Sunil Kambli is absolutely correct.

All the Law Society, with the agreement of the master of the rolls, has to do is to require borrower and lender to seek separate representation and the problem of restricted lenders’ panels will be overcome at a stroke. Let them have their panel of 43: it won’t matter. It will involve some rise in the cost of domestic conveyancing, but that cost is unreasonably low now and has not kept pace with: house price inflation; the cost of running a responsibly conducted legal practice; or the costs reasonably charged in other areas of legal work.

When costs are too low, work is sometimes done shoddily, and our premiums rise. Everyone knows this. None of this cheapskate work is in the national interest, no matter how much the ‘poundstretcher’ British may be mistakenly obsessed with value for money. Essentially, the public has had conveyancing at a discount for years, with utterly predictable results. From time to time it has received what it had paid for and that all has to stop.

Obvious advantages of the new rule will be that there will be twice the opportunity for something missed to be spotted in time. We are only human and things sometimes escape us. There is too much money involved in domestic conveyancing for mistakes to slip by unnoticed.

Also, the possibility of a conflict of interest arising will necessarily disappear. It will need to be said that any solicitor, notary or conveyancer acting in a transaction will not be discharging their duty of care to the lender just by sending out a checklist with boxes to tick, culminating in a certificate of title from the person acting for the borrower, which allows the lender's solicitor to avoid investigating the title by relying on that certificate instead. There has been too much of that recently; so, when a solicitor acts for a lender, all the proper work must be done and the certificate on title to the lender must come from its own legal advisers in reliance principally on its own research, including correspondence with the borrower’s solicitors.

Therefore, I demand that a practice rule be made as soon as possible to prevent any legal practice acting for both borrower and lender in the one transaction. Exactly the same rule needs to be put in place simultaneously by the Notaries Society and the Council for Licensed Conveyancers.

What are we waiting for? Do we want to stay in practice or not? It will save a lot of agonising meetings with lenders like HSBC, fighting a rearguard action. Actually, the threat of bringing in such a rule would give the Law Society negotiators rather more clout when knocking on HSBC’s door, if anyone still wants to keep knocking.

Anyway, we have the solution within our power, so let’s do it and be less timid. The lenders are not timid: they just do what they like.

Michael Brough, Michael Brough and Cohen, Beaconsfield, Bucks