The Ombudsman took 1,306 enquiries about conveyancing firms in a year and published 36 decisions
The Council for Licensed Conveyancers prints the Ombudsman's own case volumes for its practices, 2018 to 2023. It is a longer and wider record of complaints about conveyancing than anything the Ombudsman itself puts out.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
The Legal Ombudsman publishes a decision file. It is a rolling four quarters: the current one runs to 30 June 2026 and holds 887 decisions across every kind of legal provider. Thirty-six of them concern practices regulated by the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, decided between 7 July 2025 and 25 June 2026.
Thirty-six decisions in a year, for a profession of 2,064 licence holders in about 200 practices. On that evidence conveyancing barely troubles the Ombudsman.
The CLC’s own quarterly indicators say something else, because they count a different stage of the same process — and they go back further than the decision file reaches.
| Year | Enquiries received | Closed without investigation | Accepted for investigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 468 | 163 | 304 |
| 2019 | 598 | 270 | 324 |
| 2020 | 678 | 253 | 384 |
| 2021 | 1,053 | 545 | 450 |
| 2022 | 1,306 | 826 | 420 |
| 2023 | 1,048 | 627 | 218 |
These are the Ombudsman’s figures, reproduced by the CLC in its Indicators and Metrics report. The regulator publishes them; the Ombudsman does not publish them in this form.
What changed in 2021 and 2022
Enquiries about CLC-regulated practices nearly tripled between 2018 and 2022, from 468 to 1,306. Against roughly 200 practices, that is a move from about two enquiries per practice per year to about six and a half.
Cases accepted for investigation did not follow. They rose from 304 to a peak of 450 in 2021 and then fell — to 420 in 2022 and 218 in 2023.
The whole of the growth is in the column headed closed without investigation: 163 in 2018, 826 in 2022. In 2018 about a third of enquiries were closed without investigation; in 2022 it was nearly two-thirds.
That is the shape of a funnel whose mouth has widened while its throat has not. Whether that is more complaining, easier complaining, or a change in how the Ombudsman triages is not something these figures can settle, and the CLC offers no explanation of it.
The 2023 column that has not finished
2023 shows 218 accepted, 193 of them closed, 25 still under review — and 203 “not yet accepted or closed” at the point the table was compiled. The equivalent figure for 2018 is 1. So the 2023 row is not comparable with the others yet: a substantial share of that year had not been triaged when the table was drawn.
Anybody reading the last row as a collapse in complaints would be reading a processing backlog.
Three counts of the same thing
It is worth being plain about what the three numbers on this page are, because they are routinely treated as interchangeable — and about the fact that they are also from different years. The CLC’s table ends in 2023; the decision file begins in July 2025. The comparison below is about what each count measures, not about one year against another.
- An enquiry is somebody contacting the Ombudsman. Most go no further.
- A case accepted for investigation has passed the Ombudsman’s threshold checks — the complaint is in time, in jurisdiction, and the firm has had its own chance to resolve it.
- A decision is an ombudsman determining the case formally. Most accepted cases never reach one; they resolve by agreement.
The published decision file is the narrowest of the three, and it is the one everybody cites, because it is the one that is downloadable.
What the decisions do show
For the 36 CLC-practice decisions in the current file: 28 found evidence of poor service and eight did not; in 21 the firm’s own complaint handling was found reasonable and in 15 it was not. Thirty-four were residential conveyancing, one other property work and one wills and probate. Remedies ran from nothing to a band of £30,000–£34,999, with eight in the £300–£749 band, eight recorded as not applicable and six at £1–£299. Twenty-one distinct organisations appear across the 36.
A decision against a firm is a service complaint, not misconduct. The Ombudsman decides whether a client got the service they paid for; a regulator decides whether a practitioner broke its rules. Those are different questions with different consequences.
The figures
Ombudsman case volumes read from the CLC’s Indicators and Metrics reports for Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, which reprint the same table. Decision counts computed from the Legal Ombudsman’s published decision data. Its current file covers the four quarters to 30 June 2026; seven of its 887 rows carry dates outside that window and are left as published. This site refuses to use the file once its newest decision is more than twelve months old, which is the Ombudsman’s own retention period. Practice and licence counts from the CLC’s Q1 2026 indicators.
Complaints data published by the Legal Ombudsman. For the full picture, and to complain about a legal service provider, see legalombudsman.org.uk.