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Kings Speech 2024 – What it means for conveyancers and other property professionals.

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King’s Speech 2024 – what it means for conveyancers and other property professionals.

We are not talking about the big-ticket stuff – like House of Lords reform.  Instead, we are focusing on the small-print in the Starmer agenda.  The things which are likely to affect our day-to-day work.  We also mention things which we would have expected to see mentioned in the King’s Speech, on which there has so far been silence.  Here are the things which interest us.

A Planning and Infrastructure Bill

This is exciting.  For too long, the ‘no’ lobby has been in the ascendancy.  And all at a time of housing crisis. Planning has become two politicised.  Planning pre-conditions have become long shopping lists, within a process which has become like treacle.  Even so, the government’s announced proposals for reforming the planning system are modest: with the restoration of house-building targets and the reclassification of some parts of the green belt.  When what is really required is a speeding up of the whole planning process.  Which shouldn’t be problematic for a self-financing public service.  We’re sure many developers would be willing to pay a little bit extra by way of planning-fees, to pay for the additional staff needed to get their applications through the system.  And if it is blocked by local politicians, to get it quickly in front of a government-appointed planning inspector.  Why should that be difficult? 

Leasehold Reform

Some of it we have heard before. Like replacing a leasehold system which has existed for more than 1000 years by a new system of commonhold.  The legislation already exists in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002.  But it didn’t work when Tony Blair tried to introduce it more than 20 years ago.  Because nobody wanted it.  So why will it work now?  Despite its imperfections, residential leasehold is the most workable system for selling flats and maisonettes.  So wouldn’t it be better just to make the reforms needed to get the existing residential leasehold system right, instead of trying to force something which nobody wants.  At the moment, we are waiting for the new government to bring into force detailed provisions of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, which received royal assent in the last days of the Conservative government.  But it is not just about bringing it into force, because the detail will be in the regulations which, as far as we’re aware, have yet to be published.  So there is some work for the new government to do before that legislation can take effect.  We are also expecting the new government to waste no time in pushing forward with the Renters Reform Bill, which had been tabled by the previous Conservative government but dropped as soon as the general election was called.  It always seemed to us that the last government’s commitment to removing section 21 no-fault evictions was always a little half-hearted, we assume because of the landlord-lobby.  Funny thing about the section 21 evictions process, was that it was not seen as problematic in 1989 when the private-rented sector was opened up, because the residential market was so different, with residential landlords competing with each other for the best tenants, not the other way round, as it is today.  It meant that if, in 1989, you were a reputable tenant who was unlucky enough to be given the section 21 notice of eviction, there would be dozens of other potential landlords bidding to accommodate you.  And remember, that in 1988, most councils still had their social rented stock.

Absences

As well as the reforms which the new government has announced, there are also some things missing, which we would have expected to find within the King’s Speech or other government announcements.  We are surprised that there has been no mention at all of any scaling back of right-to-buy, not even from the crazy discounts introduced by the Cameron government.  What is scandalous is that up to 40% of ex-right-to-buy properties are now in the hands of private landlords, meaning that local authorities are having to rent back ex-right-to-buy properties on their own estates, just to meet their statutory housing needs.  What nonsense is that?  Is our system of housing benefits really so generous that it can afford to throw money at private landlords, because there is no longer any significant affordable rented sector?  No wonder first-time buyers and private renters have been priced out of the housing market.  The other thing, for which there has been no mention, is any revamp of the measures brought in by the Gordon Brown government to bring long-term empty dwellings back into occupational use.  The problem with Brown’s empty dwellings management orders, was that the whole process was too cumbersome to be of any use.  At the last count there were approximately 260,000 empty dwellings in the UK.  What a waste!

Legislative Agenda

We have also taken a few moments to look at the government bills which are currently before Parliament.  Presently, there are only five government bills, most of which we think are uncontroversial.  These include a new Arbitration Bill, building on the existing 1996 legislation, to restore London as the world’s arbitration capital.  Who is going to argue with that?  And there is also the bill to re-nationalise Britain’s railways.  With only four clauses, this bill is astonishingly short for what has become one of the new government’s landmark policies.  It does no more than prohibit a re-letting of existing railway franchises except to a government-owned company.

business, career, jobs, Law, property, real estate, self improvement, society

Conveyancing – How to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

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Conveyancing – Four Ways to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

Conveyancing is piecework.  Forget hourly rates.  In a competitive legal market, residential clients want to be able to compare quotes.  And professional rules now require transparency when it comes to pricing, so that prospective clients can see at a glance what they are going to have to pay.  But whenever you quote a prospective client, you need to be able to work within budget.  If you overrun that budget because you under-quoted or did not appreciate the extent of the work-tough!  You’ll be doing some free work. That’s not the client’s fault.  Unless you can genuinely say that additional complications cropped up which no one could have ever previously foreseen or because of something your client didn’t tell you.  So it’s all about packing in as much personal productivity as is possible for each working hour of your day.  Here are some tips:

