Selling leasehold flat--FEES!!! for licence to assign

sardarji

The solicitor acting for a friend selling an inexpensive flat has asked my friend for £375 plus VAT demanded by the ground landlord's solicitor for graciously granting a licence to assign the lease.
Is this huge fee in any way justified? How much work does the ground landlord's solicitor do to "earn" it? Or is this just another lawyers' racket? I hope somebody working in a solicitor's office can give the inside answers.

JQ.

The fee is for the Landlord, not the solicitor. It's to cover their costs for permitting the assignment, which will include legal fees. £375 does not sound too bad to me, that would be about 90 mins work for one of the solicitors we use at work.

Richard_Webster

I think it is immoral solicitor work creation.

The landlord can write a letter giving consent. Formal licence gives the landlord no real extra powers or rights so it is purely done to enable the solicitor to charge.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to the extra protection a formal document gives the landlord.

sardarji

Thanks to you both, JQ and RW, even if you disagree. (I'd love to be paid £375 for 90 minutes work... but of course as the monopoly supplier they've got my friend over a barrel, and are ripping her off accordingly--as no doubt umpteen other solicitors are ripping off countless other sellers in the same position.). Any more inside revelations from anyone?

And now there's worse to come. I learn that the extortionists not merely demand their fat fee, but insist that my friends' solicitors agree in advance (as if they or she had any choice!) that she must pay it a second time over if the first buyer falls out and a new one turns up! And no doubt a third time if the second buyer falls out and and a third one appears.

Whether or not one thinks the whopping initial fee justified (as I do not), this has to be a racket. Whatever work allegedly justified £375-plus-VAT will already have been done once. All they would have to do would be change one name on the resultant document into another--two minutes' work on a computer.

Why is this sort of extortion, in a monopoly situation, allowed? (And no, don't tell me to ask the solicitors' trade union, the Law Society. What sort of answer would you expect if you asked Bob Crow to justify a tube-drivers' strike in support of a 50% pay claim?)