Lenders changing Part II Requirements at alarming rate

Lenders changing Part II Requirements at alarming rate

A new report into updates to Lender Part II enquiries has highlighted a significant number of changes to Lender requirements.

In the last 30 days Navro Compliance have reported over 55 changes to Part II questions.

Explaining the challenges facing conveyancers, Navro Director Mike Georgiou explains

“The move to UK Finance has provided 24/7 access for Lenders to update their Part II requirements; and they are taking full advantage. One of the biggest challenges for conveyancers is knowing when and what has changed.”

Recent changes by HSBC highlight an anomaly in the way changes are recorded is a case in point.  A Navro report run on the 19th January 2021 shows an update on the 18th January 2021 and 15 questions as having been changed.  On closer scrutiny though only 3 questions have actually had any changes in the wording, these being 5.13.1, 5.19.1 and 10.3.  All the remaining questions have had “format” changes only, such as paragraphs being added.

To emphasise the speed of change, HSBC had further updates on the 21st January 2021, only some 4 days later, and then again on the  27th January 2021 with a further 10 questions changed; most of these being new contact instructions.

In total 13 lenders have made changes to their Part II’s in the first two weeks of the year with most making changes to question 5.4.6 regarding Search Insurance.

Since the turn of the year a number of lenders have changed their stance on Search Insurance with Skipton Building Society, NatWest and Nationwide amongst the most high profile. These organisations have now confirmed they will accept “Delayed Search” insurance on a temporary basis to help ease the backlog of Council searches albeit with conditions. There has been some confusion in the industry between “Delayed Search” and “No Search” policies where the former requires a search to still be ordered and forwarded to the lender when available.

The changing position comes as councils are starting to notify conveyancers and home movers that they may not be able to process local authority searches before the Stamp Duty holiday deadline at the end of March. Hackney Borough Council, which was the victim of a cyber attack in late 2020,

For Mike Georgiou, the seemingly regular changes to Part II requirements is another example of the pressures on conveyancers

“This places yet more pressure on conveyancers and now necessitates more regular checks on Part II requirements; to the extent that a Part II check just before exchange would be advisable given the rate of changes to be safe.”

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