Chair's Board Update February 2025

There was a full agenda this month including a detailed discussion with Tom Hayhoe from the LSCP.  Other meeting highlights included:

• Transparency: the Board reaffirmed its commitment to working as openly as possible with the regulated community, consumers, and others. To this end, we publish Board papers a week before our meeting and invite questions and comments in advance. We also agreed to hold a webinar for the entities we regulate, probably in the first half of April. Watch this space.
• Consumer Engagement: our 2025 Corporate Plan includes access to justice and consumer empowerment as one of our four key strategic objectives. To help shape our future work programme, we held a wide-ranging debate with Tom Hayhoe, who chairs the Legal Services Consumer Panel. We agreed on the importance of regulators collaborating on consumer research and improving consumer information given that most consumers only access legal services infrequently and often at times of vulnerability. We also discussed the need to revisit the complex structures set out in the 2007 Legal Services Act, looking forward to the unregulated legal service providers roundtable we are hosting later this month.
• Regulatory Performance: we had our usual detailed update on our regulatory performance for Q4 2024 and were pleased to see continued improvement across 2024. We agreed to an Action Plan following consideration of the LSB report into the SRA’s handling of Axiom Ince. We were reassured that our interaction with the firms we regulate is frequent and positive but agreed some further actions to improve our monitoring still further.
• Education: we had an in-depth review of our education work, including the annual report we receive from CILEX. We welcomed the work the team has continued to do on reducing the numbers who have not recorded the necessary CPD- much better than the position 12 months ago- and agreed we should continue to remove from the Register those Legal Executives who cannot show they have undertaken CPD. We also agreed to a robust sampling exercise for 2023/24; in this way we believe we are at the cutting edge for legal regulators in promoting ongoing competence.
• Finance: we received our regular report on finance and welcomed the strong end-year performance for 2024.

Our next planned Board catch-up is on 11 March 2025 with our next full meeting on 15 April 2025. As always if you want to know more, please look at our website, read our Board papers or get in touch.