relied heavily on the surveyor as their eyes and ears. As a surveyor you would see the vendor and there may well have been little things from the vendor that just didn’t add up. On the legal side it’s now fashionable to have network type conveyancers who are basically no more than sausage machine type organisations. Sorry Eddie but lenders actually say the biggest issue they’ve got with fraud is to do with the solicitors.
we’re seeing tighter paneL management by Lenders presumabLy as a resuLt of exactLy what you’re saying, on the soLicitor side as weLL as surveying. are there any aLternatives to that? RJ: I completely back the lenders going to super panel managers. First and foremost we are an aging profession so there are only 3,200 residential surveyors in the marketplace with an average age of 54. Most of them are thoroughly hacked off at the number of claims coming against them either to their companies or them as individuals. The panel managers provide confidence. The lender cannot talk to 40 different firms of surveyors, that’s not realistic but the lender can have very regular risk meetings with the panel manager providing the panel manager is then utilising a small hand-picked chosen team of firms below it where we can all adopt the correct procedures and policies. Also I have a direct line of communications through the panel manager to any lender today, so I’m much happier working under one of the flagship panels. EG: I’m not an apologist for the whole legal profession but it’s interesting to read in the Thematic Review, the FSA does
actually concede there has been substantial improvement in lenders’ oversight in some relationships particularly with solicitors. The issue is the lawyers end up as custodians and it’s a sad indictment to hear that lenders consider solicitors to be the biggest aspect of fraud. The problem there is that the Solicitors Regulation Authority said that in every fraud there is a solicitor. That’s possibly misleading but what do
we do about it? The Law Society has brought out the Conveyancing Quality Scheme. This is the first time they’re looking to identify those specialist conveyancing firms with probity with criminal record bureau checks. What’s fascinating about that is that over 1,000 firms have applied and something like 285 or 300 have been accredited. So you go from 11,000 firms to 300 so far that have been tipped as fit for purpose by the law society. Ultimately we need to position solicitors
as strategic partners. We are the custodians of the process, we handle all the money, we should be looked at as strategic partners. I have to say there has been a lack of discussion about how to achieve this across the mortgage industry as well as with the Law Society and the SRA. Talk to us about how we can reduce fraud and I think you’ll find there’s a willingness to listen and do something about it.
what are the authorities doing right now to heLp this information sharing and trying to get peopLe to work more cLoseLy together strategicaLLy? BY: We worked with the FSA and they now do seem more receptive to sharing data and if you have a regulator who is happy to share that data, that then has a
downward ripple to everyone else. We’re also working with several other
government agencies including HMRC and the UK Border Agency and I think there is now willingness as Grant said, for government to start opening up and realising that sharing data will be the only way you’re going to tackle fraud. There’s an awful lot going on at the moment with regulators and with government to really break down the barriers to data sharing which can only benefit all of us. GS: I’d associate myself with everything you just said but that’s principally what the NFA are trying to achieve in a number of areas. Another area I work in is the telecommunications sector and there you’ve got a highly competitive market worth billions, vital to the UK economy who won’t share data on fraud due to reputational risk but we’re now getting them together to do just that. We’re also running a number of pilot schemes with National Fraud Intelligence Bureau to get known fraud data in there and disseminate that out through alerts. It’s key not just in the private sector but in the public sector but there are impediments with the Data Protection Act. We have to look at how we can make that more streamlined. RN: In the last three years we’ve tried to have a more open approach with city firms, lenders and so on coming to us talking to us about things. We noticed a change in attitude banks and lenders have been coming to us talking about their internal staff and addressing complicity within perhaps their own organisations. So we have quite a lot of intelligence and knowledge about the different methods and types of mortgage fraud that has been used in the different cases that we’ve prosecuted so we encourage people to come and talk to us. n
All the best Tweets @mortgagechat mortgage introducer AUGUST 2011 41
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