The Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) has announced a freeze on its application fees, licence fees, and regulatory fee rates for the coming year.
This comes after the regulator ran an open consultation over the summer asking firms to respond on five areas, covering turnover bandings, Practice Fee rates, Compensation Fund Contribution rates, Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) levy, and individual practice certificate cost.
All practices are required to pay the Practice Fee, OLC Levy and Compensation Fund Contribution as a condition of licence. The current individual license fee for conveyancing or probate sits at £400, or £475 for both.
Respondents to the consultation were in favour of not making any additional changes to the rates that were set in 2021.
The CLC said any change to what practices pay will be because the firm’s turnover has changed, or the number of cases from the firm upheld by the Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) has changed.
In 2021, the CLC made significant changes to the fees levied on practices. These changes were implemented to ensure transparency and fairness. The changes implemented were:
- Increasing the number of turnover bandings from four to nine. This has enabled practices to benefit from lower fee rates as they grow.
- Reducing the Practice Fee rates and excluding the Legal Ombudsman charge from the Practice Fee, which has improved the transparency of fees as the funds are only used for CLC operating expenditure.
- Implementing a separate OLC levy to recover the cost of the Legal Ombudsman recharge. The CLC has no control over this charge, which is based on case numbers and costs provided by the Legal Ombudsman. The charge has increased significantly over the last five years, and separating it has increased transparency of costs and increased the focus on complaint handling.
“We believe, as a proactive and engaged regulator, it is our job to ensure we fully understand the pressures our firms face and find ways to encourage them to continue to provide a quality, cost effective service to the public,” said CLC Chief Executive Sheila Kumar, continuing:
“We have cut Practice fee rates by more than half over the course of the last seven years, and Compensation Fund contributions have been cut by around half too.
Against the background of inflation, this year’s freeze is a significant, real-terms cut in fees and fee rates. Keeping the financial burden of regulation to a proportionate level is a key element of the CLC’s commitment to supporting a thriving conveyancing and probate sector responsive to the needs of the client.”
