The Legal Ombudsman (LeO) has today published the first of a series of articles which shine a spotlight on the common themes and trends seen within the complaints LeO receives.
This new resource, delivered in line with an ongoing commitment to delivering more learning and insight, is focused on ensuring LeO’s experience of dealing with complaints leads to improvements in legal services and can help the sector achieve a step-change in lawyers’ in-house (“first tier”) complaints handling.
Intended as accessible reads, each article within the Spotlight series shares insight into the common issues LeO sees within complaints and provides tips for ensuring good practice in the delivery of legal services, together with guidance about how to handle complaints should they arise.
To kick off the series, the first article is focused on the upcoming changes to Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT), effective from 1 April 2025. As seen in previous years, changes to SDLT can increase the number of people looking to move house before the changes come into effect, leading to an increase in demand for conveyancing services. When a move isn’t completed in time, this often leads to complaints about the service received and can increase the demand for LeO’s involvement in resolving complaints.
The article highlights what LeO considers to be good service and sets out how it would expect service providers to deal with complaints related to the failure to complete a transaction before the SDLT changes come into effect. The article also includes information about LeO’s approach to considering these complaints, including views on potential remedies where service failings have been identified.
Chief Ombudsman, Paul McFadden, said:
“We have previously seen that changes to Stamp Duty Land Tax can affect consumers purchasing a property if the deadline for completion is missed. Following the Stamp Duty holiday coming to an end in June 2021, we saw a spike in complaints about residential conveyancing, with monthly volumes increasing by over 50% - one of the highest demand increases we have seen in recent years.
“With further changes to Stamp Duty Land Tax from 1 April 2025, we wanted to share our insight to support learning from that experience. Both to help legal service providers prevent complaints arising from the SDLT threshold changes and, where that’s not possible, to ensure any complaints they do receive are handled effectively and sensitively.”
Further Spotlight articles will be published over the course of 2025/26.
