In October 2023, the Bar Standards Board (BSB) launched a public consultation to clarify our regulatory expectations of chambers. This followed a series of consultative roundtables across all circuits in England and Wales. During the consultation period we also held an additional series of roundtables, meeting with barristers, clerks and practice managers at eight roundtables across England and Wales. In total, we received 22 written responses to our consultation and also gathered valuable feedback from our extensive engagement events. You can read a summary of the written responses to the consultation here and our detailed response to these is available here. An equality impact assessment for this initiative is available here.

This consultation has reaffirmed the important role which chambers can play in fulfilling many of the BSB’s regulatory objectives. The aim of this initiative is to support all chambers in emulating best practice and to do so, not by adding to regulation, but by making it easier to comply with existing regulations. The Bar Standards Board has, therefore, decided to bring together and clarify our regulatory requirements of barristers’ practice management in chambers in a dedicated section of our website. This will complement the very welcome guidance on best practice for chambers which the Bar Council also provides.

We recognise that chambers vary significantly in their size and governance.  So, we plan to frame our rules bearing on practice management primarily in terms of outcomes to give chambers flexibility to implement them in a way that can be adapted to their own circumstances. Additionally, we also plan to revise our approach to supervision to facilitate and promote compliance with our rules. We will support and encourage smaller chambers to draw on good practice examples and collaborate with other chambers where appropriate. Commenting on the BSB’s response to the consultation, Director General Mark Neale said:

We are very grateful for the valuable contributions our many stakeholders have made to our consultation and we have listened. A near universal message we heard was that chambers would find it helpful to have a consolidated set of regulatory requirements. We therefore hope that the new dedicated section of our website, to be launched in the coming months, will prove helpful in bringing together all of our rules in one place.

 We believe that barristers acting collectively as members of chambers can make an important difference on standards, equality, access and a range of other important objectives. Many chambers already do so. We hope that our response to the consultation, including our new webpage, will support chambers in emulating best practice.