Board gaming

New SRA boss Sarah Rapson tells me she is content to work ‘as best I can’ within the regulatory structure conferred by the Legal Services Act 2007. 

This is hardly surprising. To say that she has much else to think about is an understatement. Under Rapson’s stewardship, don’t expect any grandstanding about the SRA’s territorial ambitions.

It’s now over three years since SRA chair Anna Bradley enthused that moving to a single regulator for legal services was a ‘live conversation’ in Whitehall and at Westminster. Hubris, nemesis (though Bradley remains in situ). Moreover, it is over 18 months since CILEX proclaimed that it was entering the ‘final stages’ of its plan to hand the SRA supervisory control of its members.

‘Final’ is clearly a more elastic word than I had supposed.

Not that all is moribund on what I will call the constitutional front. Out of left field this week came an announcement that – for the first time since 2017 – the government is to review the future of oversight regulator the Legal Services Board.

Unexpected, certainly, but also not that much of a surprise. Detractors note that the LSB handed a glowing performance assessment to the SRA ahead of the debacles exposed in the board’s own reports on Axiom Ince and SSB. The SRA is ‘a well-run regulator with a proactive and effective regulatory approach’, the LSB purred in 2023 – handing a hostage to fortune.

The bar, which doubtless has the ear of barristers David Lammy and Sarah Sackman (who announced the review), has been especially scathing. In a parting shot last June, outgoing Bar Standards Board chair Kathryn Stone sniped that the LSB’s board and executive ‘are no more experienced’ than the boards and executives they superintend. ‘Oversight gives responsibility, but it does not, in itself, give sharper insight into, or greater care for, the public interest. Still less does it give a better understanding of the challenges of front-line regulation,’ she said. Ouch.

Sackman’s review will be led by Richard Lloyd, chair of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. Lloyd must answer a question posed in these pages more than once over the years. What compelling purpose does the LSB actually serve?