LAWYERS' LOOT
SIR,—I hesitate to cavil at your generous reference to Harrow House Owners' Society (Spectator, Sep- tember 6), but I would like to bring your readers up-to-date on the situation. We have not twenty members and twelve conveyances going through, but two hundred members and fifty conveyances—saving our members over £2,000.
The response to the publicity given us by the press and TV displays a nation-wide resentment against the absolute power of the solicitors, which has produced the results that Lord Acton said it would. We are pleased to have broken the monopoly.
You refer to the financial issue of the money our Society saves its members; we are more concerned with the moral issue. When I married there was a row of new houses, any one of which I could step into as owner for £5 and, had I wished, for nothing. Today, a young married man must find at least £200 deposit and also £85 in cash for solicitors before he crosses the threshold of his new house.
This is on a £4,000 house and a man who buys a £4,000 house will be an artisan. He works a month to earn that £85. The solicitor's clerk and typist will earn that £85 by a morning's work, but not for themselves.
We do not mind professional people with pro- fessional instincts and professional incomes charging each other professional fees, because one fee will balance out the other, but when the flow of heavy fees is one way only, they become extortion. One class battens on another, and we think there is a great moral issue. In thirty years of controversy, I have never seen it answered.
S. G. CARTER
General Secretary Harrow House Owners' Society 774 Kenton Lane, Harrow, Middlesex
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