Kumar: Seeking meeting
The Legal Services Consumer Panel (LSCP) has accepted part of the criticism made by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) of a recent report – but not gone as far as the regulator demanded.
Last month, the CLC hit out over inaccuracies it identified in the panel’s report, A Regulatory Framework for the Future, which made the case for reform of legal regulation.
The report cited conveyancing referral fees as one of three examples where failures in the legal market have been the subject of television documentaries and investigations, in this case a BBC Panorama programme last year.
The version said the investigation focused on referral fee arrangements involving licensed conveyancers, but this was not the case – rather it was about ‘conditional selling’ by estate agents, where they were incentivised to encourage buyers to use in-house services, such as conveyancing.
The LSCP has now amended the paper to reflect this but not apologised – or noted in the revised version that it was originally inaccurate.
The programme nonetheless led the CLC to launch a thematic review of referral fees, which its chief executive, Sheila Kumar, told the panel it did “to see if anything more could be done to improve the situation of consumers in the absence of regulation of estate agents”.
The interim findings were published in June, highlighting some shortcomings among firms and the risk of a “potential regulatory blind spot”.
The paper maintains the panel’s criticism that the CLC’s review “should have been prompted by the regulator itself” rather than a TV programme.
It also linked the findings of the review to the CLC having “publicly advertised itself to firms as a more ‘supportive’ regulatory environment”, the type of regulatory competition the panel said it had long warned against.
Later on, the report again referenced the CLC’s “active recruitment of regulated firms” with disapproval.
Ms Kumar criticised these comments too, arguing that the Legal Services Act was designed to give both consumers and lawyers a choice “and the CLC is simply demonstrating that it is a good choice to make”.
But the LSCP has not amended its paper on this issue.
In a statement, Ms Kumar said: “Having raised with the Legal Services Consumer Panel a significant inaccuracy in their report, which created a completely false and misleading link to licensed conveyancers in its description of the BBC Panorama investigation into conditional selling, the CLC notes that the LSCP has now publicly taken steps to rectify that inaccuracy.
“Other inaccuracies remain, however, and there is also the question of how such a document came to be published without effective checks by the LSCP or Legal Services Board. We are seeking a meeting with the leaders of both bodies to address these issues.”
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