Victims say SRA apology “falls short” after five years of ignored warnings over SSB law
Victims and creditors caught up in the collapse of SSB Law have condemned the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s response to a damning independent report, which found the regulator failed for years to act on mounting warnings about the firm’s conduct and financial instability.
The Legal Services Board (LSB) report, published earlier this month, concluded that the SRA ignored or dismissed more than 100 separate reports over five years while SSB Law amassed debts exceeding £100 million and pursued what were later found to be meritless cavity wall insulation claims. The regulator has since apologised, admitting it “should have acted sooner” and pledging reforms to prevent a repeat, but victims say the response offers little comfort or justice.
The report found that members of the public who raised concerns were frequently “fobbed off or ignored”, with the majority of complaints closed without any investigation. By contrast, reports from other solicitors or barristers were more likely to prompt action — a disparity the LSB described as evidence of a “two-tier approach” to complaint handling.
One complainant, the report noted, received markedly different treatment after resubmitting the same complaint under the pretence of being a solicitor. The staff who handled the second version spent more time reviewing the case and provided significantly more information. In another instance, an SRA employee dismissed a complainant as “some busybody” in internal correspondence.
Victims were often told that their reports related to “service issues” and were referred to the Legal Ombudsman, rather than the SRA conducting its own investigation. SRA chair Anna Bradley has since described these findings as “troubling” and insisted that they do not reflect how the regulator treats public complainants, though she acknowledged “clear and serious failures” in the SSB case.
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Debra Sofia Magdalene, spokesperson for the SSB Law Victims Support Group, said the apology does not go far enough. “The LSB’s censure of the SRA is a formal warning, not real accountability,” she said. “It recognises failure but doesn’t repair the damage or deliver justice for victims. Thousands of families have suffered because regulators acted too slowly. What’s needed now is genuine reform, faster intervention, and independent oversight to make sure promises of change are kept.”
The group, which provided evidence to the LSB inquiry, is calling for a comprehensive redress plan for all affected and a cross-agency investigation into how regulatory, financial and governmental bodies collectively failed to intervene sooner.
Meanwhile, the barrister whose 2023 complaint first alerted the SRA to the firm’s financial collapse told the Law Gazette that the episode represented a “catastrophic failure of regulatory oversight”. She said her own complaint — that she was owed £260,000 across nearly 300 cases — was dismissed even after investigators found SSB owed £128 million to litigation funders charging interest rates of up to 32%. Despite that discovery, her file was closed, with investigators concluding there were “no issues of concern identified”.
She added: “The Legal Services Board has confirmed that the SRA failed in its statutory duty to act effectively, efficiently and in the public interest. These are not isolated mistakes but systemic governance failures that occurred under the present leadership. Apologies are not enough. Confidence in legal regulation cannot be rebuilt by those who presided over this breakdown. The chair and board should step aside, and there must be a new governance structure — one that is independent, transparent and answerable both to the profession and to the public.”
The SRA has said it will respond in full to the LSB’s recommendations, which include improved complaint triage, earlier intervention powers, and a review of how the regulator assesses risks to public protection. For victims still waiting for compensation and answers, however, the latest promises have done little to restore faith in a system they say failed them from the outset.