The Board met in person on 26 March 2024. As is customary at this time of year, we discussed and finalised our plans for the next 12 months, focused on delivering our vision for legal services that meet the needs of everyone who requires them.
Maximising the benefits of good regulation in 2024/25
We are grateful to everyone who responded to the consultation on our draft business plan and budget for 2024/25. Your views were instrumental in shaping our discussion. We carefully weighed your feedback while keeping squarely in mind the public interest, the challenges facing the sector and our legal responsibilities under the Legal Services Act.
Our commitment to ensuring regulation improves legal services remains steadfast. We agreed that over the next year, we would press on with some existing workstreams, including on:
- Professional ethics and the rule of law to ensure legal services meet the standards the public has a right to expect
- Creating a diverse and inclusive legal services profession
- Ensuring technology and innovation better support access to legal services
- Exploring the role of regulation in increasing access to justice
- Ensuring legal services meet the needs of all consumers, paying particular attention to those in vulnerable circumstances.
We will also focus on our direct oversight of regulators’ performance, a key area raised by stakeholders. This will ensure our policy interventions are effectively implemented, leading to better services, fairer outcomes, and stronger confidence for society who need legal advice. Well-performing regulators are central to trust and confidence in legal services, and the additional financial resources agreed by the Board will allow us to strengthen our direct regulatory oversight and surveillance capabilities, with a view to ultimately driving up standards.
The Board, in response to stakeholder feedback, conducted a thorough reassessment of the proposed budget. We have identified cost savings and can reduce the figures set out in the original consultation. With the budget we have now agreed, we are confident that we can deliver our work programme effectively and efficiently.
Using feedback to improve services is good for business
When someone wants to complain about a legal services provider, they should raise the issue with the provider or law firm in the first instance. This doesn’t always happen, and our research shows consumers want providers to make it much easier for them to raise issues.. Consumers also want their feedback to be used to improve services and reduce the likelihood of future complaints.
Regulation can help enable this. We want anyone who has a need to complain to be confident that their concerns will be listened to, and appropriately addressed – ideally in the place where the problem occurred. More than that, though, we want to foster a culture of continuous learning so that complaints and feedback are used to raise standards.
Last year, we consulted on proposals to help us achieve this. Thank you again to everyone who responded and helped shape the Board’s thinking on this important matter. The Board discussed the responses and our statement of policy setting out our expectations for regulators on first-tier complaints. We very much see this as an opportunity for regulation to help raise standards and improve services. Effective complaint handling is good for business, and it is better, cheaper, and more effective for failures to be identified and dealt with early, reducing the need for them to be escalated to the Legal Ombudsman or elsewhere. This is in everyone’s interests. We also discussed the importance of law firms making data about the level of complaints they receive available as part of the effort to help the public assess quality when shopping around for a legal service.
Legal Services Consumer Panel work plan 2024/25
The Board welcomed Sarah Chambers, Chair of the Legal Services Consumer Panel, and discussed and endorsed the Panel’s work plan for 2024/25. The Panel’s focus is on consolidating their work of the last three years to help ensure regulators deliver tangible change for consumers. Addressing unmet legal need has been a key priority for the Panel, and we welcomed its continued drive to promote consumer-focused regulation. We discussed how we might be able to collaborate on research and look forward to working together for continuous improvements in consumer outcomes.
This was Sarah’s final LSB meeting, as her second and final term as Chair comes to an end on 30 April 2024. We thanked Sarah for her dedicated leadership of the Panel and the legal services sector over the last six years. She has been instrumental in ensuring that consumers’ interests are at the heart of legal services regulation. Under her leadership, the Panel has gone from strength to strength, increased in prominence, independently promoting the needs of consumers to ensure legal services work better for everyone.
Legal Ombudsman budget application 2024/25
The Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) is the board of the Legal Ombudsman, the free service that investigates complaints about lawyers in England and Wales. Part of our statutory role is to approve the OLC’s annual budget. For our consideration of the application, we welcomed Elisabeth Davies, the Chair of the OLC, and Paul McFadden, Chief Ombudsman of LeO.
The Board scrutinised and agreed the OLC’s final budget proposals for 2024/25. We discussed the increasing demand for services and the improvement in response time. We also discussed how greater use of technology could help to manage the caseload and the value complaints data can provide to the improvement of legal services We are pleased to see that they are poised to take forward their plans to explore the use of complaints data to improve insight and learning across the sector.
Reshaping Legal Services Conference 2024
The Board reflected on the recent Reshaping Legal Services conference, which brought together people from across the sector, including regulators, charities, the third sector, government representatives from England and Wales, the judiciary, students, and academics. We were also joined by members of the public.
The Board reflected on the powerful testimony we heard from consumers and people who needed legal services. Delegates heard the powerful real-life testimony of Lee Castleton, one of the hundreds of subpostmasters who encountered problems with the Horizon system and then faced aggressive debt claims from the Post Office. Dame Clare Moriarty, Chief Executive of Citizens Advice, delivered a keynote speech on the challenges facing the legal services sector. Denise Bentley, Co-Founder and CEO of First Love Foundation, spoke tellingly about the impact not being able to access legal services has on lives.