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From what I can tell, having not seen the letters directly, none of the letters involved reserved legal activities.
All of the letters, on close inspection, made clear what the relationships involved were.
In Lloyds' case, there were qualified solicitors writing the letters, subject to the same regulatory burdens as independent firms, even though, arguably, this was only necessary to justify the reference to 'solicitors' in the letterhead, as the content of the letter did not necessitate a solicitor.
Joe Bloggs can write as many letters as he wants demanding to recover a debt, and he is free to use a trading name as well, as long as he does not claim to be a solicitor when he is not.
I would like to re-iterate a point already made previously in these comments- how is this practice any different to sole practitioners adopting a trading name to appear to be more substantial and established firm than actually are?
Solicitors have a certain amount of exclusivity to perform a very limited number of reserved legal activities, anything outside those activities is fair game for open competition. Unfortunately competition includes some strategies that are not particularly tasteful but are simply effective.
If these companies realise that the productive response rate to letters coming from 'third parties' is higher than 'internal' letters, why on earth should they be stopped from a little bit of, shall we say, "alternative branding."