Interventions: SRA collected nearly twice as many boxes of files
The number of clients complaining to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) about its failure to retrieve their documents after it shut down a firm has shot up by over 50%.
However, the regulator said the total number of complaints it received last year showed little change at 1,069, just 2% more than the year before.
Intervention levels in the year November 2023 to October 2024 were lower than the previous year (59, compared to 65) but the SRA said it was still high compared to 25 and 26 interventions in the preceding two years.
In its annual complaints report, the regulator said: “To give context of the increased workload, during 2023/24 the team collected over 193,000 boxes (compared to 103,000 in 2022/23) and returned over 33,000 documents (an increase of 96% compared to 2022/23).
“Complainants were predominantly individuals who were looking for documents, usually a will, trust deed or other property documents. The complaints generally arose because we had yet to locate the documents concerned.
“The client protection team has substantially increased the level of resources employed to conduct this work but is also restricted by the capacity of third-party storage companies to release files to the team.”
The number of complaints about compensation fund applications rose from 41 to 58.
The SRA said this reflected an increase in the team’s work, with the volume of claims on the fund rising by around 9% in 2023/24 compared to the previous year.
Complaints about the SRA’s contact centre fell last year by over a third to 77. This was a result of solicitors having a more “positive” experience of the new regime for the keeping of the roll, which introduced an administration charge.
“Customers are now familiar with this process and multi-factor authentication, which in turn has reduced dissatisfaction levels.”
For complaints generally, dissatisfaction with outcome continued to be the main type of complaint, usually decisions not to investigate, followed by delay and dissatisfaction with process.
There were 52 complaints about bias, none of which were upheld. There were 53 complaints about discrimination, only one of which was partially upheld.
“Specifically, we did not fully record the complainant’s preferred pronouns and therefore unfortunately we inadvertently misgendered the complainant. We apologised to the complainant for our mistake.”
Those unhappy with SRA decisions can complain to its independent reviewer, the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR), which can only consider how a complaint was handled and not overturn it.
In its report for 2023-24, also released this week, CEDR said the number of enquiries rose from 114 to 153, of which 94 proceeded to review.
In almost every one, it said, “a complainant’s dissatisfaction about a regulatory decision lay at the heart of their complaint and, in many instances, that was all that was being complained about”.
For the first time this year, CEDR said it carried out an audit of “a specific area of activity”, intervention archives, rather than looking only at individual files.
“Our audit confirmed that complaints about intervention archive activity had indeed grown over the year.
“However, that increase was not a cause for concern but rather was a consequence of the SRA having undertaken a number of very sizeable interventions in recent years.”
CEDR said that in general the number of complaints referred to them still represented a “remarkably small proportion” of the SRA’s overall caseload, and “those complaints which we do see are invariably accompanied by very thorough and considered responses from the SRA corporate complaints team”.
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