LAWYERS' LOOT

SIR,-1 apologise humbly to you, sir, and to Mr. Jackman, but not to 'City Solicitor'. 1 am guilty of a deliberate and indeed calculated lie, and am no more worthy to be called your correspondent. I have deceived Mr. Jackman and all your readers, but before you banish me to the liars' limbo, let me explain.

When I said, 'the young artisan buying his house at

£4,000 must pay solicitors £85 in cash before he crosses the threshold', I had avoided and evaded a very important point. I cannot explain my default but 1 should of course have said £89, not £85.

'City Solicitor' and Mr. Jackman say the figure should be £40. Let them both beware. There are thousands of young couples who will tomorrow crowd both their offices if they offer to transfer their £4,000 house for £40 solicitor's fees. What the Law Society will do to them makes me tremble.

Why do both pretend that a young artisan buying a £4,000 London house will pay £4,000 in cash, and so will not need a mortgage'? The charitable explana- tion is that they live in their own comfortable middle- class world where every young man has a father to give him £4.000 for a house. Do they know nothing of the outside world, or are they just pretending? They must be ashamed of their fees to attempt to halve them in this uningenuous way.

Let the shameful facts he faced. When a £4,000

house is sold to a young married artisan it is always, repeat always, sold on mortgage. To pretend other- wise is dishonest. The costs are : vendor's solicitor £40, purchaser's solicitor £62 10s., building society's solicitor £22 10s. The last two sums make the £85 I 'speak of.

I failed to point out that the £40 for the vendor's solicitor goes on to the price of the house (ask any economist) and the purchaser pays £4 in cash and £36 on mortgage. The purchaser thus pays £125 in solicitors' fees for one single small house, £89 in cash before he crosses the threshold. I say it is dis- graceful beyond words.

'City Solicitor' is obviously suffering grievously from a heavy blow in the pocket or he would not ascribe statements to me I never made, and then call them lies. He is right, they are lies, but it is he who is telling them, not I.

I repeat that what the young artisan earns in a

month the solicitor's staff can earn in a morning, but not for themselves. I am prepared to demonstrate this anywhere at any time. I and a clerk and a typist are earning at the rate of £10,000 a year in our spare time, with spare capacity to make it £20,000.

If your legal correspondents think there is no moral

issue here they must be amoral. Would they tell us what are the comparable fees in other countries? Would they explain how they justify a ninefold increase in fees (threefold in real money) for the same house in the course of twenty-five years?

Your legal correspondents gleefully tell your

readers, 'Do your own conveyanCing.' Why then does Robert Crute, Town Clerk of Leeds, in a letter before me, write to a couple of our members in Leeds, so poor that they have been given a 1°00 per cent mort- gage, 'You must use a solicitor'? Is it right that solicitors, particularly when they arc public officials, should try to force these immense sums of money out of the poorest of us, on a mis-statement of the law?

S. G. CARTER General Secretary,

Harrow & North London House Owners' Society.

774 Kenton Lane, Harrow, Middlesex.