Open letter to Anna Bradley, chair of the Solicitors Regulation Authority
From Barrister (B1), the first professional to expressly warn the SRA of the financial risk and instability within SSB Law.
Dear Ms Bradley,
The profession has now read in full the Legal Services Board’s report into your regulator’s handling of SSB Law. Its findings are devastating — not only for the SRA as an institution, but for public confidence in the regulation of solicitors in England and Wales. Over one hundred reports and warnings were made to the SRA about SSB over five years. Each one was an opportunity to intervene, to investigate, and to prevent foreseeable harm. Each one was missed.
When I raised concerns with the SRA, I did so expressly warning them that SSB presented a serious financial risk - not only in relation to unpaid counsel’s fees, but to the firm’s overall stability and the protection of client money. That warning was made in clear terms. If the risk was visible to me as an external barrister, with only partial insight into the firm’s operations, if I could see it from outside the firm, it was impossible for the SRA not to see it too.
The outgoing chief executive, Paul Philip, has since claimed that the SRA 'did not have the required data' about SSB. That statement is demonstrably false. The Legal Services Board's findings show that the regulator had abundant data, repeated intelligence, and multiple red flags. What failed was not information — it was leadership, under your chairmanship.
Your response at the SRA’s annual compliance conference, invoking 'continuity of leadership', misreads the moment. Continuity, in this context, is not a safeguard but a symptom. It preserves the culture that allowed a financial time-bomb to explode under your supervision. It leaves victims without redress, whistleblowers unacknowledged, and the profession carrying the reputational cost of your board’s inertia.
The LSB has identified systemic failure in supervision, knowledge management, and risk escalation. Yet, having presided over those failures, you propose to remain in post to oversee the reforms. That proposition is untenable. Accountability cannot be delivered by those from whom accountability is required. Your apology — while welcome in tone — does not meet the standard required in substance.
Apologies are not an answer to regulatory dereliction. They are a starting point for responsibility, not its substitute.
The victims of SSB, and those of us who tried to prevent its collapse, deserve a regulator whose leadership understands that ethical failure is not a temporary lapse in process but a structural one — and that genuine reform must begin with change at the top.
Ms Bradley, the time for continuity has passed. The time for accountability has arrived. You must go.
Postscript: The SRA’s repeated assertion that it lacked the 'required data' about SSB is indefensible. The regulator was directly told — by myself and by others — that the firm’s financial model posed a serious and escalating risk. If that was clear to an external professional, it was indisputable to a regulator in possession of the full picture. The failure was not informational but cultural. The question now is whether the LSB, having diagnosed the breach, will enforce the remedy.
