Foreward

I am pleased to share with you our Business Plan and Budget for November 2024 to October 2025. This covers our second year of work under our Corporate Strategy 2023-26, and marks the mid-point for our four strategic priorities and their associated deliverables.

Our mission is to drive confidence and trust in legal services. Consumers are at the heart of this work – we want to protect consumers from harm, be responsive to emerging areas of consumer concern, and support consumers by enabling them to access information to help inform decisions. Our workplans for 2024 to 2025 confirm how we will achieve this in real terms, as we work towards our key deliverables. In our plan you will read about our workplans, our approach to resourcing and setting our budget, and our regulatory fees.

It builds on work that is already in-train and our ongoing responses to a number of challenging areas. One of these is our Consumer Protection Review which is one of the biggest projects we have ever undertaken. This review is asking important questions about the core protections sitting at the heart of our regulatory framework, particularly in relation to client money, and the safeguards they provide to the public in a legal services market that is continually evolving.

We have made progress on a programme of extensive engagement to get feedback on our approach from stakeholders, including the public, profession and consumer representatives. And we are already implementing some changes to further improve how we protect the public. Most areas of the SRA are already, or will be, engaged in some way with the review. As we move into 2025 the delivery and progression of its outcomes will require careful resourcing, as we will need to make sure we respond to the insights of our work and feedback we get through consultation.

Other key areas will impact the shape of our workstreams during 2025. These include our continuing investigation into solicitor involvement in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal – informed by the statutory public inquiry - and the issues arising from our investigation into whether the law firm SSB Group acted in compliance with our professional standards, and the Legal Services Board's independent review following SSB's collapse.

We anticipate changes that could flow from any regulatory switch of firms and individuals currently regulated by CILEx Regulation, and further work with in-house lawyers to build on our new resource package. The Solicitors Qualifying Examination enters its fourth year of operation and we will be further exploring its impacts to date. We also expect to build our use of financial penalties, and our thematic team will continue to review key areas of interest.

The legal services market is evolving, and through our horizon scanning work, and activities to promote technology and innovation, we see change happening in real-time. We are building our proactive regulatory work so that we can maintain our knowledge base and secure good data to take forward the right responses at the right times.

For these reasons it is important that we also retain flexibility to take on new challenges as they arise. And since we published draft plans in spring, further emerging issues require consideration, and we may need to take further action to protect consumers. For instance, we are concerned by some of the themes emerging from cases involving bulk claims that we think may raise new questions that we want to look at closely. We also want to progress work to improve how we identify and manage risk, particularly in relation to how we use our data. We have done some early work on scoping the new data strategy and we will continue to press ahead with this important project. We will also make progress on identifying and acting on key risks even before we have the full benefits of a data strategy in place.

We will continue to scope out work in these areas, which will be long term projects delivered over several years. As always, we will keep this under review and make sure that we are prioritising the most important areas.

We continue to structure the plan around the four strategic priority areas that we set out in our Corporate Strategy 2023-26. Under each we highlight the key deliverables for the 2023-26 period that we set out when we published our Strategy. We then set out actions that we will undertake during the twelve-month period to move us towards meeting those key deliverables, and in some cases we highlight where we have reprioritised and will deliver our priorities in different ways.

Finally, at the end of the document, we set out our budget and regulatory fees for this period.

Paul Philip, Chief Executive