News

Our new rules – one year on

08 April 2021

In November 2019, we introduced our new Standards and Regulations. These new rules were the culmination of four years of development work, which had seen us consult widely with the profession and public alike, with more than 35,000 providing direct input.

Our Standards and Regulations are simpler and far shorter than the previous SRA Handbook and focus a lot more clearly on what really matters - high professional standards and protecting the public and its money. The reforms put more trust in your professional judgment, getting rid of lots of outdated prescriptive rules and giving you more flexibility over how you work.

When we introduced our Standards and Regulations, we said that we would monitor how they were working for you and for the public. We will therefore be running a short survey to gather your views on the first year or so of their implementation.

We are keen to find out from you how you have found working within the new rules; have they reduced regulatory burdens? What practical benefits or challenges they have brought? Have they helped you work differently?

Over the coming weeks we will be contacting you directly to gather your feedback via a short anonymous survey. Please look out for the questionnaire in your inbox and let us know what you think.

We have already carried out research on our transparency rules, which also came into full effect in November 2019. That showed that both firms and potential clients were benefiting from the publication of basic information about services provided.