SRA ditches online roll list

So after wasting our money, we are now to be asked whether or not we wish to stay on the Roll and be charged £20.

But if we don't respond we will be taken off the Roll. So why would one pay to come off the Roll if it will happen anyway? This is just a paper continuation of what was proposed originally-in other words still barking mad!

Who designed this? Have they been sacked? Will the incompetent Townsend resign? (no-because he's paid too well!) Had this been a service provided to a client by a solicitor the SRA would have been investigating-but of course there is no-one to oversee it.

It will be interesting to see if the Law Society Council even passes comment.

...maybe I should ask the SRA to organise it and hold it at my local Brewery...?

The SRA is one of the most unhelpful and inflexible organisations I have ever had the misfortune to deal with so it's hardly surprising that MySRA has turned out to be a disaster. I find it amazing that they seem unable to get what is, in effect, a very basic database system to work properly. The SRA treats solicitors, who they are supposed to help, with suspicion and lack of compassion and it'll be interesting to see whether they apply the same rigour to their own failings.

One wonders what the authorities would make of it, if individual firms conducted their clients affairs which such impressive incompetence. It is not only the UK government that does not "do computers". As a retiree am pleased this farce does not affect me, but I wonder whether these people fit to be let loose on the profession?

I have just returned from a very pleasant afternoon with my wife in local licensed premises, in what is undoubtedly a somewhat uninhibited frame of mind, to see the above reactions. I doubt there is a single word, or underlying emotion there expressed, with which I do not agree. I have actually contributed before to this debate, bemoaning the apparent demise of the previous simple procedure. The only appropriate words to describe those responsible for this fiasco are those of Delboy - "What a load of plonkers"!!! What's more, they won't let me post this unless I name a website which I don't have - how's that for censorship!!!

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I am IT literate enough to know that this kind of error strewn series of events is only possible if those responsible operate at an almost mythical level of incompetence. Perhaps we ought to make a group complaint about them to the Legal Ombudsman Service....wait a minute, they're pretty useless too!

Maybe we ought to start something else, such as the Society of Attorneys and abandon the Law Society and its offshoots.

If that nice man Reinhard Heydrich were alive today he would know how to deal with the SRA Stoßtruppen. "So you have failed......" Sound of weapon discharging.

The SDT is a Star Chamber and should not be recognised. Anti-Money Laundering requiring us to collect photos of passports and gas bills is a candy floss industry, wholly invented by bureaucrats, serving no useful purpose, and should be abolished. A third is the PI cover/cost scam; underwriters dictate who can practise law and make the profession open to all, like the Ritz Hotel.

My theory is that, if you lock a bureacrat in a room for a week, at the end of it there will be 8 of them in there and the work will expand to accommodate their hierarchical pompous self-aggrandisement. They will rapidly become too busy to work.

But we solicitors have allowed this iniquity to happen. We have never been much good at rebellion or solidarity because we figure we have too much to lose. And we are always happy to pick up some unfortunate's clients or entire firm without even a moment of Schadenfreude.

I have lost a great deal of money over my career, since I reached the escape point after qualification and initial training, and adopted this strategy: I will shovel it all day every day but I won't eat any of it.

I'd make the SRA eat some but I don't have anything they want (and vice versa). My £20 will not be missed.

What they need and deserve is terror of the sack and lost reputation, never getting another job, children having to leave schools, house repossessed. Solicitors en masse have the power to make that happen.

The spirit is willing but, sadly and understandably, the pusillanimity is overwhelming.

If ever there was money to be saved by the abolition of a quango then the SRA would fit the bill perfectly. Heaven knows what was wrong with the old system with the Law Society doing it.

And this comes just a month or so after the news that the SRA has abolished the minimum wage for trainee solicitors.

