Kumar: Firms need to play their part in supporting the system
The Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) has launched ‘Project 2,000 Lawyers’, a campaign to attract 2,000 more trainees to qualify with it by 2030.
It has also called for the creation of a technical excellence college (TEC) for consumer law disciplines, initially focused on conveyancing and probate, the most widely used legal services.
The CLC said figures showed around 10,000 qualified lawyers undertaking conveyancing work in England and Wales, a significant reduction from 13,000 in 2021.
It said another 2,000 would help reduce delays and fall-throughs and could support as many as 400,000 more property transactions each year.
As we reported last month [1], the government’s professional and business services jobs plan referred specifically to raising awareness of conveyancing careers.
“Conveyancers will be central to the successful delivery of the government’s recently announced home buying and selling reform roadmap [2]… [But] as with other parts of the legal services sector, conveyancers face increasing pressures as responsibilities have expanded and workloads have grown in recent years.”
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government pledged to work with Skills England, the Ministry of Justice and industry partners “to help ensure the conveyancing workforce is equipped to support the ambitious changes set out in the roadmap.
“This includes raising awareness of conveyancing careers, supporting skills development, and helping firms of all sizes to engage effectively with new requirements, processes, and technology.”
The CLC said its project fed directly into this and urged legal education providers to recognise that there was a wider range of options available to students than traditional routes into the legal profession.
It has also announced an accelerated qualification route for non-law graduates, alongside similar tracks for law graduates, paralegals, solicitors and chartered legal executives, CILEX paralegals, STEP practitioners and those without degrees.
The government has made TECs a central part of its plan for post-16 education and skills, initially focused on other areas of high-demand jobs, like advanced manufacturing, clean energy and defence, as well as digital and technologies.
The CLC said a specialist consumer legal services TEC would be a valuable addition to their ranks, bringing together government, employers, education providers and regulators to build direct routes into areas of established workforce demand.
It would support employers to progress existing staff towards becoming qualified lawyers and introduce more school and college leavers to legal careers.
CLC chief executive Sheila Kumar said: “The jobs plan confirms what the CLC has consistently argued: UK growth, housing delivery and home buying and selling reform depend on a larger, diverse and highly skilled licensed conveyancing workforce.
“Now we are calling on conveyancing practices across England and Wales to play their part by developing talent already in their businesses and attracting motivated new staff, supporting them through to qualification and licence so that there are more conveyancers able to undertake reserved work and supervise others in every postcode.
“We urge more education providers to place CLC qualifications alongside their other law offerings, and to support the sector in tackling the under-supply of licensed conveyancing and probate lawyers and in reducing the over-supply of those qualifying for other legal professions, providing a cost-efficient career route.”
The TEC proposal, she added, “would create the long-term education and skills pipeline needed to sustain the government’s industry and economic ambitions”.