As top firms hog the headlines with redundancies and restructuring, the suffering of high street firms doesn’t always receive its fair share of attention. However, across the country last week hundreds of solicitors were dealt a painful blow after mortgage provider Abbey halved the size of its panel for residential conveyancing.

Approximately 6,050 law firm offices were removed from the 12,000-strong panel as part of a rationalisation by Santander, Abbey’s Spanish owner.

Keith Bowran, Abbey’s head of customer services, wrote to the firms affected on 16 March, stating that their panel membership had been revoked because of ‘the low volume of transactions dealt with by your firm’ over the past year.

The Gazette reported that by Monday last week, Abbey had already received 542 letters of appeal from solicitors’ offices, 319 of which had transactions in the pipeline. By Friday the 319 firm offices which had ongoing instructions, or instructions in the pipeline, had already been reinstated to the panel, with a further 75 set to follow…