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No COLP/COFA split in January: what the SRA has said it will do instead

Writer: Ashley Barwick
Ashley Barwick
Oct 26
4 min read

On 22 October the SRA confirmed that its rules separating compliance officers from the people who run a firm will not come into force in January. It had announced a pause last month. This is the formal follow-up, and it says more than the headline suggests.


I should declare an interest. I am a signatory to the SME & Boutique Law Firm Alliance, which opposed these rules. I will try to read the announcement as plainly as I can.



What the SRA actually said


The regulator said the pause lets it "work with stakeholders, including through working groups" and "test alternatives and consider wider approaches" to making sure firms have appropriate governance in place. Once it has decided what comes next, it says it will allow an "appropriate lead-in time" for firms to make any changes.


It also accepted, in the words of its own statement, that its original approach "could have had unintended consequences within smaller firms and sole practices".


The Law Society president welcomed the move and said the working groups "must have representation from those businesses and practitioners most affected". The chair of the Conveyancing Task Force, which opposed the rules, called it "a pause, not a resolution". I think that is the right reading.


What has not gone away


The same statement says the SRA is running a supervision pilot and is "looking at adopting proactive approaches to supervising firms where we identify potential higher risks". As part of that, it will "seek assurances that firms have appropriate governance arrangements in place and that their compliance function is able to operate with the necessary independence."


The Law Gazette reports that, in the meantime, the SRA is identifying higher-risk firms and working with them directly on establishing separate management and compliance roles where necessary.

So a blanket rule has gone, for now. A targeted conversation with the regulator about who holds the compliance roles, and how independent they are, has not.


For reference, the original proposal applied to firms with turnover above £600,000 or holding more than £2m of client money. Those figures belong to the rule that has been paused. They are not a statement of how the SRA will choose the firms it looks at.


Nobody has said what "higher risk" means


Jade Gani, who founded the Alliance, told the Law Gazette that she wants to understand "what metric is being used to identify the 'high-risk' firms". I have not seen an answer in any of the reports I read.

If you run a small firm, that means you cannot assume you are off the list, and you cannot assume you are on it. What you can do is be ready to answer the question if it arrives.


Six questions for your COLP and COFA


These are my suggestions for a quiet hour. They are not SRA requirements, and they are not a substitute for taking advice on your own firm's position.


  1. Who holds each role today? Is it recorded somewhere a new member of staff could find it?

  2. Can each officer see what they need to see? That means management information, the client ledger, the complaints register and the breaches log, without having to ask the person whose decisions they are meant to be checking.

  3. When did your COLP last challenge something? A decision, a process, a late file. If the answer is "never", ask whether that is because nothing went wrong or because nobody was looking.

  4. If your COLP or COFA is also the main decision-maker, what stops a problem going unseen? Could you describe that check to an SRA supervisor in two minutes?

  5. Who covers each role during a holiday, illness or departure, and does that person know it?

  6. Where would you point a supervisor for evidence of all this? Minutes, notes, a log, a dated review. Evidence is what turns "we always do that" into something you can show.


What I would not do


I would not spend money preparing for a rule that no longer has a date. Nor would I assume the matter is closed. The SRA has said it still wants appropriate governance and a compliance function that can operate independently. That aim has not changed. Only the route to it has.

An hour spent making sure the answers to those six questions are written down, and true, costs very little. It is worth doing whichever way the working groups land.


Start with a conversation


If you would like an independent view of where your firm stands on governance and compliance, I offer a free health check, with no obligation. Get in touch and we can arrange a time to talk it through.


The contact page is an enquiry form, so please put "free health check" in the message subject and I will pick it up straight away.


Ashley Barwick is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives and a Law Society accredited Lexcel Consultant. This post is general information and does not constitute legal advice. Fraxinus Business Associates is not authorised to provide legal advice.


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