The Council for Licensed Conveyancers is under fire again, this time from the panel that’s supposed to represent consumers within legal services regulation.
A year after BBC Panorama caught Connells managers pushing buyers toward preferred conveyancers regardless of quality, the Legal Services Consumer Panel has published a position paper reopening the whole affair. Its argument is blunt: the CLC’s structure is part of the problem. As a smaller regulator competing to keep firms on its books, the panel says it was never really built to scrutinise referral fee arrangements before they became a scandal.
“Referral fee arrangements [sat] in a regulatory blind spot, because a smaller regulator with limited resources and a stated interest in retaining regulated firms had not prioritised proactive oversight,” the report states. Its preferred fix is a single, unified regulator with no commercial stake in attracting firms and enough scale to actually supervise them properly.
Chief Executive Sheila Kumar has rejected the report as inaccurate. She points out that Panorama’s findings were about unregulated estate agents, not conveyancers, and notes the CLC was the only conveyancing regulator to look into the issue afterwards. “Responding to market intelligence is the sign of a proactive regulator… It is worrying that the panel misread this so badly,” she said.
That defence is a bit slippery, though. The panel’s complaint was never that conveyancers broke the law, it’s that referral fee arrangements between conveyancers and agents went unexamined until a TV documentary forced the issue. Being the only regulator to react after the fact isn’t quite the same as having caught it proactively, which was the panel’s actual point. And Kumar’s claim that “active recruitment” of firms is simply good for consumers sidesteps the more uncomfortable question the report raises: whether a regulator that competes for firms’ business can ever fully police the fees those firms earn from each other.
The CLC says it’s tightening its code and still lobbying for estate agents to be regulated too. Fair enough, but the deeper question, whether a competitive, multi-regulator model for legal services actually protects consumers or just creates gaps for someone else to find, is still very much unresolved.