Property fraud is accelerating faster than most conveyancing teams can keep pace with.

In 2025 alone, HM Land Registry stopped 86 potential frauds with an estimated value of £58 million, and the National Residential Landlords Association has described property fraud as one of the fastest-growing categories of financial crime in the UK. Digitised land records, rising property values and increasingly convincing identity fraud techniques are making it harder – not easier – for conveyancers to spot when something is wrong.

Payment diversion fraud, commonly known as “conveyancing fraud” or “Friday afternoon fraud,” is just as pressing. City of London Police and Action Fraud recorded 143 reported cases of this type of fraud between April 2024 and March 2025, totalling £11.7 million in losses, with an average loss of nearly £78,400 per case. It’s still making headlines now, with fresh warnings this month reminding homebuyers to verify bank details by phone rather than by email.

Against that backdrop, CQS accreditation isn’t a marketing badge. It’s the clearest framework firms have for demonstrating that fraud controls, client care and file management are being taken seriously – and, for most firms, it’s the gateway to a functioning conveyancing practice at all.

The scheme has just been updated

The Law Society’s 2026 CQS update, approved in February, sharpened the scheme’s focus on exactly this risk. The refreshed mandatory training now covers the new TA6 property information form, SDLT and LTT changes, climate change disclosure, digital identity processes, financial crime, AML and risk management, alongside the SRA Accounts and Transparency Rules. It isn’t a wholesale rewrite of the scheme, but it does reflect a clear direction of travel: more scrutiny of fraud controls, more emphasis on documented governance, and less tolerance for firms treating CQS as a one-off tick-box exercise.

That direction of travel matters because the SRA has separately flagged vendor and identity fraud as an emerging risk in its own sectoral risk assessments, tied in part to weaknesses in source-of-funds compliance. CQS and SRA expectations are increasingly pulling in the same direction, and firms that treat the two as separate exercises are likely to find themselves doing the same work twice.

Why CQS accreditation is commercially non-negotiable

For firms carrying out residential conveyancing, CQS accreditation has become essential for full lender panel access. Several major lenders – including Nationwide, HSBC UK, Metro Bank, Santander, Yorkshire Bank and Clydesdale Bank – make CQS accreditation a condition of panel membership. Lose accreditation, and a firm doesn’t just lose a badge on its website; it can lose the ability to act for buyers using those lenders at all, which for most conveyancing teams means losing a meaningful share of instructions overnight.

That’s before accounting for what accreditation forces a firm to get right in the first place. The application process requires firms to appoint a Senior Responsible Officer with overall responsibility for CQS compliance, alongside a Head of Conveyancing with the experience to supervise the team. Every conveyancer – qualified or not – has to complete mandatory training in Protocol in Practice, Financial Crime, Conveyancing Practice, and Risk, Compliance and Client Care, refreshed annually. Firms also need to evidence compliance with the Core Practice Management Standards, which in practice means having a genuine risk management framework covering money laundering, property fraud and cyber security – not just a folder of policies that were written once and never revisited.

What this means in practice

For firms that are already accredited, the 2026 update is a prompt to check that CQS manuals, Firm Wide Risk Assessments and AML policies and controls reflect the current training content, not last year’s version. For firms considering accreditation for the first time, it’s a reminder that the bar isn’t static – the standards a firm needs to meet in 2026 are more demanding than those the scheme launched with back in 2011.

Either way, treating CQS as a live, evolving standard rather than a one-off application is what keeps a firm both fraud-resilient and commercially viable. In a market where lenders are watching accreditation status closely and fraudsters are getting more sophisticated by the month, that distinction is what separates firms that stay ahead of the risk from those that end up managing a crisis after the fact.

How Enderley Consulting can help

Enderley Consulting has supported firms with CQS accreditation since the scheme began in 2011, from first-time applications through to annual re-accreditation. Our support includes:

• Compliance audits and gap analysis against the CQS Core Practice Management Standards
• COLP/COFA support retainers
• CQS manual, Firm Wide Risk Assessment and AML policy reviews and updates
• Annual declaration preparation
• Staff training on AML, property fraud and cybercrime via our Enderley Infohub webinar platform

Get in touch with Enderley Consulting to discuss your firm’s CQS application or re-accreditation.