Consuming Interest
Elisabeth Dunn
A knotty little legal riddle. When is a solicitor acting against the interests of his client ? Answer : When the client is buying a house. For part of the solicitor's job is to establish that what his client is buying is indeed a house and not a potential redevelopment area. To this end, the solicitor checks with the relevant local authority and makes a land charges search.
At least, that is what a schoolteacher who bought a house in Blackpool last year thought. (He himself must remain anonymous because he does not wish to engage in hostilities with his employer, the Lancashire County Council.) A couple of weeks after he moved in, he found out that his fine new house stood directly in the path of a proposed new road. Furthermore, the local press published a map of the said road which had been circulated to members of the Wyre Borough Council at the same time as his solicitor had been making the land charges search on his behalf. There was no hint of a new road in the search and our man was somewhat ruffled about this; he reckoned his solicitor should have known about it and that the council should have had the decency to tell him.
He complained to the Commission for Local Administration in England. The Local Commissioner, a Mr F. P. Cook, replied thus: 'Your complaint against Wyre Borough Council has been given very careful consideration but I have decided that it is not a matter I can investigate.
'The wording of questions submitted with a local land charges search has been agreed between the Law Society and the Local Authority Associations. As such, you will perhaps agree that they are phrased very specifically rather than generally. It cannot be said that the answer you received was incorrect. At the date the answer was given, no order, draft order or scheme had been made nor any resolution passed.
'Clearly you feel that the authority ought to have volunteered further information rather than restricting themselves to a bare reply to the question and although I sympathise with that view, I could not consider that to amount to maladministration.'
What was this ? our man asked himself. Was it not some restrictive practice agreed between the Law Society and the local authorities which effectively undermined a soliticitor's duty to his client ? Briefly, he concluded, yes, it was.
In fact, it is rather more than that. Such is the nature of the agreement between those two august bodies that a solicitor retained and paid by a house buyer finds himself effectively acting for the vendor.
`So often,' said a lady at the Law Society, 'it depends on how well the council knows the solicitor as to whether they answer the questions straight or say: "Yes. But . . ." Still, this one sounds like negligence to me—but that's only an opinion.'
It seems that back in the old days before land charge searches were a simple but strict matter of filling in forms, a solicitor would write a letter to the council which would reply with a brief outline of its plans—even if they weren't formally agreed by council members—so that the would-be buyer knew exactly where he stood. 'They [the councils] found that this prejudiced the vendor,' said the Law Society lady.
I'm sorry, could you repeat that ? 'They found that this prejudiced the vendor,' said the Law Society lady.
'I mean, they could be discussing one n,ew road in ten different places and anybody trying to sell their house along any one of those ten routes would find it very difficult to find a buyer. And when the council finally decided against nine of them, the vendors in those nine places wouldn't get any compensation.'
Wasn't this bending over backwards in favour of somebody who wasn't about to lose very much, whatever happened? Vendors untouched by a new road would still be able to sell their houses at market prices once the plans had been published and those with houses in the way of the new route would be compulsorily purchased. Wouldn't they ? The lady passed the argument on to one of her colleagues, a solicitor himself, who barely two weeks ago was engaged in consultation with the local authority associations on this very question. 'We've tried to widen the terms of the answers to the supplementary inquiries form,' he said. 'But the local authorities said that if you make them too wide, then you'll have a very large area subject to planning blight. It also depends on what the local authorities are prepared to do, bearing in mind staff problems, economies and all the rest of it.
'All one can really say is that if a purchaser wants further information, he's got to go and ask for it himself. But if too many people do that, the local authorities Will stop giving the information altogether.'
Heart-warming, indeed, to see so much concern for the ratepayers.
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