About

Team size: 150

Major legal advisers: Ashurst, Clifford Chance, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters, Travers Smith

‘She’s at the top of a very interesting organisation at a very interesting time, given the bank’s role in navigating the issues concerning Brexit,’ Latham & Watkins partner Stuart Alford QC comments. ‘What’s interesting about her Bank of England (BoE) role is that it sits at the sharp end of the market – balancing the commercial needs of financial traders and banks with the BoE’s role as custodian of market ethics and financial stability. Striking the right balance requires a personality, judgement and a set of skills that not everybody has.’

Since 2015, general counsel (GCs) Sonya Branch has been charged with striking that balance. And, for much of that time, Brexit has dominated the UK central bank legal team’s workload: a major part of the 150-strong legal directorate has been involved since the mid-2016 referendum in reviewing about 10,000 pages of legislation and tracking 39 statutory instruments, to which it contributed drafting. That’s 6,000 pages of binding technical standards and 6,000 rules, all to make sure the UK financial services sector had a regulatory framework fit for purpose on the point of exit.

‘Because so much effort was put in upfront in preparing a revised legislative and regulatory framework, and so much contingency planning was done with firms and supporting supervising colleagues implementing those contingency plans, the Brexit process, as it happened, went as smoothly and effectively as one could have planned. But there is plenty of continuing preparation work for the end of the implementation period, which is now in action.’

While being at the forefront of Brexit’s impact on the economy, Branch has also brought significant change to BoE’s legal function with her One Legal Directorate strategy – nearly doubling headcount, streamlining a structure of nine legal units down to four alongside an EU withdrawal division and appointing two deputy GCs. Permanent paralegals have also been appointed for the first time, creating a structure whereby staff can join as a paralegal and move all the way up to GC, while the first three women have been appointed under the Women Returners scheme, which places people in work after extended career breaks.

‘It has effectively been a five-year project and involved so much change in such short measure. I had absolutely no metrics to be able to verify, for rational, enquiring, intellectually-engaged minds, why it was worth the effort,’ she comments. ‘I look back now and feel so incredibly grateful that colleagues had the trust to see it through.’

Interview with

How has the financial services industry responded to the changes brought about by Brexit?

We were very active, very early on, in trying to come to a manageable plan of action – in building a transitional regime and a temporary permissions regime, and the approach we took to Nationalising the Acquis to allow for the financial services sector to make the requisite changes in time. Largely, the impact has been managed as far as possible. That’s not to say firms don’t face considerable ongoing efforts to be ready for the end of the implementation period, but we’re fortunate in that for the UK financial services sector there’s been a clear plan of action and firms have been engaged with regulators throughout.

How do you prepare for the transition to a new governor?

We’re entirely focused on making sure that Mark [Carney] has a very smooth exit and that takes a particular focus, but also that Andrew [Bailey] is fully briefed and ready for all his key first engagements, such as his first select committee and first statutory committee. His efforts throughout the financial crisis are almost legendary in the bank, for the sheer amount of commitment over such a period of time to trying to do the right thing and rescue the economy: he has a huge bedrock of loyalty here.

What other projects have the team been involved in?

The day job as well as a vast range of priorities, such as supporting individual insurer and firm supervision, the real-time gross settlement renewal programme and supporting the statutory committees on their priorities. We’ve had some big-ticket work this year in things like the character selection of the next £50 note and making sure that the Public Sector Equality Duty was through the seam of how that process worked. I sat with the governor in the final character selection meeting to make sure the Equality Act considerations were front of mind right to the very end.

The £50 note process must have been fun?

There are so many privileges about this role, but that was one of the highlights. I could not have been more delighted by the character selected [pioneering mathematician Alan Turing]. It was somewhat frustrating sitting as the legal adviser because I was desperate to throw my support into the discussion.

How do you find time for all of this?

That’s before we get to any of the sensitive stuff. It is an enormously busy directorate – we’re very stretched at the moment. However, I put a lot of emphasis on wellbeing and life-work balance across the team. One of the things we have as a leadership team when we meet every week, and the only thing fixed on the agenda, is a temperature check: what’s keeping us busy, what’s worrying us as a leadership team, but also to pick up on individual pastoral issues across our staff. I also suspect that the work we’re doing is rewarding in itself for our colleagues because it is so intellectually stimulating. That has its own momentum and its own motivation.