The SRA’s capture of legal executives is by no means a done deal, although it is starting to look that way. Oversight regulator the Legal Services Board, with which a final decision rests, has hitherto been concerned with making CILEX and CILEx Regulation (CRL) work together better. This became evident last year when the LSB intervened in their fractious public spat.

CRL believes the pair’s frayed partnership can be patched up. Governance and funding concerns are in the process of being addressed – though whether CILEX, besotted by a dashing new suitor, really wants to attend marriage counselling is another matter.

Inconveniently, too, the members whom CILEX is supposed to represent are not overly keen on succumbing to the SRA’s embrace. Quite the opposite. So CILEX seeks to justify the transfer on nebulous ‘public interest’ grounds.

CILEX must also be aware of the consequences for its own stature as a representative body. In any enlarged SRA ‘family’, the Law Society would always be the senior sibling, with much more money and many more members.

Could not the Law Society simply subsume CILEX, then? That would be a logical corollary of regulation of legal executives coming under the SRA. But why should this be attractive to Chancery Lane? How do solicitors benefit from parity of esteem?

Most importantly of all, perhaps, one must be mindful of the high stakes attending the SRA’s lofty ambitions. Not only does it want to be the profession’s single regulator, it also demands the right to levy unlimited fines. (If you think the latter power a good idea, do take note of our lead news story in today's Gazette magazine). How much power is too much?

As the SRA concedes, primary legislation to simplify legal regulation is ‘unlikely in the foreseeable future’. Yet the piecemeal consolidation that the SRA favours in this political void poses an existential threat to the LSB itself. Fewer bodies under the board’s oversight and one mega-regulator would mean redundancy – unless the LSB were to become a parallel SRA board.

The LSB has its own turf to defend, in short. And one should never underestimate a cornered quango.

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