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The Association of British Insurers has opened a new front in its ongoing battle with the Law Society by arguing that solicitors’ representative body should not automatically receive a cut of the practising certificate fee.

The government needs to provide further clarity and guidance on how the ban on referral fees will operate in practice, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has warned. Issues such as the definition of a referral fee need to be resolved.

Some 138 law firms have closed after entering the assigned risks pool in the past two years, while solicitors who do not pay their ARP premiums are being pursued into bankruptcy, the Solicitors Regulation Authority has reported. Most of the firms (119) shut through an orderly wind-down, while 19 were closed by an SRA intervention.

The furore over referral fees has come out of nowhere. In the past three weeks, the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, the Sunday Telegraph and, this week, The Times with the help of Jack Straw, have all climbed into the trade in claims. There has been an increasing focus on the role of insurance companies – referral fees’ most vehement critic – in actually fuelling them, which has certainly put the industry on the spot. The “if we don’t do it, everyone else will” argument put forward by the Association of British Insurers is not exactly an attractive one.

Michelle Garlick, a partner in the professional risk team at Legal Futures Associate Weightmans, considers the changes the SRA is planning to make to the professional indemnity insurance regime and is not surprised that it is not happening as quickly as insurers wanted. But in the meantime they will be reviewing their risk assessments and underwriting criteria very carefully.