The separation of regulation from representation for barristers has removed conflicts and allows a robust defence of barristers, writes Mark Stobbs

Barristers and complainants used to harp on relentlessly about what they perceived to be a conflict in the Bar Council's role in both regulating and representing barristers. Not any more.


In the wake of Sir David Clementi's review, the Bar Council - like the Law Society - has set up a body, the bar standards board (BSB), to take on our regulatory role, independent of any representative considerations.


This is a sea change. For eight years, my job epitomised the concerns that Sir David Clementi had about that dual role. I was responsible for supporting both the Bar Council's rule-making and complaints-handling operation, and much of our representational work - the lobbying about fees, the response to the Office of Fair Trading, the support that we provide as a representative organisation for the bar.


You can exaggerate the tensions between the two roles. The priority was clear - to remain a self-governing profession. That meant having an efficient complaints procedure, unafraid to take action against our members where there was a case to answer, and rules that would stand up to critical scrutiny even if they imposed unwelcome burdens on our members.


There is a strong cultural understanding that being a professional means accepting obligations occasionally to act against your own interests. We managed a number of reforms that the profession may not have liked and that required clear leadership to implement - making our complaints system more accessible and powerful, introducing direct access, compulsory continuing professional development, pupillage funding and more.


Some reforms may have come more slowly than many would have liked; some will say that our view of the public interest coincided a little too neatly with the profession's interest. But it would be nonsense to say that the regulation of the profession has not modernised significantly in the last decade or so.


So how will separation affect this? First, my job loses its regulatory role in the sense that it will no longer manage the complaints side and have no direct input into the rule-making. That does not mean it will not have an interest - a major role will be to influence the BSB by persuasive argument.


Secondly, the fact that the BSB exists to focus on the public interest means that the representational side can focus on the profession's interests.


This means that we can be more vocal about the burdens that others are seeking to place on the profession. It will be easier to provide an effective defence service for barristers facing complaints - the conflict inherent in one part of my team acting against another part will have disappeared. We will have the opportunity to look at the services we provide the profession - how these can be improved, what added value we can give. There is an opportunity for the bar to look again at where it wants to go and what it wants out of its professional body. We were always accountable to the profession, but we are now in a stronger position to take lines that we might have shied away from.


This does not mean that we will become a strident trade union, nor, I hope, that we will be permanently at war with the BSB. We have set it up and it is in everybody's interests for debates to be constructive. The basic public service values of the bar will remain. What will be fascinating is to see how far the fact that a separate body has been set up to regulate will liberate the representational side, how the conflict will manifest itself and, above all, how it can represent its membership better.


Mark Stobbs is head of the services, representation and policy department at the General Council of the Bar