The Solicitors Regulation Authority has admitted answering just 7% of calls to its contact centre within a minute during July – far short of its target of 70%.

Chief executive Antony Townsend revealed the figure to the authority’s board at its monthly meeting last week.

Townsend said performance levels were down because existing staff were occupied with training new recruits. Incoming calls were up almost 30% in July compared with the previous month, largely due to the keeping of the roll exercise.

Townsend said that ‘various steps’ are being taken to improve service going into the second half of the year. These include recruiting more operators and ordering software to forecast demand.  

‘It is anticipated that the benefits of recent recruitment should begin to be seen in August/September’s results,’ he said.

July’s performance came on the back of a second quarter of 2013 where 25% of calls were answered within the regulator’s promised service parameter. Calls lengthened earlier this year because of the introduction of the MySRA website and outcomes-focused regulation, the regulator said.

Richard Collins, SRA executive director, told the Gazette that levels of demand had risen significantly, both in terms of the number of calls received and the average length of these calls. ‘We have a finite resource within the contact centre to manage this increased load. Work is being undertaken to identify the causes of this increased level of demand and to review resources and ways of working.’