Melton Mowbray Building Society Conveyancing Panel Information

Unlike the CML the Building Society Mortgage Instructions deal with this. Section A.12 states ‘In order to act on our behalf your firm or company must be a member of our conveyancing panel provided we are a society that operates one – see specific requirements for details of our arrangements. The Special Requirements state:

You must also comply with the terms and conditions of your Melton Mowbray Building Society solicitor panel appointment.

Melton Mowbray Building Society addresses this at section B.3 of their BSA specific requirements which states:

The BSA is an association rather than a regulator and therefore will not investigate grievances against lenders. You can of course contact Lexsure to see if we can assist.

We only know of a couple of lenders that operate a distinct conveyancing panel where the mortgage advance is over a certain level. You should nevertheless check directly with Melton Mowbray Building Society. At one stage HSBC would only allow Sole practitioners to act for them where the mortgage was below £150,000. We are not sure if HSBC still operate such a condition. In your case it is best to check with Melton Mowbray Building Society

We can't comment specifically on Melton Mowbray 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 buyer client 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 just send the lender the parts solely relating to themselves. But, of course, as this will basically be correspondence with the lender, mortgage instructions etc.

Check with your Compliance Officer, but a firm should not send the complete conveyancing file without the borrower client’s express consent – and if he is in dispute with the lender he is hardly likely to agree. However, if the lender can establish a prima facie case of fraud, then you may be under an obligation to disclose the whole file.

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

There are many reports available but examples include:

• Average time frame to register charges at the Land Registry
• Average time frame to send deeds to the lender (calculated from completion date or title registration)
• Number of conveyancing cases by lender
• The percentage of the firm’s business which is conveyancing (purchase and remortgage)
• Average mortgage advance
• Buy to Let transactions
• Disclosure to Lender analysis indicating frequency and nature of disclosures - to include benchmarking analysis against aggregate data
• Evidence of undertaking logs
• Current and historic missed priority dates
• Analysis as to the nature of clients (e.g. existing client )

The answer to this question really depends on the reason that your firm has been removed off the Melton Mowbray Building Society conveyancing panel. The top 3 reasons are as follows:

1. lack of transactions
2. the lawyer is a sole practitioner
3. as part of the HSBC panel reduction.

In these three circumstances it is unlikely that you would expected to take any action. Disclosure and other compliance considerations are more likely to be relevant if the reason for removal is due to breaches of lender requirements or allegations of fraud or negligence. Whether the reasoning should trigger a disclosable 'material' breach will depend on the firm and the circumstances around possible failures to comply with the SRA Authorisation Rules, and the SRA will judge each case on its own merits. Factors such as the detriment or risk of detriment to clients, the scale of the issue and overall impact on the firm will need to be considered in deciding whether a failure is 'material'. As the compliance officer you will need systems to identify patterns of breaches. Even if you don't consider there to be regulatory implications, the firms COFA needs to consider whether he or she needs to take any action as result of being removed from the conveyancing panel of Melton Mowbray Building Society.

BSA lenders do not come within the top 20 lenders in terms of frequency of questions. The most popular lender panels in terms of questions are as follows:

• Santander Conveyancing Panel
• National Westminster Bank Conveyancing Panel
• Royal Bank of Scotland Conveyancing Panel
• HSBC Conveyancing Panel
• Lloyds Conveyancing Panel