I am instructed by a lady awaiting estate money due to her. She had rung her solicitor only to hear a recorded message saying that the firm had ‘closed until further notice’. The firm had in fact been the subject of an intervention by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. I duly submitted a claim form to the SRA regarding a potential claim on the compensation fund.

On 2 September I received an apologetic letter explaining that there had been an increase in applications and that it ‘was anticipated that the claim would be passed to a claims investigator within the next 12 weeks’. On 1 December I telephoned and was told that there had been a lot of interventions this year, with the implication that there were insufficient resources to deal with them. No claims investigator had been appointed and no indication was given as to when one might be.

A major reason for the separation of powers was that there needed to be a body which would see the consumer’s interests as paramount. Moreover, accepting that there is a resource issue, it seems to me that how those resources should be allocated is not being looked at in proper perspective. The SRA still spends considerable resources looking at the processes of firms that are otherwise acknowledged to be well run. Surely the regulator should be allocating resources to deal with the compensation fund backlog as a priority? The consumer interest depends on it.

Anthony Wooding, managing partner, Kerseys Solicitors, Ipswich