Barristers: Three-year plan to improve regulation
The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has given the Legal Services Board (LSB) a series of voluntary undertakings about how it will improve its performance over the next three years.
The undertakings form part of informal enforcement action taken by the LSB beyond the current requirement that the BSB provide voluntary ‘assurance letters’.
They follow the oversight regulator’s determination in May that the BSB was not improving its performance with “sufficient urgency or pace”
This in turn came in the wake of the LSB’s annual performance assessments, in which the BSB failed to provide sufficient assurance on whether it met two of the three standards: well-led (which relates to resources and capability) and operational delivery.
It only provided ‘partial assurance’ in relation to the other, having an effective approach to regulation.
The LSB has had concerns about the BSB for the past five years and last year saw the start of the change process, with publication of an enforcement review the BSB commissioned from City law firm Fieldfisher and an organisational restructure completed last December.
The reform programme’s three broad goals are to deliver: “proactive, consumer-focused regulation anchored on a much deeper, intelligence-based understanding of the market the BSB regulates”; “modernised delivery for operational excellence”; and “engaged, agile and committed people”.
The first undertaking is that this will be delivered in full by March 2028.
The second is to ensure the BSB has “a fair, timely and efficient enforcement process”. Work on this is already well underway, with a consultation published last month setting out major changes to the way in which barristers are disciplined.
The undertaking says that, by the end of 2025/26, the BSB will have met all of its 20 current key performance indicators, including that 80% of reports of misconduct are assessed within eight weeks and 80% of resulting investigations are completed within 38 weeks.
The most recent BSB performance report recorded that it hit 12 of its 20 targets in the last quarter, with two narrowly missed. In March 2024, it only met eight.
The BSB told the LSB that, for 2027/28, the goal was to complete 80% of investigations within 25 weeks.
The third undertaking is that the BSB will “strengthen its knowledge management” and the fourth that its website provides “clear and accessible information” for consumers about what it can help with.
One indicator for the success of the latter is that the BSB should receive a lower proportion of reports from consumers which, on assessment, are judged not to warrant a regulatory response.
The voluntary undertakings contrast with the statutory directions that the LSB issued in May to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to address the multiple failures in its oversight of Axiom Ince.
These are formal enforcement measures and the LSB has recently published the proposed implementation plan for them, which will see all of them completed by August next year at the latest.
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