The SRA’s draft Business Plan for 2026/27 is honest about how badly things have gone. The new Chief Executive’s foreword does not reach for euphemisms. Axiom Ince. SSB Group. PM Law. Formal enforcement action from the Legal Services Board. A 45% increase in misconduct reports in three years. SRA’s candour is welcome, and we should acknowledge it.
But buried within the plan is a decision that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received. The SRA has chosen to pause further work building on the evaluation of its Transparency Rules, alongside work on quality indicators and digital comparison tools. The justification is resource pressure, and we accept that pressure is real. What we cannot accept is the implicit logic: that this work is something you set aside, without a clear plan to pick it up again, when times get difficult. The evidence of the past two years makes precisely the opposite case.
Consider what Axiom Ince, SSB Group and PM Law have in common. In each case, consumers were operating in the dark. They could not understand the terms on which they had engaged a firm. They could not assess the risks they were bearing. They had no realistic means of making an informed choice. In the case of SSB, they were told they faced no financial risk. These failures were not purely enforcement failures. They were failures of a market that did not give consumers the information and transparency they needed. A regulator responding to that pattern of harm by deprioritising work on whether its own transparency framework is functioning has misread its own evidence.
The plan does not specify which areas of legal practice this pause affects. The Panel has always argued that the Transparency Rules should apply across reserved legal activities, including family and employment law, where consumers report some of the greatest difficulty understanding fees, scope and risk before instructing a solicitor. With work building on the Transparency Rules evaluation now paused, there is no active policy making and evaluation feedback cycle to inform new interventions on transparency gaps.
The SRA committed to a five-year evaluation programme when it introduced the Transparency Rules in 2018 and 2019. The Year 3 evaluation published in October 2023, showed that only 42% of firms claimed to be publishing all the required information after four years in operation. The SRA has confirmed it will publish the Year 5 evaluation later this year, and we welcome that commitment. But evaluation and action are not the same thing. Publishing findings into a paused programme, with no published timeline for resuming the wider work and no committed date for translating evaluation findings into a compliance response, is not accountability. It is a filing exercise. The value of an evaluation is entirely dependent on whether anyone is in a position, on a known timetable, to act on it.
There is also a tension in the plan that the SRA has not addressed. It proposes, elsewhere, to consult on new consumer information requirements for the high volume consumer claims sector. The Panel welcomes that. But you cannot credibly create new transparency requirements while pausing the programme of work responsible for understanding whether existing Transparency Rules are working and how to improve them. Future design has to be built on an honest and thorough assessment of past policy implementation. You cannot skip that step.
We understand that a regulator under formal enforcement action, managing a caseload crisis and dealing with the fallout from multiple large firm failures, faces genuine prioritisation choices. We are not asking for everything at once. What we are asking for is this: a clear, published timeline for when the paused work on building on the Transparency Rules evaluation will resume; a specific commitment within the 2027 to 2030 Corporate Strategy that consumer empowerment and information work sits at its centre; and an honest acknowledgement that transparency is not a discretionary enhancement to be picked up in quieter times. It is structural. It is part of what prevents the next SSB Group failure.
Six years have passed since the CMA told the legal services sector to fix its information failures and ten years since it first raised them. The profession and consumers are being asked to fund a 29% increase in the SRA’s costs this year. That money must be spent on a regulator that understands what consumer protection actually means: not just enforcement after the fact, but establishing conditions that allow consumers to protect themselves before things go wrong.
By Tom Hayhoe, Chair of the Legal Services Consumer Panel