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The Times
September 16
Martin Mears believes that changes to the SCB do not go far enough
New name, but bad old habits
Ann Abraham, the new Legal Services Ombudsman, takes up her position next week. The function of the LSO is to oversee the handling of complaints against solicitors, barristers and licensed conveyancers. Coincidentally, this month is also the first anniversary of the reorganisation and renaming of the Solicitors Complaints Bureau (now the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors).
Miss Abraham is a former chief executive of the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux and, by reputation, no soft touch. At this point, it would be usual to say something about the difficulty of her new position. But a lawyers' regulator can easily give herself a quiet life and win applause. All she has to do is talk tough and sprinkle her annual report with quotable phrases of the "solicitors are drinking in the Last Chance Saloon" type. I assume that Miss Abraham has higher aspirations.
If only because of the sheer size of their profession, it is solicitors and their regulatory body, the OSS, that will be the new LSO's main customers. How should she set about her task? She could start by reading the literature produced by the SCB during the past seven years and in particular its annual reports. These she may find puzzling.
She will undoubtedly wonder, for instance, why last year the Law Society went to the effort and expense of reorganising its regulatory arm. What was supposed to be amiss?
In a succession of annual reports, the SCB had presented itself as a model of efficiency and fairness, with criticism dismissed as ill-informed or malicious. The flow of glad tidings culminated in the SCB's July 1995 press release. This claimed that the quality of the bureau's decision-making was demonstrated by "an almost faultless record on appeals". The reorganisation carried out in 1991 had resulted in a system that could "be regarded as the Rolls-Royce of decision-making". We were told that, "in an external quality audit in May 1995, a statistical sample of files taken at random disclosed no delay or error".
In the face of such claims, why was there a second re-organisation in five years? The reality was that the outside world's perception of the SCB was so negative that the Law Society had concluded that nothing less than a relaunch under a new identity would quell the torrent of criticism.
As it turned out, the latest reorganisation was purely cosmetic.
Meanwhile, such evidence as there is suggests that the bad old practices and attitudes of the SCB continue mostly unchanged. What is different is that the OSS has become yet another outpost of Management Man. What it lacks in performance, it makes up in presentation. It has its Business Plan and Key Tasks. Complainants are "customers". It has its Mission Statement, its Masthead Slogan.
But the same impossible caseloads continue to be handled by the same personnel with the same levels of delay and complainant dissatisfaction. During my presidency, I proposed that the Law Society appoint an independent Visitor (not another tame committee) of genuine stature to oversee the OSS. This would ensure that at long last we had solid facts about the OSS's performance.
Without such knowledge, how can effective reforms be undertaken? Anyway, the idea fell on stony soil and is unlikely to be revived. It is, I fear, only a matter of time before the renamed SCB attracts more adverse reports of the kind published by the National Consumer Council and the Law Society's own research unit during the past few years to say nothing of the adverse reports that fail to see the light of day.
- The author is a past President of the Law Society, a society council member and editor of the Law Society's Client Care Guide. His views are his own.
