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"That the SRA is not so intervening is suggestive of the practice not being so wide spread as posited or the SRA being not fit for purpose (of course these are not mutually exclusive) perhaps those who have the evidence should, if the SRA are not acting on it, dump in on the Daily Mail."

I am not the world biggest fan of our regulator, but I find myself in the unusual poistion of having to take issue with this point slightly as I feel it is missing the bigger picture. I am certain that the SRA are aware of what's going on with secret ATE commissions being deducted from client damages in the RTA industry.

Contrary to some of the contributors to these message boards, I do believe that that SRA are well intentioned and genuinely try to improve the profession by routing out the bad apples. Admittedly, sometimes they get it wrong (see the Emily Scott strike off.)

However, this issue is widespread across the PI industry, it is not limited to a few bad apples – it’s the majority of low value PI practitioners. If the SRA were to prosecute any single solicitor involved in this, they would simply have to pursue everybody who has been engaged in it since the introduction of LASPO.

If systemic undisclosed commissions were identified, there could be no other sanction other than intervention on that firm. Whether you characterise it as ‘fraud’ or not is not for me to say, however it amounts to only a couple of hundred pounds from each clients damages. But some of these PI factories are churning out thousands of these claims every month, insisting on every single client taking out an ATE policy, and they are collecting these commission on every case. So the commissions tot up to hundreds of thousands of pounds a month.

But if the SRA were to intervene on a firm like that, what would they do with all of these cases? Where would they go? They would have to make sure the next firm was squeaky clean (very tough in that industry!) and the firm has the capacity to take over a huge caseload from the intervened firm. It’s simply not logistically feasible.

However well-resourced the SRA are, they simply do not have the resources to take the regulatory action necessary. I suspect they have made the policy decision to simply let sleeping dogs lie, and wait for the rule changes next April to wipe out the low value PI industry and the problem will take care of itself.

So your criticism of the SRA not being fit for purpose may be apt, but I suspect it is more reflective of the scale of problem across the industry rather than lack of competence or willingness on the part of the SRA.

With ATE premium kickbacks, the genie is out of the bottle I’m afraid.

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