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Not quite clear as to what "wants to be chosen by legal tech providers to develop new sector tools" but if this means promoting shared data applications to mean that consumers can have consistent and comprehensive information from all regulators from a single enquiry, it will be welcome

A few years ago experienced an illustrative problem of differences between regulators when looking into a local charity.

I found that, at tghat time, if a body was regulated by the Charity Commission it only took a few keystrokes and no payment to get its latest accounts on screen. Companies House provided the same information but was a little slower and required a nominal payment. If, however, it was registered as a mutual with (then) the FSA information took however long it took to get files back from off-site storage and cost a minimum of £50. I questioned whether the charity had offloaded part of its operation in this way to keep information from local journalists.

Things have changed for the better but multi-body regulation was raised at the Charity Commission's Annual Public Meeting on Tuesday. Its ACEO announced that it was promoting consistency between regulators. This followed an address by Prince William calling for co-operation rather than competition between charities.

Legal sector regulators should be thinking how they can work together in the consumer's interest and realise that one which seeks to attract the regulated could be looked on with suspicion.

A good start would be an investigation into the use of open data so that comparative performance information across all regulators (and other sources eg HMLR) could be made easily available on comparison sites to consumers.

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