The week’s most startling revelation from the Solicitors Regulation Authority was not that 35,000 non-practising solicitors have agreed to pay the new £20 annual charge to stay on the roll. Rather, it was that the regulator won’t make any money from the exercise. Chief executive Paul Philip told journalists that it will take five or six years before the new charge covers the cost of levying it. ‘Up-front software development costs,’ Philip explained.
Really? Obiter reckons that over five years, the charge will have pulled in £3.5m, which sounds a lot for what should be a straightforward database maintained by the data subjects themselves. Our local IT expert down the Seven Stars agrees – though points out that updating old software is invariably more costly than starting from scratch. As the SDT’s list of non-practising solicitors has presumably been gathering dust since 2015, that explains a lot.
But who was the genius who decided back then, just when data protection laws were being ratcheted up to warp factor six, that holding an unmaintained database was acceptable? Accuracy, after all, is the fourth basic principle of data protection.
And what of the 25,000-odd who have dropped off the list? Assuming that Office for National Statistics death rates apply to non-practising solicitors, we reckon that, since the roll was last updated, about 9,000 colleagues will have handed in their dinner pails. That leaves 16,000 who either can’t or won’t pay. The won’ts include veteran legal commentator and esteemed Gazette columnist Joshua Rozenberg (admitted 15 December 1976). ‘I shall soon be a struck-off non-practising solicitor,’ Joshua lamented this week.
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