new life abroad.
I think about that case whenever I hear about a file collecting its 40th enquiry, or a completion pushed back another month for reasons nobody can quite explain. Behind every one of them is somebody whose next chapter is on hold until we get it right.
I’m 68 and I have no interest in walking away from this profession while it’s carrying this much unnecessary weight. We can’t uninvent AML checks, source of funds requirements or incoming FCA supervision, and we shouldn’t want to.
But we can agree, as a profession, on what’s proportionate, and stop treating inconsistency as simply the cost of doing business.
If you’re a conveyancer who’s built a file thicker than it needed to be purely to protect yourself, or a firm still guessing at what a lender really wants on mortgagee protection clauses, I want to hear from you.
Get in touch at improveconveyancing.org
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