SLCC publishes responses to strategy, budget and operating plan consultation
Four key themes dominated the responses to the recent consultation by the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission on its draft strategy, operating plan and budget.
Neil Stevenson, the Commission’s Chief Executive thanked all those who responded “we know preparing a response takes time and consideration, and we’re tremendously grateful to stakeholders who took the time to share very frank, focussed, and thoughtful feedback.”
“Our Board is now working to consider each and every element of feedback, and there is huge value in some of the fine detail which we need to consider. However, four broad themes emerged where we can give an early indication on how the feedback might influence future drafts.”
“Firstly, with hindsight, we did not focus enough on communicating our aims for the complaints process itself and our performance there. We referenced our latest Annual Report in the consultation document - this had significant detail on our work in legal complaints. However, we were strongly reminded that if this focus was not duplicated in the strategy document it could look as if our work plan were unbalanced. We can rectify that immediately, as there is already a firm commitment to improvement on the first page of the strategy and we will look at adding further detail and context here. That commitment extends to trying to achieve legislative change to make the process more efficient. We know ‘lobbying’ was not seen as our role by some, but when we see the costs and inefficiencies of the current statutory model we do feel it is right to raise these to help benefit lawyers and consumers.”
“There were also points about our focus we’d strongly contest. Our Act sets out many wider responsibilities beyond complaints, and we have powers to undertake other work to support our core role. It is not surprising that lawyers and consumers groups have different views on priorities – our role is to balance those. Comparisons were drawn with other organisations that are dramatically different to ours – and while the support for us benchmarking our performance is welcome, consumers and lawyers will benefit most when this is about real learning and improvement based on properly thought-out examples.”
“A second source of comments was how much project work we undertake. Our operating plan had a similar number of projects and similar funding and staffing to the last two years, but in the context of the strategy it may have looked more substantive. We now have a great chance to add clarity in two ways – better describing the small scale of many projects and their value for lawyers and consumers while also making the link to the relevant statutory powers more overt (we had removed this in the final draft for the sake of plain English). We made clear in our budget consultation document that increased costs largely related to extra temporary resource we were using for what stakeholders flagged as our focus: handling individual complaints (with other increases coming from unavoidable property, pension, IT and training costs). Overall spend was reduced a small amount in our final budget submitted to parliament in relation to feedback on one specific area of work.”
“Our Board were, however, frankly surprised that there was a suggestion our job was only to handle complaints, and not to contribute to debate on what standards should be. We have a bank of over 8,000 complaints, which lawyers, and indirectly consumers, have paid for and we believe that a modern approach to regulation should see this as a valuable resource to be mined for information to help future consumers. So some projects will stay firmly on the agenda.”
“There was also some comment on specific projects and we are now going to amend or reduce in some in scale, and remove others, based on the helpful feedback. We will continue to consider some, and continue to discuss them with stakeholders and further evolve the ideas for inclusion in a future plan. I’m still pleased we consulted on these, some were projects we’ve been frequently asked to consider, and we can now show we have considered these ideas but taken account of the consensus that they were not a priority. I hope reducing the total number of projects also shows we are listening and that we agree that our complaints function remains our core focus.”
“Finally, there was much discussion about the consumer focus and language, and whether projects went beyond our role. Few of the responses made reference to the legislative changes that came into force last year to establish a statutory SLCC Consumer Panel, nor how they would interpret the role set out for that panel in statute. There was a disappointing lack of comment on consumer issues generally. The Panel’s creation has increased some of the consumer input and focus of our work – while our decisions on individual cases must be completely independent and impartial, those who have less knowledge of legal matters and legal processes may need additional support to engage in the complaints process. We believe we may need some research to understand what that is. We also have concerns about consumers failing to receive redress, lack of clarity around fees and a lack of learning from complaints. When we see the same issues happen time and again to clients and solicitors, costing them both in terms of our process, it does not seem wise to keep the status quo where there may be simple fixes. Making progress on these will save the profession and consumers money in the long run. Even though not all the stakeholder responses in this area were positive, these are likely to remain strong themes of our work.”
“Once again, we’d like to thank all those individuals and organisations who responded to the consultation – the variety of perspectives have been invaluable. There is a huge value to positive dialogue, and we plan more engagement before finalising our plans.”
