Townsend: regulation "needs to be like radiotherapy"

Regulation “needs to be like radiotherapy treatment”, the outgoing chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has said.  

In what is probably his last speech to the profession, Antony Townsend said regulation should be “highly targeted on the problem. If it used too liberally or without sufficient focus, it risks doing more damage than good”.

Townsend, who is due to leave the SRA in February after seven years in the role, said the pace of change in the profession had struck the right balance between “bloody revolution” and Jarndyce v Jarndyce. However, the SRA was still “a young regulator which needed to mature rapidly”. 

Setting up the SRA in 2006 was “somewhat daunting”, he said, since there was “a prescriptive, bureaucratic, regulatory approach that was unfit for purpose and expensive; a market that was restricted and in many areas lacked innovation; an assigned risks pool which placed the organisation and those regulated at serious risk of massively escalating costs; a reactive and often secretive organisation; an infrastructure in desperate need of an overhaul; and a requirement to make regulation independent of the representative body”.

Speaking at the first dedicated conference for compliance officers, in Birmingham this week, he reflected how the SRA had moved away from “a tick-box approach”, and put the “code of conduct on a crash diet”.