Swansea Building Society Conveyancing Panel Information

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (or the BSA) do not involve themselves in training although they do organise numerous general legal related conferences which are attended by firms on the Swansea Building Society conveyancing panel. It is our intention to run specific lender focused seminars in the coming months including a webinar on Swansea Building Society’s Part 2 obligations. Solicitors on the Swansea Building Society conveyancing panel will be invited. Further details will be made available as part of the LENDERmonitor P2 change Notifications.

The Law Society of Scotland has suggested that solicitors should check their lender panel status prior to accepting client instructions to act. The advice is lender-agnostic as it does not relate specifically to solicitors on the Swansea Building Society conveyancing panel. The suggestion arises from the practice of a number of mortgage lenders who remove solicitors from their panels without prior notice as part of their panel management system, which can lead to some solicitors discovering this only once instructed. This is sensible advice as a client finding out midway through a transaction that their lawyer is not on the approved lender panel is very frustrating and can lead to complaints. Many online consumer forums contain posts where someone is complaining about finding that their lawyer is not on a lender conveyancing panel. Such forums include mumsnet.com

We can't comment specifically on Swansea 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 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 COLP but a firm should not send the complete conveyancing file without the buyer 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 are valid. Please click here for more information about that case.

With mortgage companies and property lawyers working so closely together it is surprising that there has not been much call for the introduction of a bit of transparency regarding not just the figures for the Swansea Building Society conveyancing panel but for all mortgage panels

Your insurance brokers are your best port of call to address this question. The chances are that on the basis that you have not been removed for fraud or negligence reasons that there will be little or no impact. The main reason why a firm would be removed off of a lender panel is due to low volume of conveyancing cases although there may be a number of criteria for Swansea Building Society solicitor panel membership. Please remember that it is always important that you complete your insurance forms accurately.

You need to communicate with Swansea Building Society to obtain standard documents. The The Council of Mortgage Lenders Handbook includes an individual question for lenders to set out who to contact to obtain standard documents. Swansea Building Society in their Part 2’s state: It is likely that you will need to disclose the firm’s Swansea Building Society conveyancing panel number.