The Solicitors Regulation Authority is to reduce its staff levels by 12.5% by the end of the year, in an organisational restructure announced today.

The reduction in staff numbers forms part of the regulator’s transition to outcomes-focused regulation and the licensing of alternative business structures, which will be permitted from 6 October 2011.

There will be around 560 staff in post by the end of the year, compared with the current workforce of 640.

The SRA said its new structure is designed around three key regulatory activities: authorisation, supervision, and enforcement.

Chief executive Antony Townsend said: ‘This is the final stage of our programme to equip the SRA to be a modern, risk-based regulator, capable of meeting the needs of consumers of legal services in a radically changing legal sector.

‘A combination of retrained staff, the targeted appointment of new staff members with new skills, and the replacement of our old and inefficient IT systems, will enable us to deliver effective and efficient regulation with a lower cost base than before, to the timetable to which we are committed,’ he said.

Townsend added: ‘There will be some redundancies where we cannot redeploy existing staff, and I am grateful to all my colleagues for their professional approach during what is inevitably a difficult period.’