SDT: Fewer sitting days next year
The Legal Services Board (LSB) has approved a reduced budget for the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) of just over £3m for 2026, a drop of 2.5% from this year.
This equates to £17.65 on the practising certificate fee of every solicitor.
The LSB said the budget assumed that there would only be 230 sitting days next year, 70 fewer than the estimated total for 2025, but said the tribunal has struggled to estimate this accurately.
In a paper for last month’s meeting of its main board, the LSB said the number of sitting days in 2024 was 260 and 270 in 2023.
Bearing in mind the lower number of sitting days in 2026, costs ‘per court’ (per sitting day) would be an estimated £13,300 in 2026 from a figure of almost £10,500 this year.
In total, the SDT expected to receive 140 referrals in 2026 from all sources – predominantly from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), but members of the public can seek to bring prosecutions too.
In its application, the SDT said the SRA expected to refer approximately 120 cases during 2026. “This is driven by a rise in misconduct reports, more historical cases now progressing to the tribunal and additional resource within the SRA’s legal department to support faster case progression.
“The SRA’s expectation is that the tribunal will receive matters requiring longer listings with a continued increase in case complexity, greater reliance on live evidence and more issues in dispute between the parties.”
The LSB acknowledged that the tribunal had “undertaken considerable analysis on past referrals” from the SRA to “achieve a more reliable prediction” on sitting days, taking into account that around 44% of cases result in agreed outcomes, which require the approval of the SDT but nothing like as much hearing time.
“In recent years, [the SDT] has overestimated how many sitting days will be required, and is seeking to correct that for 2026,” the board was told.
“The SDT is heavily reliant on information from the SRA, which has tended to predict higher case referrals than ultimately occur.”
In 2024, for example, the SRA estimated that it would make 196 referrals but in the end only made 153. As of 31 August, only 68 of the predicted 120 for 2025 had been made.
The SDT also said that around 60% of cases have resulted in late agreed outcomes or been adjourned on health grounds.
Though the SRA is expected to submit agreed outcomes to the tribunal 28 days before the hearing, it often fails to do so and regularly attracts criticism as a result, as hearing days are effectively lost.
The SDT told the oversight regulator that it was confident that closer working with the SRA, together with its case management practice of only listing a case for substantial hearing after 14 weeks to give the parties the opportunity to resolve issues, “should help to reduce the attrition rate”.
The LSB approved the SDT’s budget for 2026 “on the basis that the increase in funding for strategic investments is intended to secure greater efficiencies, including AI integration to streamline judgements, revised sanctions guidance to increase transparency, and graduate outreach and member recruitment to improve EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] outcomes and broaden access to the tribunal’s work”.
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