There are perfectly good reasons for the SRA to bide its time over any potential action resulting from the Post Office scandal.
The ongoing public inquiry has steadily exposed the shortcomings in hundreds of Post Office prosecutions and exposed the people who either caused them or sought to cover them up. Disclosure – albeit delayed – has uncovered a plethora of new documents which start to answer the question most people ask of this scandal: how on earth was it allowed to have happened?
Yet the laudable SRA position, restated today, of waiting for the full evidence to be presented is rapidly being overtaken by the tide of public opinion.
There has been an extraordinary response across the media in the last week since the brilliant ITV drama Mr Bates v The Post Office. Sub-postmasters who have fought for years to gain any recognition of their suffering have been invited onto BBC Breakfast sofas, platformed by all the leading news programmes and their bid for convictions to be overturned fast-tracked by the prime minister.
The news cycle will inevitably move on at some point but the public anger is palpable and lasting. The campaign for ex-Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells to lose her CBE was low-hanging fruit. The demand for decisive action will not subside – and that demand is bound to include action against any lawyers who were involved in this scandal. The prosecutions phase of the inquiry is almost complete and there is no more to come out about lawyers involved. If the oral and written evidence suggests there has been any wrongdoing, what is stopping the SRA from acting?
The SRA’s stated aim is to give the public ‘full confidence’ in the solicitors’ profession. But the Post Office scandal has unquestionably damaged public confidence in the profession and the SRA is under a statutory obligation to do something about that. The public inquiry is not due to finish hearing evidence until the summer at least and a report is unlikely to be published until the end of this year. That means the SRA will wait another year even to formally bring action against anyone implicated by the inquiry’s findings.
It is not right to say the SRA has sat on its hands over the Post Office scandal. A dedicated team of investigators has been in place for more than two years and there is ongoing work to collect evidence before the end of the inquiry, when the formal steps to disciplinary action can be started. The SRA has been investigating since April 2021 after the criminal conviction appeals were successful.
Given the extent to which public confidence in the legal profession has been damaged (despite some excellent work by those representing victims), delaying this process is going to be difficult to maintain. Solicitors involved in the scandal may still be in practice and, for as long as that remains the case, the SRA is arguably not fulfilling its role. Even if it means just placing restrictions on individual practising certificates, the profession must show the public that it understands the scale of this scandal and the fury it has provoked.
The SRA may find it cannot wait much longer.
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