Spotlight’s campaign to beef up anti-money laundering supervision of professionals who enable dirty money achieved a crucial milestone with the October 2025 announcement that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will become an anti-money laundering super-regulator.
Three years ago our Privileged Profession? report laid bare the utterly inadequate way in which the legal sector was supervised for AML by a patchwork of nine professional bodies with weak and uneven powers. Our recommendation to give the Solicitors Regulation Authority unlimited fining powers was put into law in 2023.
Determined to press for greater effectiveness, we worked closely with civil society and private sector partners in 2023 to push the case for reform in response to a key Treasury consultation.
Meanwhile, our court monitoring programme analysed key cases and we crunched the relevant data to continually review the performance of legal sector supervisors. That culminated in our 2025 Broken Record report that found minimal progress had been made and led us to call time on the existing system.
The FCA’s new role is welcome, but it is not the end of our story. We’re campaigning to ensure the new regulator is properly empowered and resourced to succeed, and current supervisors don’t drop the ball in the transition period.
