Demob-happy regulators make for cracking news copy. I remember being gratified, if startled, when Matthew Hill signed off as CEO of the Legal Services Board last year with a blistering valedictory message. Frontline regulators ‘lacked energy’ and just weren’t getting results, he said, citing SLAPPs and the Post Office scandal. That amounted to a ‘strategic failing with current approaches to regulation’.
The sentiment is mutual, evidently. The LSB continues to struggle to win the respect and understanding of its principal charges – the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board.
A degree of friction is perhaps healthy, but instances of outright hostility appear to be multiplying.
Gazette readers will recall that the SRA’s chair brushed off the board’s damning independent report on the Axiom Ince debacle with the blithe observation that there was ‘much’ in that document the SRA ‘did not agree with’. If that retort connoted contempt, the outgoing chair of the BSB was not to be outdone this week.
Speaking on Wednesday, Kathryn Stone laid into the umbrella watchdog with a relish, nettled by the LSB’s less than glowing annual performance assessment of the bar’s regulator.
To summarise, Stone said the LSB simply does not understand the challenges of frontline regulation, while its head honchos are no more qualified to be guardians of the public interest than those they affect to superintend. In consequence, ‘oversight regulation would be better to direct its efforts to supporting the work of the boards of the front-line regulators and taking its assurance from the robustness of their own governance’.
In short, ‘take our word for it and go away’. I do not see how else that statement can be interpreted. Such an approach would, of course, render the LSB effectively redundant. Perhaps that’s what Stone really wants us to infer.
The argument can certainly be made that the LSB serves no compelling purpose; but Stone was on shakier ground elsewhere.
‘Legal services are manifestly not for the most part poorly regulated and it is deeply unhelpful to the reputation of a successful industry to say that they are,’ she averred. This assertion is, at the very least, moot. Quite a few laypersons would beg to differ. Perhaps they too are underinformed. But I am inclined to wonder if Stone has read the Axiom Ince report – or watched the Horizon Inquiry sessions focusing on counsel.
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