A staff member of the Solicitors Complaints Bureau who recently applied for a mortgage was asked to produce a letter saying his job was safe; the building society manager had gathered from press reports that the bureau was to be abolished.
The bureau chief, Veronica Lowe, recounts this incident as an example of how 'unpleasantly fraught' things are for her 210 staff at the moment.
'Many of the staff believe they are going to get their P45', she says, seething on their behalf.
Over the last 18 months the bureau has been subject to publicity as poisonous as anything hurled at the much-vilified Child Support Agency.
Like the CSA, the charges have been that the bureau is slow, inept, wasteful and even unprincipled.
'It is a very sore subject with the bureau staff,' says Ms Lowe.
'We do not mind being told we are wrong.
We do not even mind being told we are inefficient, although we are not.
But when it comes to suggestions that we manage without principle, and by omission, and are accused on occasions of telling lies and fabricating evidence...when we are told we are out of democratic control...then you start to be more introspective and you worry about the future of self-regulation.' Ms Lowe says there has been a wave of 'ill conceived and ill-considered' complaints by a number of solicitors in the legal press over the last year.
Their tirades were fuelled strongly by the publication last December of a highly damning report on the bureau's operations by the National Consumer Council.
The NCC suggested that bureau procedures were unfairly weighted in favour of solutions.
In an interview with the Gazette, Ms Lowe spoke frankly of her 'considerable resentment' at the way she was 'disabled' by Chancery Lane from responding to this report as she would have liked.
'There were very strong views on the NCC report and it could have been demolished line by line,' she said.
She claims her view was strongly shared by the adjudication and appeals committee.
The decision by Chancery Lane to play it low key in relation to the NCC report stemmed, according to Ms Lowe, from the 'furore over the [high profile] launch of the bureau's annual report last October'.
Departing from usual practice, the bureau had hired a room in London's Waldorf Hotel to launch the report.
The result, says Ms Lowe, was that 'some individuals within the Law Society felt the bureau was too free with its own publicity and needed to keep its mouth shut more often'.
In the event, the bureau was left to fume quietly while members of the profession used the 'fundamentally flawed' report 'as a stick to beat us with'.
Ms Lowe is also frustrated by the 'no comment' policy imposed upon her as a Law Society employee for the length of the election campaign for the profession's leadership.
She has had to keep her silence while each of the candidates have sought to make political capital out of talking tough about the bureau.
Ms Lowe fully accepts that her organisation is not blemish-free.
There is, she readily concedes, delay in dealing with the less serious complaints because the bulk (80%) of the bureau's resources are taken up with regulatory and default matters.
But she claims that even here the critics have gone over the top: 'The delay is not by any means as profound or widespread as some have suggested.' The other criticism she considers justified relates to the quasi-autonomous status of the bureau.
'It is [seen as] neither fish nor fowl -- in the eyes of some insufficiently independent, and in the eyes of others far too independent.' This criticism of the bureau's constitutional structure has 'a validity which we need to address and resolve'.Indeed, together with Law Society Secretary-General John Hayes, Ms Lowe has just developed a consultation document (not yet issued) which puts forward a wholly new constitutional structure for the bureau.
Her view is that self-regulation is currently on thin ice.
She does not exactly agree with some regulators that self-regulation is 'dead because it can never convince the public that it is effective and unbiased', but she believes the need is urgent for 'a body which inspires public confidence in the regulator and those it regulates'.
She adds: 'My five years as director of the bureau teach me that unless we solicitors can achieve this within the next two years or so, we shall lose self-regulation.' In the reform consultation paper Ms Lowe effectively writes herself out of a job with a proposal that the chief executive of the proposed new body -- provisionally titled the Supervision of Solicitors Agency -- should be a lay person.
She plans to stand down as director next year -- a plan which, she claims, her staff deplore.
'I have been pretty roundly told off for letting them down.'She makes no secret of the fact that the bureau's blurred constitutional status has become an increasing source of frustration even while accepting that she has contributed to this herself by her membership of the Law Society's management board and her attendance at Council meetings and strategy committee meetings.
But considering herself first and foremost a regulator she believes that she should be free to speak out without restriction.
'I have an authoritative and well informed voice and it is sometimes very difficult to get that voice across,' she says.
It has been a tough five years.
Asked about the toll it has taken on her private life, Ms Lowe -- who acknowledges that her toughness helped to land her the job -- lets the mask slip a little.
What it has meant is that she works seven days a week, ten hours a day.
When her 11-year-old daughter questioned her recently about working on Sundays -- a day supposedly devoted to the child -- she thought 'what a lousy mother I actually am'.
Meanwhile, her husband -- not a lawyer -- she uses as a sounding board about the bureau.
'To me he is the man on the Clapham omnibus but it does mean that the poor bastard actually has to sit and listen and talk to me long into the night.'And what of life after the bureau? Ms Lowe says she has no idea where to from here because she is completely focused on achieving 'what is right and workable for self-regulation'.
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