In this session Edward Romain, founder and CEO of the access to justice charity Blind Justice UK, presents The Memory of Justice, the second briefing in the charity’s transparency research series, covered by the Law Society Gazette on publication. The audit examined twelve of the bodies that decide complaints and discipline across British public life, from the Financial Ombudsman to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, on four questions anyone can check: do they publish their decisions, in full or in summary, in a searchable form, and for how long. Every finding was verified against each body’s own website, and the full evidence annex is published so the audit can be reproduced by anyone.

The findings reveal three very different regimes: bodies that remember permanently, bodies that forget on a published schedule, and outliers where the public record is short, thin or absent altogether. Edward will explore what institutional memory means for consumers choosing a professional at the most vulnerable moments of their lives, why the Financial Ombudsman’s fourteen-year archive answers every objection to publication, what the audited bodies said when Blind Justice put the findings to them, and what the Legal Ombudsman’s just-closed consultation on decision publication may now change. He will close with a preview of the series’ next question: what happens to the complaints that disappear before anyone decides them at all.