Legal Services Board unveils year-one priorities

The Legal Services Board (LSB) has launched its business plan setting out the oversight body's agenda in its first year of operation.

The LSB document published today (15 April) identifies seven key policy areas. They are: putting the public interest at the heart of regulation; widening access to the legal market; improving service through better complaints-handling; developing excellence in regulation; securing independent regulation; promoting diversity; and developing legal education strategies for the public.

Areas of most interest to the profession will include year-one priorities for regulation. The LSB assumed oversight powers on 1 January over the UK's main approved regulators (ARs) including the Law Society and the Bar Council.

The body states that its 2009-10 regulatory priorities are the creation of:

• a methodology to assess front-line regulators;
• rules to rubber-stamp the codes of front-line regulators and allow new bodies to become ARs;
• a process for identifying and improving target areas of regulation;
• agreed rules requiring ARs to maintain separation between representative and regulatory functions;
• mechanisms to test regulatory independence; and
• agreed rules to ensure all practising fees paid by authorised persons are as transparent and fair as possible

The plan also sets out projected costs for the body, which was created as part of a radical overhaul of professional regulation in the 2007 Legal Services Act. The LSB projects £4.74m total operating costs in the year until December 2009 with a projected operating budget of £4.5m by 2011-12.

The report also states that the LSB sees it as a priority to promote new entrants to the legal services market, including non-traditional services providers. As such, the body pledges to make "significant headway" in realising opportunities related to alternative business structures in legal services, the most radical element of the 2007 act.

The LSB also warns that it is the responsibility of the profession to make this "hybrid model" work to head off the likely alternative of "wholesale statutory regulation, with a progressive loss of public confidence in the concept of a profession".

LSB chair David Edmonds and chief executive Chris Kenny (pictured above) write in a foreword to the report: "Our aim is not to attack [a] huge agenda in a scattergun way but to work constructively with... all our partners. We will do this by drawing on the best available evidence from the legal services sector in the UK and abroad and from the experience of regulators and policy makers in other sectors."

The launch of the business plan comes after the LSB unveiled its first major policy act last month with the launch of a review of regulatory independence. There has also been a renewed debate on regulation within the profession with a Law Society-backed report last month calling for the creation of a specialist division to police large City law firms.

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