Romain: Significant victory for accountability
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has withdrawn decisions not to investigate a solicitor after being threatened with a judicial review.
The founder of litigant in person charity Blind Justice, Edward Romain, sent a letter before action over the way the regulator responded to a report he made about a solicitor.
He said reflected wider concerns over the SRA rejecting complaints without investigation and the lack of a formal right of review.
After the initial decision not to investigate, Mr Romain raised further points and asked if it would be reconsidered. The SRA did this but eventually decided again not to investigate.
In a formal response to his letter before action from regional law firm Ward Hadaway on the SRA’s behalf, the SRA accepted that it treated his report “as being narrower in scope than it actually was” and, further, the enquiries made between the two decisions were not detailed enough.
According to Mr Romain, the SRA initially closed the report without asking the solicitor questions. It subsequently sought an explanation from him after the push back.
The SRA agreed to withdraw both decisions and reconsider the report, “and for that process to be completed by a decision maker not previously involved. The SRA agrees that reasons should subsequently be given that address each element of the report”.
More broadly, it confirmed that its rules do not give the person who makes a misconduct report a right to apply for a review of the regulatory decision – the SRA has discretion as to whether to do so.
On its quality assurance of decisions not to investigate, the response said: “Quality control takes place via a process whereby dip samples are reviewed each month.”
Mr Romain, who is an ACILEX – associate member of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives – said he had scored “a significant victory for accountability”.
He continued: “But it raises a question the SRA still needs to answer. What happens to an ordinary member of the public who receives a flawed decision and does not have the knowledge, confidence or resources to threaten High Court proceedings?
“It should not take the threat of litigation to secure a proper assessment of a misconduct report.”
Georgina Halford-Hall, chief executive of WhistleblowersUK, which supports the judicial review, said: “Litigants must be able to rely on the advice they are given. Too many whistleblowers find themselves treated as cash machines by unethical firms, which exploit their clients’ vulnerability in the full knowledge that a complaint to the regulator is unlikely to get more than a cursory glance before it is dismissed.”
In a personal comment on the proposed claim, Iain G Mitchell KC, a Scottish silk who is chair of the legal panel of WhistleblowersUK, added: “Blind Justice has raised real concerns as to the trustworthiness of the SRA’s complaints procedure.
“It has highlighted the apparent failure of the system to provide any reliable mechanism to carry out checks to test assurances given by solicitors against whom complaints have been taken, and a systemic failure to provide any kind of review or reconsideration of decisions once made.
“These are systemic defects which, unless addressed, will continue to undermine public confidence in the system. It is to be hoped that the SRA will now take active steps to remedy these deficiencies and thus avoid the need for a judicial review to compel it to do so.”
Mr Romain stressed: “We are not suggesting that every report about a solicitor must result in disciplinary action. We are asking for something much more basic: decisions based on adequate enquiries, proper consideration of the evidence and reasons the public can understand.
“The SRA has now accepted that those standards were not met in this case. The question is how many other people have been told no, with no effective means of securing the same reconsideration.”
He added that he was now considering the implications for his wider challenge to “the absence of an effective public review right”.
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