Furness Building Society Conveyancing Panel Information

Some might be tempted to steer clients away from those who impose the greatest restrictions on panel membership. John Scott, secretary to the Society’s Property Law (formerly Conveyancing) Committee, advises: “The difficulty there is that you are effectively giving financial advice to clients. It might be that the best choice for them is from one of these lenders and it’s difficult to see how you could give advice not to choose that product without putting yourself in a conflict position.”

The LSS proposals would have made it compulsory for lenders and buyers in the same property transaction to be represented by separate solicitors. For example if the borrower was getting a mortgage with Furness Building Society one solicitor would act for Furness Building Society being on the Furness Building Society conveyancing panel and a separate lawyer would act for the borrower.

The key points that the CML raise are Compulsory separate representation has the potential to cause considerable and unnecessary duplication of work (and costs) and increase the risk of delays in transactions. Secondly,The consultation document has not been written in a balanced way, overtly favouring the arguments for separate representation with little evidence to support the assertion of routine problems with joint representation.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders are not a regulator and therefore do not investigate complaints against lenders. You can contact Lexsure to see if we can assist. Please see our contact details below.

The Scottish Law Society has advised that solicitors should check their lender panel status prior to accepting client instructions to act. The advice is lender-agnostic since it does not relate specifically to solicitors on the Furness Building Society conveyancing panel. Because a number of mortgage lenders remove solicitors from their panels without prior notice as part of their panel management system, some solicitors discover their removal too late to be effective. Checking one’s legal panel status is sensible advice because a client who finds his lawyer is not on the approved lender panel is very frustrating and can lead to complaints as seen on online consumer forums. Such forums include moneysavingexpert.com

We can't comment specifically on Furness Building Society. Many major lenders are now introducing ‘file auditing’ as standard practice in relation to completed matters. This raises questions of confidentiality in relation to the borrower and the purpose to which the results of such audits will be put. The starting point is to remember that the file does not belong to your firm, it belongs to the ‘client’. But, of course, we will normally have two clients--the buyer and the lender--and you will owe a duty of confidentiality to each. So basically, you have to separate the file and only send the lender the parts solely relating to the lender. But, of course, this should be correspondence pertaining to the lender, mortgage instructions etc.

The emerging convention is that lenders include authority to disclose in loan application forms to counter this problem. Mortgage Express v Sawali, [2010] EWHC 3054 (Ch) indicates that such provisions are valid. Please click here for more information about that case.