Membership renewal 2023 – what you will be asked and why 

CILEx Regulation’s Sue Chandler explains what you will be asked when renewing your membership and why this information will help promote fairness and inclusion in the profession

Listening to former prime minister Boris Johnson’s resignation speech in September, I reflected that, when he stated “genius, talent, enthusiasm and imagination are evenly distributed throughout the population, but opportunity is not”, his words could arguably be applied to many parts of the legal profession.

Capable people should be able to enter and progress their careers in the law, regardless of background or diverse characteristics. Not only this, but it is also vital that we encourage a legal profession made up of talented people who reflect, understand, and connect with the consumers they serve.

If individuals face barriers to doing this, then both the wider legal profession, consumers and society lose out.

Help us advocate for change

For CILEx Regulation, promoting equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) is not an optional extra but at the heart of everything we do as a regulator. We’re firmly committed through the aims of our EDI strategy to fair access for all those who work within the legal services market, as well as those who use legal services.

“Capable people should be able to enter and progress their careers in the law, regardless of background or diverse characteristics” 

We are also required by legislation to encourage a strong, diverse and effective legal profession. Members of the regulated community also play a vital role.

From this month, different grades of member will be invited to renew their CILEX membership and, as part of the renewal process, will be asked to complete a section entitled ‘My personal data submission’. The diversity information collected from member responses will be analysed, helping CILEx Regulation to evidence the barriers to entry and progression in the profession that still exist.

Evidence is key 

With this information, we are able to recognise trends over time and issues which require our focus. For example, the current data suggests that some groups of people do not progress as far in their legal careers when compared to other groups.

It also provides the opportunity to compare the make-up of our regulated community with other legal professionals. The data indicates, for example, that the CILEX route is providing opportunities for people from less traditional backgrounds to enter the legal profession.

We have used the information to identify where potential decisions we might take may impact in differing ways, on different groups of regulated members, such as with the practising certificate fee for 2022. When this differing impact emerged from analysis of the consultation responses, we reviewed our budget, leading to a reduction in the increase to the proposed 2022 fee.

Your 2023 membership renewal – things to look out for 

When you complete the personal data submission as part of next year’s renewal process, you may notice the addition of some new questions about social mobility. You may also see some questions similar to those you answered previously. We are re-asking these because they have changed slightly.

We have made these few updates to the questions to bring them in line with government equality standards and as part of our work with other legal professions to obtain statistically comparable data to recognise and work to resolve barriers in legal practice. 

Your help to provide accurate data is essential and, while we have included a ‘prefer not to say’ option for each question, we do hope that you feel able to provide a full response. The fuller the information you supply, the more accurate the understanding we can continue to develop and, in turn, we can provide more effective and targeted regulation for you and the wider regulated community.

We encourage you to:

• Respond to the new questions;
• Check that the responses you have already provided are up to date; and
• Consider providing full data to replace any earlier ‘prefer not to say’ responses.

Finally, but importantly, your privacy and your rights to your personal data are taken extremely seriously and you can read about the protection and privacy of personal data, in the CILEX and CILEx Regulation privacy notices.

Sue Chandler is a consumer engagement and policy officer at CILEx Regulation