Williams: Bradley and/or Philip need to take responsibility
A former member of the board of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has called for its chair and/or chief executive to resign in the wake of the Axiom Ince report.
Tony Williams, who served on the board until August 2022, said that, if they did not do this, other members of the board should resign.
He also described the board’s decision in September to extend Ms Bradley’s term as chair as looking “suspiciously like rewarding failure”.
Last month, an independent report commissioned by the Legal Services Board concluded that, in the lead-up to the SRA closing Axiom Ince in October 2023, it “did not act adequately, effectively and efficiently” and did not take all the steps “it could or should have taken”.
The LSB is to begin enforcement against the regulator as a result.
However, the SRA has pushed back, saying there were “no findings of fact in the report… it’s all opinion”, and that it was “in many respects… history for us”.
The furthest it has gone is saying that, “while we accept there are things we might, in retrospect, have done differently, in our view they don’t go to the heart of the matter”.
Writing today in The Times, Mr Williams, a one-time managing partner of Clifford Chance and long-time law firm consultant, acknowledged that the issues at Axiom Ince were “primarily the responsibility of individuals — subject to an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office — and hindsight can provide a misleadingly clear view of issues that have emerged over time”.
But as an organisation that held regulated firms and individuals to high standards of professional and personal behaviour, the SRA should behave to “similarly high standards”.
The SRA’s response to the report “seems to adopt the approach that attack is the best form of defence”, he said. “There is little sign of humility and only a grudging acceptance that, in retrospect, its officials might have done things differently.”
He continued: “What appear to be basic failures in the SRA’s inspection of Axiom in October 2022 left the door open for the subsequent takeovers of Ince Gordon Dadds and Plexus Legal, and, it appears, the further disappearance of funds.
“Furthermore, there was a disappointing lack of inquisitiveness and scepticism concerning the extra risks inherent in so-called accumulator firms — those that buy a variety of other practices in relatively short order, in many cases where the target faced financial difficulties — despite a growing level of evidence as to their risks.”
While “no workable regulatory regime will prevent or detect all suspected fraud”, leaders take the plaudits when things go well “and need to accept responsibility when their organisation fails”, Mr Williams went on.
“So now either Anna Bradley, the chair, and/or Paul Philip, the chief executive, should take responsibility and resign.
“Unfortunately, to date, rather than this happening Bradley has been given a two-year extension to her usually six-year limited term to deal with ‘recent developments, including evidence of shifting risks in the legal sector’. This looks suspiciously like rewarding failure and a failure of process to identify a new chair by last September.”
If no resignations were forthcoming, Mr Williams added, the non-executive directors on the SRA board should resign. “The profession deserves no less.”
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