The SRA Post Office prosecutions began on 25 June 2026, when the regulator referred two solicitors to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal. Both cases concern conduct after the main events of the Horizon scandal rather than the subpostmaster prosecutions themselves. The allegations are unproven, the Tribunal has made no findings, and neither referral relates to the wrongful convictions.
What the SRA has referred
The regulator has confirmed two referrals in SRA Update issue 152. The first concerns a former general counsel of Post Office Ltd, in post between 2015 and 2019. The allegation is a failure to co-operate fully with the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry over a request to give oral evidence during 2024. The second concerns a solicitor who acted for former subpostmasters in overturning their convictions and then entered retainers for later work. Those allegations run from 2021 to 2025. They relate to costs information, the justification for invoices raised, client confidentiality and the nature of correspondence sent to a client.
Jonathan Peddie, the SRA’s executive director of investigations, enforcement and litigation, has said the cases can proceed on a specific basis. Their nature means they are unlikely to prejudice the criminal investigations or the inquiry. Wider investigations continue with the inquiry team and the Metropolitan Police.
Nothing has yet been tested. The SDT will hear both matters in due course. Until it does, the position is that a regulator has decided there is a case to answer, which is a considerable distance from a finding of misconduct.
Why do these two cases come first?
The sequencing is the most instructive thing about the announcement. The SRA has more than 20 live investigations into solicitors and firms who acted for the Post Office and Royal Mail Group. It said in March 2026 that cases concerning conduct since the scandal emerged would likely progress faster than those arising from the prosecutions themselves. The reason is straightforward. The later conduct sits outside the territory the inquiry and the police are still working through, so acting on it now cuts across neither.
That produces an outcome which reads oddly at first. The first disciplinary proceedings arising from one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in English legal history concern inquiry co-operation and billing rather than the prosecutions. It reflects what can be safely litigated now, not a judgment about relative seriousness.
The category of risk in-house teams have not modelled
Set the individuals aside and the referrals map a category of exposure that most in-house legal functions have never risk-assessed. The SRA has identified the areas it is examining in the post-scandal period. They are the operation of the complaint review and mediation scheme, overcharging of claimants, the use of non-disclosure agreements, the labelling of correspondence, and engagement with the public inquiry.
Every item on that list is conduct that happens after an institutional failure is already known about. It is the response, the remediation, the correspondence and the co-operation, all generated under pressure and frequently by people who did not create the original problem.
An allegation of failing to co-operate fully with a statutory inquiry is worth pausing on in particular. Most conduct risk registers contemplate what a solicitor does for a client. Fewer contemplate what a solicitor owes to a public inquiry examining that client. Fewer still address what happens when the two pull in different directions, or how a decision not to attend gets documented at the time.
Conduct after an institutional failure carries its own regulatory exposure, separate from anything that caused the failure. Inquiry co-operation, costs information, billing records and client correspondence all become disclosable. The SRA has now shown it will act on those without waiting for the underlying inquiry to report. For in-house teams, the practical question is whether the file would show who advised what, on what basis, and when.
What can the Tribunal actually do?
The SRA can fine solicitors and traditional law firms up to £25,000 and impose controls on how they practise. Where it considers a more significant sanction is needed, the case goes to the SDT. The Tribunal is independent of the regulator and can impose unlimited fines, suspend a solicitor, or strike them off the roll. Referral is the SRA’s route to sanctions beyond its own ceiling. That is why the step signals how the regulator views a case, and equally why it settles nothing.
For the regulator’s wider enforcement direction, see our reports on the return of accountants’ reports under the Consumer Protection Review and on the independence pressures the SRA has identified in in-house practice.
The SRA maintains a standing statement on the investigation, updated as matters progress, at sra.org.uk/po-2026.