As a firm dealing with conveyancing matters on a comparatively small scale we feel hugely threatened by the pressures on our business from the increase of indemnity premiums largely resulting from the requirements of the Council of Mortgage Lenders, who of course include all the major banks and financial institutions.

We are correspondingly concerned at the deplorable lack of service from these institutions and delays in dealing with many of the fairly routine issues that arise from lenders’ instructions, and the need for compliance with those instructions by us as small firms.

There appears to be no attempt to deal with matters raised by solicitors with these institutions in a timely fashion. This is leading to a knock-on effect where solicitors are blaming other solicitors for delays, and those solicitors are excusing themselves because of the behaviour of these institutions. Meanwhile, the respective clients of the two firms are suffering and on occasions their business and personal activities are put at risk.

As we are told that the ‘perfect storm’ is on the horizon for small practitioners it is time that we stood up and shouted that we serve our clients particularly well in a personal capacity, and that the bigger the institutions involved, the less service the clients can expect.

This will probably eventually rebound on these bigger institutions (including new entrants to the legal market) so that many of them will lose custom. As a practitioner of over 40 years’ experience, I am sad to see this decline, but I regret that I do not anticipate being in business or alive when ‘what goes around comes around’ and the bigger institutions have to disassemble to allow the man in the street to be properly looked after, even if I survive to 6 October 2011.

Christopher Browning, Browning Grassam, Looe, Cornwall