LSB publishes review of regulator performance

CILEx Regulation Ltd (CRL) has provided “partial assurance” it meets the standards required of regulators, the Legal Services Board (LSB) announced in March.

The oversight regulator published its 2024 performance review of all the regulators, judged against three standards: whether they are ‘well led’, have an ‘effective approach to regulation’ and the quality of their ‘operational delivery’.

CRL, it said, “continued to improve its transparency of decision-making, its approach to risk and its resourcing capacity to carry out its regulatory objectives” and praised the regulator’s “effective use of member data to inform its approach to equality, diversity and inclusion”.  

The report also identified several areas where CRL needed to make progress, saying the regulator had not “demonstrated that it has a robust process that considers impacts and evidence thoroughly for applications to change its regulatory arrangements”.

The LSB wanted to see improvements to the quality of applications for changes to regulatory arrangements and practising certificate fees, for the regulator to “more clearly communicate when activities under its corporate plan are being discontinued and the rationale behind the decision” and “to improve its approach to effectively pursuing and implementing regulatory activities that are in consumers’ interests”.

CRL’s development of a sustainable compensation fund model and the provision of sufficient training for all students would also be monitored.

The majority of other legal regulators were also benchmarked as either sufficiently or partially meeting standards in the three categories apart from the Solicitors Regulation Authority and Bar Standards Board. The former performed insufficiently for operational delivery and the latter for both operational delivery and being well led.