SRA: High standard of complaints handling, says reviewer
Complaints about the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) handling of cases rose by 29% last year, with the increase in interventions part of the reason.
The SRA responded to 1,044 complaints in the year to 31 October 2023, up from 808 the year before and the highest total for five years.
The main theme, as in previous years, was dissatisfaction with outcome, followed by dissatisfaction with process and delay.
The majority of complaints concerned SRA investigations – or, rather, decisions not to investigate – and the increase was broadly in line with the larger number of reports of potential misconduct made to the SRA during the year (to nearly 11,000).
Interventions jumped from 25 to 65 – including the “substantial intervention” into the Metamorph Group – and meant the volume of claims on the compensation fund more than doubled to over 2,500.
In this context, the rise in the number of complaints about client protection matters to 168 was “proportionately lower”.
In a paper for this month’s SRA board meeting, the regulator said two-thirds of these complaints were about files taken over by the SRA on intervention and most of those upheld related to “customer dissatisfaction concerning a delay in locating a file” and a smaller number to clients told the file they were looking for did not exist.
The SRA took possession of nearly 1.5m files from interventions in 2023, more than four times the number of the previous year.
“Our intervention archives work is contracted to Capita and we have been working with them to increase the staff numbers and the facilities that they have to index, process and store files received.”
The SRA received 41 complaints relating to compensation fund applications. More staff have been recruited to tackle the applications.
There were 119 complaints about the SRA’s contact centre, with people particularly unhappy about the return of the keeping of the roll exercise, with its administration fee, and the introduction of multi-factor authentication on MySRA accounts.
There were 47 complaints across the various areas about bias, only one of which was upheld, although the SRA said the decision itself was fair but was not expressed clearly.
There were 55 complaints of discrimination. The SRA said there was no evidence of discrimination but partially upheld four complaints linked to errors relating to reasonable adjustments.
The SRA met its deadlines for dealing with complaints in almost all cases.
Those unhappy with the SRA decision can complain onto its independent reviewer of internal complaints, the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (CEDR) – it can only consider how the complaint was handled and cannot overturn a regulatory decision.
Its report for 2022-23 was also released this week and showed that the number of enquiries fell from 143 to 114, of which 74 proceeded to review.
“Overall, the number of cases referred for independent review remains very small in the context of the SRA’s considerable workload,” CEDR said.
It issued 82 reports in the year, of which 44 related to SRA decisions not to take action on allegations of misconduct against a solicitor acting for the other side, usually in litigation, and 21 on allegations against the complainant’s own solicitor.
Leaving aside regulatory decisions, delay was the most common cause of complaint, followed by poor quality of responses, failure to respond fully or explain, and bias or discrimination.
“Delays in responding to concerns raised by individuals who have gone to the trouble to report their concerns to the SRA are clearly undesirable, but they had clearly taken place in many of the cases that we reviewed.
“In every instance, however, those delays had already been appropriately acknowledged, explanations given and, in some cases modest ex gratia payments offered by the corporate complaints team. Where appropriate, they had also acknowledged and apologised for any failure to provide updates to the complainant.”
CEDR said there were seven cases alleging bias or discrimination by the SRA, none of which were upheld.
The reviewer “found no failings and had no recommendations to make” in 73 (89%) of its reports.
“Amongst the nine recommendations that we did make, eight dealt with case-specific aspects where we considered that the SRA’s responses had not been as clear or comprehensive as they could have been.
“The remaining recommendation addressed the importance of having clear procedures for handling complex case where more than one SRA officer may be involved.”
CEDR’s wider oversight role found a “consistently high standard of complaints handling” by the SRA.
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