Philip: Temporary bump in cases going to SDT
It is too early to say when prosecutions arising out of the Post Office scandal and Axiom Ince will occur, the chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) said yesterday.
Paul Philip was responding to comments made in the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal’s (SDT) application for approval of its budget, which said the SRA may file such cases “around mid-2025”.
In a press briefing yesterday, Mr Philip admitted that this “came as a bit of a surprise to me”.
The SRA has routine meetings with the tribunal about future workload to help it plan, and this “certainly does include Post Office-related work and Axiom Ince”, he said.
However, on Axiom Ince, the SRA has agreed to pause regulatory action while the Serious Fraud Office carries out its investigation – which was announced in November 2023 – and it would also depend “on whether the criminal process will allow us to use evidence” gathered for that purpose.
Similarly, the Post Office inquiry will need to be “comfortable” with the SRA using the evidence it has collated.
“I’m not too sure there’s great certainty around the timing of both of those,” Mr Philip said.
Back in 2022, the SRA said the Post Office inquiry would not hand over any of the evidence it held unless the SRA provided an undertaking “which restricts our ability to use the information in our processes”.
It went on: “So we anticipate that we will need to wait to the end of the inquiry process before we can take any further formal steps.”
The SDT application cited a 50% increase in cases referred by the SRA in the last eight months as the reason it needed a 25% increase in its budget for next year.
Mr Philip said this was a “temporary bump” that reflected the success of work over the past year to clear the backlog of investigations that had been building up at the SRA – we reported recently that it has reduced by 63% the number of cases that had been under investigation for over two years.
Also at the briefing, Mr Philip said the SRA had met recently with the SSB Victims Support Group.
This was mainly a listening exercise, he said, but the former clients of SSB Law were assured that, if it considered there were solicitors guilty of misconduct, they would be prosecuted. “This will take some time,” he added.
However, there was “not a lot we can do” about former clients being pursued by insurers to pay adverse legal costs in relation to discontinued cavity wall insulation claims; though the SRA has had conversations with insurers, ultimately it was between them and the individuals.
