Bar slaps down “super-quango”

Nicholas Lavender QC, chairman of the Bar Council, has mounted a staunch defence ahead of any plans to introduce a single regulator “super-quango”.

In a speech to regulators and professionals at Lincoln’s Inn this week, he warned that constantly changing the regulatory regime for legal services is costly and lawyers need time to let the current regime bed in.

On the possibility of a single regulator being introduced—the Legal Services Board (LSB) controversially called for a single legal services regulator in 2013—Lavender warned that a super-quango would fail to understand the differences between the various parts of the legal profession and would try to impose a one-size-fits-all concept of regulation.

“The last thing we need in this country, and certainly in the legal profession, is more or bigger quangos,” he said.

“I trust that no-one in this room would consider it appropriate for lawyers to be regulated directly by a government minister. Likewise, it would be unsatisfactory for lawyers to be regulated by a government minister’s agents or appointees.

“So that is another reason why it would be an inappropriate and retrograde step to set up an new quango, or series of quangos, to regulate, say advocates, and litigators, and conveyancers, and what have you. And establishing a super-quango, with the attendant bureaucracy, would be a backwards step because it would be likely to lead to regulation which was both more expensive and of poorer quality.

“We need a regulatory system which respects the independence of lawyers and of the legal professions. One of the important safeguards of the rule of law is the existence of an independent legal profession or professions.”

Lavender also took aim at the concept of entity-based regulation, which would not work in the area of advocacy and was “simply a fashionable idea amongst regulators”.

Meanwhile, lawyers are still getting to grips with the Legal Services Act 2007 and the regulatory regime it introduced. Moreover, the LSB, Bar Standards Board and Solicitors Regulation Authority will all have acquired new heads in the space of eight months, adding to the changes.