Bar watchdogs are considering whether to make public how they rate individual chambers under plans to beef up regulation. Chambers could also be subject to five-year ‘audits’ of how well they secure access for disabled barristers, pupils and clients.
These are among proposals floated in a consultation from the Bar Standards Board on the board’s regulatory expectations of chambers.
The board wants to provide chambers with ‘greater clarity’ about regulatory expectations in areas including standards, pupillage, diversity, bullying and harassment, anti-money laundering and information security. The BSB’s aim is to pull together on its website during 2024 all practice management requirements imposed on self-employed barristers.
A new kitemarking scheme has been ruled out, however. Reviving ’Barmark’, a voluntary quality standard launched in 1999, is ‘not the answer’ after it proved ‘unsustainable’, the board concludes.
England and Wales’ 341 chambers accommodate 13,800 self-employed barristers. But the sets’ effectiveness in overseeing standards, equality and combating economic crime varies, the BSB says. Small and medium-sized chambers in particular ‘need help’.
One answer to administrative overload may lie in consolidation of chambers, the watchdog stresses, though ‘voluntary mergers are likely to be far more effective than shotgun marriages’. Smaller chambers could also share back-office functions, the board suggests.
Under its proposed outcomes-based approach, the board says it will take enforcement action only against those chambers which are ‘persistently non-compliant’. But it adds: ‘As part of a graduated approach, we may also consider whether, and if so how, our assessments of individual chambers might be made public and so inform the users of chambers’ services.
‘We are conscious, however, that this would significantly raise the stakes of our supervision work, might well diminish its capacity to promote useful change in chambers’ approaches and certainly lead to greater contestabilitity.’