This is a national disgrace. The fact that the national body for regulation of a key profession cannot introduce a simple IT-based system for maintaining the Roll after 2 1/2 years is pathetic (in the true sense of the word) and heads should roll (pardon pun), starting with the CEO of the SRA. I belong to about 8 other professional bodies in the UK and overseas (engineering, expert and arbitration) and none of them has any difficulty whatsoever with keeping up their membership list and dealing with subscriptions (including official status such as C.Eng) by computer.

I made a formal complaint about the MySRA fiasco nearly a year ago. I put it on a back burner against assurances from SRA (the usual flannel) that it would all be over by Christmas. I now intend to revive my complaint.

Not sure whether the wasted money comes within the jurisdiction of the Public Audit Office but it should do.

Will we get an apology ? Don't anyone try holding breath.

Old Possum

Yet another examplr of the total incompetance of the SRA, and they are the people who regulat us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What has our profession come to?????????????

Why on earth would anyone want to stay on the roll !!!!

I lost the will to live trying to renew our practising certificates last year. It beggars belief that an organisation as inept as the SRA should actually be in charge of anything. Does anyone have the power to discipline them?

Solicitor logs-on to SRA website.
Cannot find form to renew PC
Spends 2hrs. rummaging from page to page.
Gives up and sends e-mail to SRA asking for a clue.
A week later, SRA replies saying that it will later reply.
It doesn't.
Solicitor receives tetchy reminder.
Eventually, after whole evenings spent hunting, he lodges it.
After some months, SRA tells him that his form has been lost by its computer.
He sends letter of grievance.
A kind soul at SRA-.who'd telephoned only in order to tell him to file COFA/COPL forms- talks him through it all.
SRA loses the fee that he paid. Takes two months to refund that to.
You couldn't make it up...

How can someone fail so spectacularly at such a simple task?

All they had to do was compile a list of names.

They are bureaucrats who designed the most complicated manner in which to keep a list of names. If they were tasked to pick their noses they would probably devise some sort of machine to do it, and then hold a review to find out why it hasn't worked. The team which produced the BBC comedy Twenty Twelve could probably make something of the SRA. So - and here's the thing - it's all good, really.

Not fit for purpose, sack them all and get some solicitors in to do the job properly. If we ran our practices in the same way they would "intervene".

This is regrettable, but everyone can make mistakes, What is more disappointing is detectable in the way Mr. Anthony Townsend expresses himself (as quoted) and the idiots he, as indeed the ethos generated by the SRA as a whole, has become supercilious enough to take us for.

Let's remind ourselves:

"We have made the decision to continue with a paper process for keeping of the roll this year as we are focusing our efforts on delivering an improved online system for PC renewals".

"At present, given the current infrastructure the SRA cannot be sufficiently confident that keeing the roll on line would not cause difficulties for those completing the process".

"Carrying out further work to make the system stable for keeping of the roll could detract from the significant progess we are making with out suppliers on enhancements for PC renewals and we are not prepared to take this risk".

There is no trace of an apology to the 35,000 non-practising solicitors who have been religiously trying to maintain their status on the roll for the past two years and to those many who will during this time have wasted their time, emails and telephone calls on tryng to find out what the position was. No trace either of any suggestion that the SRAmight be looking for new suppliers and seeking damages or, alternatively confessing to their own responsibilities for not permitting the suppliers to fulfill their task and7or not catching on a good deal earlier. No querying, moreover, as to the real sense of the exercise in the first place and, not surprisingly, even the remosest hint that the 'decision to continue with a paper process for keeping of the roll' might , in reality, not be the consequence of the illuminated inspiration of top management finally come to save the day and for which we should all be grateful and in awe of its sagacity.

A enquiry by the Law Society into the handling by the SRA of its delegated powers over these past few tears would I suspect prove to be a much more fruitfull ecercise and money well spent.

Words are cheap from all the various commenters here. Who is writing to Townsend / law doc rep / press / their MP etcetc trying to get these t@ssers shut down?

I would have thought that, surely, someone would have tested the on-line system before the deadline, just to see if it worked.

But maybe that would have been too logical.