Hayhoe: This is not work SRA can set aside
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) must publish a timeline setting out when it will resume work on the transparency rules for law firms, the Legal Services Consumer Panel (LSCP) has said.
Chair Tom Hayhoe said that “buried within” the SRA’s draft business plan for 2026-27 was “a decision that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received” – the pausing of work to evaluate the transparency rules, together with work on quality indicators and digital comparison tools.
He wrote on the panel’s website: “The justification is resource pressure, and we accept that pressure is real. What we cannot accept is the implicit logic: that this work is something you set aside, without a clear plan to pick it up again, when times get difficult. The evidence of the past two years makes precisely the opposite case.”
Mr Hayhoe said Axiom Ince, SSB Law and PM Law were “not purely enforcement failures”, but failures of a market that did not give consumers the “information and transparency” they needed.
“A regulator responding to that pattern of harm by deprioritising work on whether its own transparency framework is functioning has misread its own evidence.”
Mr Hayhoe went on: “We are not asking for everything at once. What we are asking for is this: a clear, published timeline for when the paused work on building on the transparency rules evaluation will resume; a specific commitment within the 2027 to 2030 corporate strategy that consumer empowerment and information work sits at its centre; and an honest acknowledgement that transparency is not a discretionary enhancement to be picked up in quieter times.
“It is structural. It is part of what prevents the next SSB Group failure.”
In the LSCP’s formal response to the consultation on the SRA’s business plan, Mr Hayhoe said the transparency rules for law firms were introduced in December 2018 and November 2019 with a published commitment to a five-year evaluation programme.
The year three evaluation, published in October 2023, found that only 42% of firms claimed to be publishing all the information required by the rules, a finding which “warranted urgent follow-up, not deferral”, Mr Hayhoe said.
The SRA should, in its consultation response, make clear whether the year five evaluation had been “commissioned, deferred or cancelled”.
Mr Hayhoe said there was also an “internal tension” in the SRA proposing to consult on new transparency requirements for the high-volume consumer claims sector, a step the panel welcomed, while “declining to evaluate whether the existing rules are working in the areas they already cover”.
Also in the response, Mr Hayhoe said the panel understood the rationale for the SRA revising the assessment threshold test to reduce the overall number of cases entering formal investigation, but the new criteria should be published in full along with data on cases closed without formal action.
The panel also expected the SRA to “set a clear target for the proportion of consumer contacts that are proactively assessed for vulnerability”, as well as its existing “modest” commitment to ‘rolling out vulnerability leads in public-facing teams’.
On third-party managed accounts, which the LSCP had “long supported” as a way of reducing client money thefts, Mr Hayhoe called on the SRA “to set a clear timeline for consultation within the 2026/27 year”, and “not defer it to a future corporate strategy”.
The panel recognised that the regulator faced “a period of necessary and difficult transformation” and that since joining last autumn chief executive Sarah Rapson had been “frank about the scale of the challenge”, which it welcomed.
“This business plan is better than its predecessors in its acknowledgement of the problem, but it is not yet sufficient in its commitment to measurable, consumer-facing improvement.
“The plan describes transformation. Consumers need to feel the results of that transformation.”
Leave a Comment