LSB policy objective: Regulators have appropriate frameworks for continuing assurance of professional competence throughout the careers of the people they regulate
Why have we committed to this policy objective?
This project goes to the heart of the LSB ambition to reshape the legal services sector to better meet society’s needs and to provide consumers with fairer outcomes, stronger confidence and better services. Consumers should be able to trust that legal professionals have the necessary skills, knowledge and attributes to provide good quality legal services and that they are kept up to date and relevant over time.
Statement of policy
In July 2022, we issued a statement of policy that sets expectations of the regulators to assure the ongoing competence of those they regulate. In the statement, we set out that regulators should meet the following outcomes:
- Set the standards that authorised persons should meet at the point of authorisation and throughout their careers.
- Regularly determine the levels of competence within the profession(s) they regulate, and identify areas where competence may need to be improved.
- Make appropriate interventions to ensure standards of competence are maintained across the profession(s) they regulate.
- Take suitable remedial action when standards of competence are not met by individual authorised persons.
We expect regulators to provide assurance that they have met the four outcomes by January 2024.
Implementation
In January and February 2023, the regulators provided us the following updates setting out their progress:
We will continue to monitor regulators’ progress through our regulatory performance framework.
Background to the statement
Reforms to education and training up to now have largely focused on assuring day one competence, but regulators should also ensure that legal professionals remain competent throughout their careers. While consumers can usually observe ‘service quality’ e.g. promptness, courtesy, administrative efficiency, often they are not able to assess the technical quality of work. This means they rely on there being checks in place to provide quality assurance. And unlike other professional service sectors e.g. healthcare and teaching, there is no regular, formal assessment of legal professionals during their careers beyond requirements for continuing professional development.
The LSB Board determined that we should consider whether this status quo is sustainable and if the current approach is effective in protecting consumers’ and the public interest.
In January 2020 we launched a call for evidence to help us understand current approaches to assuring competence and gain clarity on whether there are any gaps in the system or areas of concern that need to be addressed. We had extensive discussions with stakeholders across and outside the legal services sector and received 31 formal submissions by July 2020, in addition to other datasets and research shared with us or sourced through LSB desk research.
We published our summary of evidence and identification of emerging themes in February 2021.
We also commissioned two research projects to support our evidence gathering. This includes:
- an independent report into the approaches to ongoing competence assurance adopted in other legal jurisdictions that was prepared by Hook Tangaza following a competitive tender; and
- work with the LSB Public Panel to test some of the findings from the call for evidence with consumers and understand if they have confidence in the current measures for ensuring ongoing competence.
Our research and evidence shows that the current ongoing competence measures are out of step with consumers’ expectations of ongoing checks for legal professionals and with the more robust approaches adopted in some other regulated sectors. There are also some novel approaches being adopted in other jurisdictions that we should take note of.
We concluded that regulators need to do more to understand levels of competence and to demonstrate that their approach to regulation is informed by this understanding. This was the starting point for the expectations that we consulted on between December 2021 and March 2022. We issued the statement following the public consultation.