  • Always dictate-dictate-dictate your work.  Never try to hand-type everything.  It’s just too much hard work.  Maybe like me, you lost your secretarial support more years ago than you can even remember.  Never mind.  There is Microsoft voice dictation.  If you’re working on a computer which is Windows 10 or above, you’ll find voice dictation somewhere.  Just go to ‘settings’ and ‘ease of access’.  Dictating your work can be annoying to those around you, particularly if you have to keep repeating the same phrase until your voice recognition gets it right.  Sometimes it never gets it right.  If I say the word ‘comma’, it will tell me to ‘call my mum’.  If I say ‘draft’ as in document, I will always get the draught which blows in from an open window.  So why do I use voice dictation?  Because even with its faults, it’s still three times quicker than trying to type everything out longhand.  Because even if you can touch type, you can’t type as fast as you can speak.  So by using voice dictation I can triple my chargeable output.
  • Standardise-standardise-standardise.  Take a tip from Henry Ford.  Install a conveyor belt.  Metaphorically speaking of course.  Try to create your own all-purpose templates, which you can easily and quickly populate before sending out.
  • Front-load your work, so that you can do as much as possible in one shot.  Don’t wait for the other party solicitor to send across to you their title documentation, download it yourself and save a week.  Never issue documentation in draft if the you can send out something which is a engrossment-ready.
  • Finally, never compromise on the quality of your work or the service which you provide to your client.  Make sure that everything is right first time, the moment it is sent out.  Don’t rely on your client to pick up your mistakes.  Take the trouble to organise your electronic file so that everything is correctly labelled and stored in its correct folder, so that you can find anything in an instant instead of having to trawl through the whole file.  It also makes it easier if a colleague has to look after your file in your absence.
business, housing, Law, Uncategorized

What a New Labour Government Means for Conveyancers in England and Wales

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With a new government on 5 July 2024 now a cert, it is time to think about what this means for UK conveyancers.  Here are our own predictions for the year ahead.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024

As this non-controversial piece of legislation reached the statute book in the closing days of the Sunak government, it only remains for Starmer to issue regulations bringing it into force.  We expect this to be amongst the first tasks for the new Labour government.  The legislation is important because it changes the process for dealing with statutory residential lease extensions and enfranchisements as well as regulating freehold estate management.

Renters Reform Bill

This bill, which was already part way through parliament, was one of the legislative casualties of the general election.  The key provision of this bill was the removal of section 21 non-fault evictions.  Although the removal of section 21 evictions is not quite a roll-back to the bad old days of rent-controls, it will certainly make many would-be landlords and mortgage lenders think twice before going into this market.  It may also lead to a loss in private rented accommodation as landlords sell up when tenants vacate instead of re-letting.  When it was first introduced on 1 April, 1989, the ability of landlords to regain possession of their properties on two months notice was not particularly problematic because there was a healthy housing market, which made it easier for prospective tenants to pick and choose where they wanted to live and to negotiate how much they wanted to pay.  Unfortunately, that is no longer the case because of the depletion of the social-rented sector.  So our expectation is that the new government will waste no time in re- launching this bill and pushing it through to royal assent.

Right-to-buy

Unlike Scotland and Wales, we are not expecting the new government to abolish right-to-buy in its entirety but simply to scale it back, in terms of discount, to what was available when Gordon Brown left office in 2010.  At that time, the maximum discount on a right-to-buy sale was capped at £16,000.  Our expectation is that this £16,000 cap might be increased to reflect price-inflation but fall well short of the generous discounts introduced by David Cameron when he took power in 2010.  What this means is that purchasing under right-to buy may no longer be the attractive proposition which it is today.  There are also the transitional arrangements which will need to be put in place for right-to buy purchases which are underway at the time the new legislation is introduced.  We are not expecting any changes to right-to-buy to operate retrospectively, which would mean that work-in-progress will be allowed to continue to completion of the transaction.

Reform of the Town Planning System

This is going to be the most difficult task for the incoming government as it will be trying to push back against a bureaucratic inertia which has built up over decades and in which the ‘No!’ lobby has remained supreme.  It is not just about restoring the house building targets which had already existed until the recent abolition by the outgoing Conservative administration.  It is about breaking through the treacle.  The bottom line is that town planning is too politicised.  With too many vested interests.  It shouldn’t be like that.  It’s about making the most efficient use of land.  Key to breaking through this inertia is to simplify and speed up the appeals process, so that any developer who feels that their application is being frustrated by local politicians, can quickly get their planning application referred to a third party for determination.

V. Charles Ward

Solicitor and Legal Associate RTPI – 15th June 2024

business, housing, Law, Uncategorized

Service of Documents – New Case-Law

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If I outstay my welcome in a camera-controlled car park, I will probably be issued with a penalty charge notice. 

That notice would, in the ordinary course of events, be posted to the registered address of my motor vehicle.  But supposing I don’t receive that PCN because I have moved away from my old address and have not yet got around to updating the DVLA with my change of address?  And supposing I don’t receive any of the follow-up correspondence, during which time the original £60 PCN has accumulated to £600?  The first I know about it, is when a bailiff comes knocking at my door.  But Mr Bailiff, I didn’t receive anything? 

