Which Conveyancing Searches Are Mandatory (and Which Are Optional)?

Ask ten people which conveyancing searches are mandatory and most will name three or four. They'll be confident. They'll also be wrong — at least about the word "mandatory."

The honest answer is more interesting, and it's the one your clients need. No conveyancing search is required by law. Not the local authority search. Not drainage. Not anything. What makes searches feel compulsory is a mix of lender requirements and the conveyancer's duty of care — two things that aren't the same as the law, and aren't the same as each other.

This post separates the three: legally required, lender-required, and advisable. Get the distinction right and you stop overstating the rules to clients while still protecting them properly.

Are any conveyancing searches legally mandatory?

No conveyancing search is mandatory by law in England and Wales. A cash buyer with no mortgage can complete a purchase without ordering a single search. There is no statute requiring a local authority search, a drainage search, or any other. The compulsion people feel comes from lenders and professional duty, not legislation.

That surprises people, so it's worth being precise. The law does not list a set of searches a buyer must obtain. Conveyancing is, at root, a private transaction between buyer and seller. If the buyer wants to proceed blind, with their own money and nobody to answer to, the law does not stop them.

What the law does do is hold the conveyancer to a standard. A solicitor who fails to advise a client about searches a reasonable solicitor would have recommended is exposed to a negligence claim. So while no search is mandatory, the duty of care makes recommending them effectively unavoidable.

"Clients hear 'mandatory' and assume it's the government. It almost never is. It's the lender, or it's the conveyancer covering the client properly. Those are the real rules — and they bite harder than any law would."

— Valerie Bennett, Personal Search Veteran · June 2026

What searches does a mortgage lender require?

Where there's a mortgage, the lender sets the rules, and the acceptable searches are defined lender by lender in the UK Finance Mortgage Lenders' Handbook (Part 2, clause 5.4). There is no single national mandate. Each lender's Part 2 entry states what it accepts — which is why conveyancers check it per transaction.

This is the part most explanations get wrong. People talk as if "the lenders require X" were one rule. It isn't. The Handbook gives each lender its own Part 2, and the searches one accepts may differ from another. Most major lenders accept the standard set, including Search Code-registered personal searches. Some specialist lenders specify more.

In practice the expected set on a financed residential purchase is consistent: a local authority search, a drainage and water search, and an environmental search. The lender wants assurance the security isn't undermined by a planning charge, a drainage liability, or contaminated land. The conveyancer orders to satisfy both the lender and the client.

What is the expected set of conveyancing searches?

The expected set on most residential purchases is three core searches plus situational ones. The core three are the local authority search (the CON29 and the LLC1), the drainage and water search (the CON29DW), and an environmental search. These appear on almost every financed transaction, regardless of where the property sits.

The local authority search splits into two forms. The CON29 and LLC1 are Law Society forms: the LLC1 reports entries on the local land charges register, while the CON29 answers a standard set of enquiries about planning, roads, and notices affecting the property. Together they're what people mean by "the council search."

The CON29DW, the drainage and water search, confirms whether the property connects to public sewers and mains water, and flags any public drains crossing the land. The environmental search assesses contaminated-land risk, flooding, ground stability, and nearby industrial history. None of the three is required by statute. All three are expected by lenders and recommended by competent conveyancers.

Which searches are situational rather than standard?

Situational searches depend on location and property type, and the conveyancer decides which apply. The clearest example is the coal mining search, the CON29M, from the Mining Remediation Authority — essential in a coalfield, pointless in Norfolk. Roughly a quarter of properties in England and Wales sit over former coal workings, where ground stability is a live concern.

Geography drives most of them. In tin and clay areas you'd consider a non-coal mining search. Near a watercourse or on a floodplain, a standalone flood search adds detail beyond the environmental report. In parts of England, a chancel repair liability search checks for an ancient obligation to fund church repairs — rarer since 2013, but still raised on older parishes.

This is where the conveyancer's judgement does the work. There's no list that says "order a coal search here." The duty of care means the conveyancer must know the area, read the environmental flags, and instruct the situational searches a competent practitioner would. Get it wrong, and the negligence exposure is real.

Required by whom, and when? A quick reference

The table below sorts the common searches by who actually requires them and when they apply. "Lender" means acceptance is set in that lender's Part 2 of the UK Finance Handbook. "Conveyancer's duty" means it's advisable rather than imposed — recommended to meet the standard of care, not because any rule compels it.

The pattern is clear once you see it laid out. Nothing in the right-hand world is "the law." It's the lender's commercial requirement and the conveyancer's professional judgement, doing the job people imagine legislation does.

What does this mean for search firms and solicitors?

For the conveyancer, the practical rule is simple: check the lender's Part 2 every time, and let your duty of care decide the situational searches. For the search firm, it means the core three — local authority, drainage, environmental — are your bread and butter on virtually every order, with coal and other situational searches stacked on by location.

A well-run personal search firm compiles all of these. The local authority search is usually the slow one, because it depends on the council's queue rather than your turnaround. In our experience most searches come back inside 24 to 72 hours once you're past that council dependency — the council wait is the visible part, and it's the part you can't speed up.

The point worth holding onto is the framing. "Mandatory" is the wrong word for almost everything in conveyancing searches. Required by a lender, or advisable under a duty of care — those are the real categories, and explaining them honestly is part of doing the job well.

Conveyancing searches explained → · Regulated vs official → · CON29 vs LLC1 → · Valio for solicitors →