Two new, A-rated insurers are poised to enter the professional indemnity insurance market, adding much-needed volume to a market that is again expected to be tough this year.

Leading broker Richard Brown told the Sole Practitioners Conference in Harrogate yesterday that he is ‘90% of the way’ to agreeing terms with the pair, which he said would be writing cover for sole practitioners.

He declined to name the insurers for confidentiality reasons.

Brown, who is managing director, professions, at Prime Professions, and the SPG's preferred broker, is optimistic that recent changes to the client financial protection rules will ‘help turn the insurance cycle down again’.

He added: ‘New insurers should mean reducing premiums in 2011, and the cycle should start to turn.

'More firms will find it easier [than last year] but firms with a heavy exposure to conveyancing will still find it difficult.’

This year’s annual conference was the SPG’s sixteenth, with the challenges of alternative business structures, outcomes-focused regulation and the blanket removal of firms from conveyancing panels at the forefront of the agenda.

The Law Society has enjoyed some success at getting firms reinstated to panels, but chief executive Des Hudson told delegates that Chancery Lane is keeping its options open as it continues to negotiate with major lenders.

It is presently taking fresh legal advice on whether the Society may have grounds for a competition referral to the Office of Fair Trading.

And while conceding that there has been some solicitor involvement in the upsurge in mortgage fraud, Hudson hit out at lenders’ attempts to use solicitors as ‘convenient whipping boys’ to justify their panel purges.

‘Andy Hornby has more to answer for in the destruction of HBoS than solicitors,’ he said to applause.

The lenders do not disclose their criteria for running panels, he added, which Hudson described as a ‘ridiculous’ way to operate, but Chancery Lane does not believe it has grounds for litigation on panel exclusion.

He added: ‘We do not have a strong legal basis to challenge what they’re doing, but it’s arguable that there may be a breach of competition law.

'But could we prove to the OFT that what they are doing is improper?

'And if we do make a competition referral and lose, how much worse would our position be? We have, therefore, chosen the path of negotiation.’

Chancery Lane has agreed an appeals process with the big six lenders, he added, and continues to lobby the Council of Mortgage Lenders on the issue.

But Hudson stressed that the CML’s new chairman, Colin Walsh, managing director of Lloyds Banking Group Mortgages, works for an institution that has been 'most resistant' to objective criteria for panel management.

An industry-wide consultation has been agreed on developing an accepted and open set of rules on the management of law firm panel membership. In the meantime, said Hudson, a competition referral remains under review.

For a full report on the SPG conference, see this Thursday's Gazette.