Victims and creditors caught up in the SSB Law scandal have lambasted the Solicitor Regulation Authority’s response to a damning report into its handling of the affair.

The regulator apologised and vowed to improve, after failing to act earlier on more than 100 reports over five years that SSB was racking up enormous debts and running meritless claims.

The Legal Services Board’s report included findings that members of the public who made complaints about SSB were fobbed off and ignored. Most of these reports were closed without any investigation, whereas reports from other law firms or barristers resulted in further action.

Victims complained of a ‘two-tier approach’, demonstrated when a member of the public made a second report under the pretence they were a solicitor. Staff took greater time with them when they presented as a solicitor and gave them significantly more information.

On another occasion, in response to a report from an individual, one SRA staff member referred to the complainant as ‘some busybody’ to another colleague.

Rather than seeking to establish if there was a pattern of complaints, victims were told their reports related to service and thst they should take issues up with the legal ombudsman.

SRA chair Anna Bradley has said this aspect of the report was ‘troubling’, insisting it does not reflect how the organisation handles members of the public who make reports.

Debra Sofia Magdalene, spokesperson for the SSB Law Victims Support Group, welcomed the report’s findings but said the outcome fell a long way short of what is required. ‘The LSB’s censure of the SRA is a formal warning, not real accountability,’ she said. ‘It recognises failure but doesn’t repair the damage or deliver justice for victims. Thousands of families have suffered because regulators acted too slowly. What’s needed now is genuine reform, faster intervention, and independent oversight to make sure promises of change are kept.’

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The group, which gave evidence to the LSB’s independent review, is now calling for a comprehensive redress plan for all affected, and a cross-agency inquiry into how regulatory, financial, and government oversight repeatedly failed to prevent the crisis.

Meanwhile, the barrister whose initial complaint from April 2023 was effectively dismissed after a forensic investigation has told the Gazette there had been a ‘catastrophic failure of regulatory oversight’. She had told the SRA she was owed more than £260,000 for work across nearly 300 cavity wall insulation claims, and said the outstanding debt indicated that SSB was not financially stable.

The SRA’s investigators found that SSB owed more than £128m to litigation funders at interest rates of up to 32%. The firm had told the regulator that it intended to repay loans using fees from cavity wall claims, but a director admitted that none of these cases had been successful or was likely to succeed. The forensic investigation recommended that the barrister’s complaint file be closed and noted there were ‘no issues of concern identified’.

The barrister who made that complaint told the Gazette that the SRA had evidence of misuse of funds months before SSB closed but chose to do nothing.

She added: ‘The Legal Services Board has confirmed that the SRA failed in its statutory duty to act effectively, efficiently and in the public interest. These are not isolated mistakes but systemic governance failures that occurred under the present leadership.

‘Apologies are not enough. Confidence in legal regulation cannot be rebuilt by those who presided over this breakdown. The chair and board should step aside, and there must be a new governance structure – one that is independent, transparent and answerable both to the profession and to the public.’