- Backfire - 29th May 2025
- Moving story! - 28th May 2025
- Sorry seems to be the hardest word… - 28th May 2025
Property experts and homeowners have condemned mistakes by solicitors, after one in Cardiff was sacked for failing to do essential legal work before a huge loan was secured, and his replacement was instructed last year but the task has still not been completed.
The extraordinary situation follows alarming details in an Ombudsman’s report which criticises errors in the conveyancing world which have had terrible repercussions.
It warned: “This report contains summaries of eight Legal Ombudsman investigations: four are about delays and hidden costs – resulting in some customers losing out on their home or being left with significant unexpected costs. Two relate to a failure to follow the customer’s instructions or inadequate advice or background information on the part of the lawyer – leaving one customer in a caravan on Christmas day, and another some £50,000 out of pocket”.
Separately, the property expert caught out by the solicitor mistakes in Cardiff said: “This is just appalling. I’ve lost thousands of pounds in rental income, I’ve had to borrow money from friends, re-mortgage my house, and not pay mortgages on other properties I own in order to put food on the table.
“But I’ll just have to put this down to experience, because I don’t want to have to sack ANOTHER one”!
Citizens Advice devote a special section giving online information to how to complain about errant property lawyers, declaring: “…you may think that the solicitor or licensed conveyancer has been negligent…”.
It has also been posted on reddit: “Solicitors are useless and make purchasing a home harder. Trying to purchase a home for 6 months now, with no chain, just a new build. Everything they’ve provided me with is just the same old default information I could have gotten myself. I’ve had to amend some info ‘cause they’ve mistakenly labeled the area as “flood risk” while being on a big hill lol.
“I’ve also had to search council public info for them as well, they can’t use Google. They’re now completely blocking the exchange, refuse to cooperate and told me to stop emailing them, as this is keeping them from doing work (as if they’ve done work until now).
“The purchase will fall apart for sure but I refuse to get myself back into this and try again with any other property until something changes in this country with the property purchase process! If people think waiting for months to move is normal, I’ve got news for ya! Check literally any other country”.
However the governing body Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) appears clear that solicitor negligence will not be tolerated, proclaiming: “Our rules aim to uphold high professional standards. We insist that solicitors and firms in England and Wales report serious breaches of our rules to us. But we also need the public, clients and others to let us know when things go wrong in a way that breaches our rules”.
It seems obvious that things have gone wrong in Wales, if one solicitor was sacked for failing to do his job and his replacement was instructed before Christmas but still hasn’t done it!
The memories of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when poor work by solicitors was often exposed) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – how during that career it has always been fundamental to expose the weakness in official policy, or when the plans don’t happen AT ALL.
This is now underlined by a conference next month with delegates meeting against a disturbing backdrop of ‘sustainable development goals’ announced 10 years ago to turn “billions to trillions”, which were never actually reached!
