The Bar Standards Board should tell the Legal Services Board to stop making overreaching demands and ‘butt out’, the head of the bar has said.
Mark Fenhalls KC told the Bar Council’s annual conference that the LSB has, over the years, started to increase its reach and make 'overreaching' demands on the bar’s frontline regulator. 'It's time for a triennial review that should have taken place many years ago to take place. It should happen in 2023,' he said.
The LSB's responsibilities under the Legal Services Act 2007 include regulating approved regulators, overseeing the Office for Legal Complaints, making recommendations to amend the list of reserved activities and setting up voluntary arrangements to improve standards.
During the passage of the Legal Services Bill, and set out in the framework document between the LSB and the Ministry of Justice, it was stated that the LSB and the Office for Legal Complaints would be reviewed every three years.
The Bar Council, the approved regulator for barristers, is required by the LSB to delegate its regulatory functions to a separate body. These functions are delegated to the BSB, whose responsibilities include maintaining standards of barristers’ conduct, assuring competence, considering reported concerns and taking enforcement action.
Fenhalls said the BSB ‘should be more forthright telling the LSB that it should butt out'. The public are 'betrayed' if complaints made against a barrister take years to resolve, he continued. Resources should not be spent on anything that distracts the BSB from its core responsibilities.
He also highlighted the need to ensure that the BSB's efforts 'do not duplicate what we do as the bar representative body'.
The LSB told the Gazette it was unable to comment on a speech it had not seen, but pointed out that it consulted on a new regulatory performance assessment framework this year. The 'proportionate, risk-based and evidence-based' framework will come into force on 1 January.
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