The Solicitors Regulation Authority is poised to be granted a new designation that should make it easier for solicitors to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. The regulator expects to be added as a ‘prescribed person’ under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, giving employees a safer alternative to making disclosures to the press or on social media.
Applying to join the prescribed persons list is part of a wider effort to root out unethical behaviour as well as give in-house lawyers an option to report wrongdoing in their workplace, Naomi Nicholson, senior regulatory executive at the SRA, said. ‘We really hope it will increase confidence that wrongdoing can be safely reported,’ she told a Westminster Legal Policy Forum on ethics yesterday.
The charity Protect says that becoming a prescribed person can encourage more whistleblowers to come forward. Whistleblowers are protected by law from being dismissed or treated unfairly for making a protected disclosure which they believe to be true to an appropriate prescribed person.
Protect chief executive Sybille Raphael told the conference that the current legal test for reporting to regulators who are not prescribed is the same as going to the newspaper or posting on LinkedIn. But more importantly, reporting wrongdoing as a lawyer is really difficult. Whistleblowing, she said, even if only to your boss (let alone to your regulator), can cost you your job. ‘I do wish the SRA would tackle that problem head-on and say to law firms “we have to check whether systems are working or not”,’ said Raphael.
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