Newbury Mortgage Services 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 Newbury Mortgage Services solicitor panel appointment.

The requirements to join the Newbury Mortgage Services conveyancing panel is likely to be fairly detailed and is unlikely to include signing up to LENDERmonitor alerts.

Although not necessarily published, lenders have varying criteria . We do not hold specific requirements relating to the questions raised as part of the application to be on the Newbury Mortgage Services conveyancing panel. Typically lenders need to have full knowledge of a firm including (but not limited to):

• Full complaints history for each conveyancing solicitor
• Details of any accreditation e.g. Lexcel and/or Conveyancing Quality Scheme
• Charge registration history
• Full disciplinary history for each conveyancing solicitor
• List of all those who can sign off the Certificate Of Title
• PII Cover details, including, if relevant, whether the firm is or has been in the assigned risks pool and structure of cover – basic split and history of any refusals
• House price discrepancies (declared to lender vs. registered at Land Registry)
• List of all those staff who work within the conveyancing team
• The percentage of the firm’s business which is conveyancing broken down into sale
• Number of lender conveyancing panels the firm is currently on

The feeling from lenders generally (we can not speak for Newbury Mortgage Services specifically), is that for too long solicitors have concentrated on their duty of care to their purchasing client, and have paid scant attention to the duty they owe to the lender, whom they conveniently forget is also their client.

Looking from the lenders’ perspective, it has to be said that there are pressures to encourage smaller panels. The Financial Services Authority regards the open panel system as a major contributor to mortgage fraud and negligence cases, and has been leaning on lenders to move to proactive panel management, which is more expensive the larger the panel. Hence it is becoming more common for lenders to charge fees, and/or require extensive form-filling, from would-be panel members

Newbury Mortgage Services and other BSA lenders are in varying stages of reviewing their approach to vetting firms on their conveyancing panels, to ensure their ongoing exposure to unsuitable firms is reduced.

We can't comment specifically on Newbury Mortgage Services. 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 arrears 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 various requirements you need to follow if you wish to comply with your lender client’s instructions as set out in the BSA Mortgage Instructions. (I) You must take reasonable steps to verify that there are no discrepancies between the description of the property as compared to an out of date postal address or DX details.

The BSA Mortgage Instructions don't specifically deal with Solar Panels but it would be prudent as approved solicitors for Newbury Mortgage Services to raise the issue with them (as you would if the UK Finance Lenders’ Handbook applied). In any event you need to raise the appropriate questions for your buyer client.

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