A campaigner who said a threat of legal action forced the Solicitors Regulation Authority to reconsider a complaint against a practitioner this week described the regulator as not fit for purpose.
Edward Romain, founder of Blind Justice UK, said parliament must ‘rebuild the regulation of solicitors’ after revealing that the SRA referred only one in five complaints for investigation.
Romain, who trained as a barrister but never practised, said he had threatened to judicially review an SRA decision not to investigate a complaint by a woman who said she was left destitute by the actions of a solicitor. In response, he said the regulator acknowledged that it had treated the report too narrowly and agreed to reconsider the case. He has not named the subject of the allegations.
Romain told the Gazette his organisation receives between 20 and 40 complaints a day alleging SRA failures to act. He said that while some may be vexatious ‘what we are seeing is people don’t know where to turn’.
London-based Blind Justice describes itself as ‘a registered charity dedicated to advancing public education in law and justice and improving access to justice in the UK’. It called for an independent audit of complaints closed by the SRA without investigation, a statutory right for the public to challenge regulatory decisions, and the replacement of the existing regulatory structure with a single regulator independent of the profession and government.
A spokesperson for the SRA said: 'We confirm that we have reviewed our decisions and are reconsidering the original report of potential misconduct.'
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