Philip: Leaving the SRA next week
The chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said yesterday that he did consider resigning in the wake of the report on SSB Law but decided that “it wasn’t the right thing”.
But Paul Philip conceded that the timing of his imminent retirement “has probably worked quite well”.
Questions have been asked about accountability at the top of the regulator – beyond the apologies it has made – in the wake of the systemic shortcomings outlined in the report on SSB Law published last week by the Legal Services Board that meant it missed multiple warning signs.
Speaking at a media briefing at yesterday’s SRA compliance conference in Birmingham, chair Anna Bradley repeated her insistence from last week that the board of the SRA did not think resignations were needed and that “more change in the current climate is not the right thing”.
Though he leaves the SRA at the end of next week after nearly 12 years in post, Legal Futures asked Mr Philip whether he had nonetheless considered resigning.
“The thought crossed my mind and I came to the conclusion that wasn’t the right thing,” he said.
“As an organisation we make tens of thousands of decisions every year and we will get some wrong and we clearly got some wrong with SSB, there’s no doubt about it.
“So actually we take the view that we need to learn from those and put in place arrangements to make the organisation better. And certainly in relation to both [SSB and Axiom Ince], we’ve worked very, very hard to make sure that we have action plans in place to develop the organisation so that it’s better.”
He added that he decided 20 months ago that he would be leaving the SRA and then announced it in February this year.
“We didn’t know when [the SSB report] was being published. It wasn’t even anywhere near finished at that point in time. So I think it’s probably worked quite well in terms of organisational development and no, I don’t think, as Anna has already said, there’s any need for resignation.”
Though the question was briefly raised with the pair on stage at the conference by journalist Daisy McAndrew, who was chairing the event, solicitors were not able to address them directly.
But a sense of the profession’s feelings about the SSB report came out in a breakout session on professional ethics.
One solicitor questioned why there had not been any resignations. “When members of a professional mess up, you sometimes see incredibly harsh sentences that the SRA has put forward, huge fines, striking off, everything else.
“When the SRA mess up, they affect the consumer, the ones who they purport to protect. So Axiom Ince, SSB Law, nobody’s resigned, nobody’s been sacked, at least not openly. How do you reconcile that? Because leadership from the top is not coming from the SRA. There is a distinct lack of trust.”
Another said: “We had the leadership today first thing this morning say ‘Hands up. These things were being pointed out for us and we didn’t deal with it properly’. There’s lots of people in this room who might be thinking that they’re being held to a standard that actually the regulator isn’t being held to and there’s lots of bitterness, lots of anger, lots of frustration…
“If the leadership and the regulator is not abiding by the ethical point, to where it says ‘Yes, we’ve got it wrong, even though we were being told A, B, C and D’, how can we take confidence away from that?”
The contributions received applause from the audience. While speakers said the comments were not directed at the SRA speaker in the session, Jonathan White, the head of professional ethics, he replied: “I think what I’d say is let’s look in a year’s time in terms of how we responded to the SSB issue, what steps we’ve taken and how we can account in our actions.”
But the second solicitor said: “We always get this response, ‘We’ll do another review’. Last year it was Axiom Ince, this year it’s SSB. There’s something wrong in my view. There’s something fundamentally wrong.”
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