Romain: Repeating pattern
A charity set up to help support litigants in person has sent the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) a letter before claim for judicial review for rejecting reports from members of the public without investigation.
Edward Romain, founder and CEO of Blind Justice, said that since he issued a call for evidence a month ago, the charity had received 50 letters from members of the public about reports made to the SRA which were not investigated, together with a few from solicitors, “some quite senior”.
Mr Romain said: “The pattern we see over and over again is that the solicitor’s account is accepted, the evidence is not examined and there is no route for the decision to be looked at again.”
The “eagerness” with which people had responded to the call for evidence “shows how serious the issue is” and the fact that people “have no other form of redress”.
Mr Romain said Blind Justice had started the judicial review process because of the way the SRA responded in March this year to a 50-page “dossier”, cut down from 200 pages, that he sent to the regulator about a specific solicitor in January.
“What I found initially very shocking is that rather than investigating the substance of the report, they offered up a number of partial explanations for what had happened.”
Mr Romain said he received a letter from the SRA in September in which it made clear that the regulator had accepted the explanation provided by the solicitor without seeking further evidence.
He said figures showed the proportion of reports referred by the SRA for investigation had fallen from 53% in 2017/18 to only 15% in 2023/24.
The letter before claim asks the SRA to reconsider the report made in January and to identify in writing the ‘established process’ it says exists.
It should also disclose its “quality assurance procedure” for decisions not to investigate and the proportion of those decisions subject to it.
Mr Romain said the grounds for the judicial review were the SRA’s failure “to take reasonable steps to acquaint itself with the relevant material” and test it against evidence it already had.
There was “irrationality” in the regulator relying on “reasons inconsistent with the material before the decision-maker”.
Mr Romain said the SRA had failed to give adequate reasons and its decision did not address the points raised by his report. In the alternative, the practice of closing down a report on the “untested evidence of the person reported” was unlawful.
He argued that it was “deeply concerning” that the regulator was making these decisions without oversight and largely on the word of the people reported.
“The public is entitled to know what, if anything, stands between a solicitor’s explanation and the closure of a file, and under which rule people could ask for that decision to be looked at again. The SRA would not say, so we are asking the court.”
It was open to the SRA to reconsider its decision not to investigate the matter reported by Blind Justice in January and explain what the process was.
“That could be end of this”, Mr Romain said. If not, he said Blind Justice would serve the judicial review claim itself by mid-December.
The SRA said it could not comment until it has formally responded to the letter.
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