In June 2023, we published our report on Consumer Focused Regulation in Legal Services. We’ve since been working closely with the legal services regulators to encourage them to adopt the best practice approaches set out in the report, both through our day to day engagement and a series of roundtable meetings. Two years on, we wanted to reflect on the progress we’ve seen.
The original driver for this work was a strong sense that we had as a Consumer Panel that regulation in the legal services sector could be significantly more consumer focused, and we wanted to produce a report which would be a useful, practical tool to help all legal regulators, including the Legal Services Board (LSB), to understand their own performance as consumer focused regulators and identify steps they could take to improve. The report sets out best practices in consumer focused regulation taken from financial services, telecommunications, and legal services, covering six themes, including governance, strategy, consumer research and engagement, policy development and implementation, approach to consumer protection and responsive regulation. The report lists specific indicators of what consumer focused regulation looks like within each of those six themes. The LSB has also adopted the Consumer Focused Regulation report as part of its Regulatory Performance Assessment Framework sourcebook so that it informs the LSB’s assessment of any standards that require regulators to be aware of and respond to consumer needs, in line with the regulatory objective to protect and promote the interests of consumers.
Over the last two years, we’ve run a series of roundtables with the oversight and frontline legal regulators, designed to provide an informal opportunity to share experiences of working on the consumer focused agenda in their organisations, including the more challenging aspects. There has been excellent engagement on this topic to date and some great examples of the actions that individual frontline regulators have taken in response to the report.
Whilst all the regulators have taken positive steps, we have been particularly impressed with the approach that the Bar Standards Board (BSB) has taken.
Their immediate first step was to undertake an internal self-assessment against the six themes and indicators in the report, identifying areas of strength and opportunities for improvement in their work, which was also then discussed at Board level. Following on from the internal self-assessment, they nominated an executive level consumer champion, who has spearheaded the work to address the opportunity areas since then under the BSB’s programme to reform itself as a regulator. This is already bearing fruits. For example, one of the big opportunities was the scope to do more to embed the consumer perspective in the upcoming BSB five year strategy. The BSB has commissioned consumer research to provide a robust evidence base to inform its strategy that is due to be published later this year for consultation. They are considering how consumer focus in all areas of work could be developed further for BSB staff, helping to drive internal culture change in line with the ambitions of their reform programme. This work to be more consumer focussed, is in addition to BSB’s efforts to empower consumers which was initiated by the LSB under its empowering consumer policy statement. On the latter BSB already has in train a variety of projects with an explicit consumer focus, including a consultation on first tier complaints and further work following up their pilots on the use of digital comparison tools to support consumers to choose legal services, which includes a joint research study with other regulators on digitally excluded consumers.
The standout aspect of the BSB’s approach is the fact that it is strategic and ambitious in its approach rooted in the spirit of continuous improvement – starting with a comprehensive self-assessment to identify where there was scope to improve consumer focus in their own work and seeking to build out a programme of activities based on their assessment for delivery in their next 5 year Strategy. We are also particularly pleased to see the involvement of the BSB Board and the nomination of a dedicated executive champion for this agenda because it is fundamentally an issue of culture and leadership.
Two years on, there’s still scope to increase the focus on consumers in legal services regulation so this remains one of our three strategic objectives. We’re already planning another roundtable for later this year and look forward to continuing positive engagement with both the LSB and frontline regulators.
Liz Owen, LSCP Panel Member