Tough!  Parking enforcement is entirely a matter of process.  No allowance is made for oversight. Fortunately, the law is not always like that.

Supposing a civil judgment is entered against me in my absence for legal proceedings which I knew nothing about.  Even if the papers were correctly served, I might still have good grounds for asking a district judge to set aside that judgment if I can convince the judge that it would be unfair to let the judgment stand, because I had an arguable defence.  A similar issue arose in relation to two recent cases at the Upper Tribunal Lands Chamber, which concerned situations where papers had been correctly served by a local authority but had not come to the attention of the intended recipient.  

In the first case, Tabassam v Manchester City Council [2024] UKUT (LC), Ms Tabassam was held to have had a ‘reasonable excuse’ for not complying with a statutory improvement notice which had been sent to the proprietorship address stated on her land registry title, as well as well as to the property itself.  But neither notice reached her and she therefore did not respond.  In default of her response, Newcastle City Council imposed a financial penalty against her for failing to comply with the improvement notice. 

The reason why Ms Tabassam had not received the improvement notice was that she had moved away from her old address and had not updated the land registry record.  She pleaded ‘reasonable excuse’.  Her plea was upheld as it was said that the council could have found a more up to date address if it had searched other internal records.

In the case of Newcastle City Council v Abdullah [2024] UKUT 140, the city council had adopted a landlord licensing scheme under the Housing Act 2004 for the area within which Mr. Abdullah’s property was situated.  A licence issued by the council permitted Mr Abdullah to manage premises at 29 Gillies Street subject to standard conditions requiring him to provide certain information on demand.  The council later requested information from him by letter sent by ordinary post and addressed to him at an address he no longer occupied.  The key question in that appeal was whether a demand which never came to his attention was nevertheless an effective demand for the purposes of the licence condition.  If it was, Mr. Abdullah’s failure to comply with that condition would have been an offence contrary to section 95 (2)(b) of the Housing Act 2004 unless he could prove that he had a reasonable excuse for that failure.

In this case, the upper tribunal found that the notice had been properly served, even though there was other e-mail correspondence on an unrelated matter between Mr. Abdullah and the council which quoted a more up-to-date address.  Nevertheless, the upper tribunal found against Mr. Abdallah on the question of whether service of the notice was valid. 

What made Mr Abdullah’s case different from that of Ms Tabassam was that he was under a legal duty to notify the council of any change in his address.  However, the upper tribunal left open the issue of ‘reasonable excuse’, which was remitted back to the first-tier tribunal.

One of the puzzling things about these two cases is why they were ever allowed to reach the Upper Tribunal.  Wouldn’t a wiser local authority, in those circumstances, simply have accepted the owner’s claim that they had not received the earlier documentation, and started the whole process again?  Yes, starting again might be annoying.  But it’s a damned sight cheaper than losing a ‘reasonable excuse’ argument in the upper tribunal.

business, Law, Uncategorized

The Power of the Mailing List

bruceandholly
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I discovered the power of a targeted mailing list when my book shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list for business law books on the day it was published.  A new book on cemetery and crematorium law was also an unlikely best seller.  Hardly a mass market.  But it had a couple of things going for it.

Until the book went into print in June 2021, nothing had been written on cemetery and crematorium law for almost 20 years.  The industry standard had always been Davies Law of Burial and Cremation, but that hadn’t been published since 2002 and there is still no indication as to when the next edition will come out.  In the meantime, something had to be written to fill the gap.

The second thing was that the marketing of this book had been specifically targeted to those in the cemetery and crematorium industries, who were most likely to need it.  The book itself had been commissioned by the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, which represents this industry, and which meant that I had access to its mailing list.

Within minutes of the mail shots going out, the orders started coming in.  More than 100 books were sold on the first day.  Over the following months, sales of the book tapered off as the market became saturated.  But it is still making sales.

At £39.00 for the paperback, the book was not cheap.  But by law-book standards, it was not overpriced.

A 900-strong mailing list might seem miniscule compared with the 60,000 strong mailing lists boasted by some writers.  If only!  But I’m not complaining.

The book reached the people it was intended to reach.  Although I only had access to the ICCM mailing list, there will of course also be other mailing lists for a book of this type.  For example: funeral directors.

If you are thinking of putting together a mailing list, there are some things which you need to watch out for.

You can’t just throw together a list of email addresses without breaking data protection law.  And the penalties for that can be severe.  The essence of data protection is that you can only use somebody’s personal information if they have expressly given you permission to do so.  And they can withdraw that consent at any time.  One way of making sure that you don’t fall foul of data protection legislation is to use a compliant platform such Mailchimp.  It won’t cost you anything.

Nor was it a problem for me, as the recipients of the mail shot were already signed up members of the institute and receiving bulletins on a daily basis.  And judging by the volume of take-up, it was well received.

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