The Solicitors Regulation Authority spent £16.5m on its disciplinary processes last year - a £1.5m increase from the year before the pandemic, according to its latest annual report.

The 10% increase from 2019/20 was ‘largely because we added more resources to our investigation and supervision team’, the regulator said. This followed 'unusually low' spending of £14.5m in 2020/21. 

The figure appears in a set of reports covering enforcement, approval of new firms and solicitors, education and training, and the activity of the compensation fund in the year to October 2022.

A total of 76 cases were brought by the SRA to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in 2021/22. Of these, and the nine appeals heard, five incurred SRA costs of £100,000 or more. Costs in those cases ‘will generally have accrued over a number of years’, the report stressed. 

The most expensive case, which centred on an investment scheme, saw costs rise to £148,797 across the SDT and High Court hearings. The SRA was awarded costs of £98,000 by the SDT and £35,000 by the High Court.

SRA Board chair Anna Bradley said: ‘One area of particular focus, where we already have a robust programme of work in hand, is looking to conclude cases in our enforcement processes more quickly.’

In 2021/22, the SRA collected £106m which helped fund six organisations, including the Law Society. Some £58m went towards the overall expenditure of the regulator, which includes staffing, property costs and projects.

Elsewhere, the regulator noted that it has been working on dozens of investigations relating to solicitor and firm conduct when acting in bulk compensation claims. Many relate to faulty cavity wall insultation, following a government initiative in the early 2010s to help make homes become more energy efficient. The regulator has also looked at car finance claims and packaged bank account claims.

During 2021/22 the regulator closed 20 of these cases with no further action and issued one letter of advice. 

'These matters relate to a range of issues where solicitors are not meeting the standards we expect,' the SRA said. 'In some cases solicitors are not investigating whether the claim is properly valid prior to making it, or failing to advise clients about their options and what will be expected of them when making a claim. We have also found that some firms have been acquiring clients by giving them incomplete or misleading information and that the work of some firms is not adequately supervised.'

 

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