SRA Chief Executive Sarah Rapson has set out plans to rebuild the trust of the legal profession and the wider public in a news release on 22/4/26, acknowledging that the organisation needs to evolve to realise its ambition of becoming a modern, proportionate and proactive regulator.
Presumably this is the start of the “change in tone” we heard about at the Law Society Risk & Compliance conference in March (see our April update)?
The plan outlines four key priorities for 2026:
- Operational excellence: To address slow casework the SRA is reviewing how cases move through the organisation, including reviewing the application of their assessment threshold test and triage processes and developing alternatives to full investigation. The aim is for the SRA to become more accountable, timely, and consistent in how it operates.
- Proactive risk identification: Aiming to move away from reactive enforcement, by proactively identifying risk, to avoid further failures along the lines of Axiom Ince, SSB Law and PM Law, with the introduction of a ‘law firm profiler tool’ and processes to improve their understanding of the ever-evolving challenges in the market.
- Focusing on the biggest issues: The SRA will concentrate resources on areas with the greatest public impact, such as high-volume consumer claims, and (perhaps less obviously) the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE).
- Collaboration and engagement: The SRA aims to be an “ally” to the profession, with a shared interest in its success, by ensuring earlier and more visible engagement, clearer communication, and greater transparency behind their decisions, to try to reduce the need for enforcement action. One of the main aims it to create a new professional ethics framework to support solicitors to do the right thing (see our separate blog here for more on this point).
The overall tone of the news release is that while enforcement will obviously remain for deliberate rule-breaking, the hope is that with earlier supervisory engagement, better guidance, and clearer communication they will build bridges with the profession, which the SRA acknowledges have many shared goals with the them, and enforcement won’t feel like the only/ go-to solution. Only time will tell whether this new approach will have the desired effect.