The Bar Standards Board (BSB) today published its annual Business Plan which explains what we shall be doing during 2023-24 to take forward our strategic aims, as set out in the BSB Strategy 2022-2025.  The full Plan can be downloaded here.

The Business Plan also includes these transformative reforms.  The reforms aim at operational excellence in delivering our core regulatory services, maintaining high quality decision-making and high productivity while delivering a more timely and responsive service.   The BSB aims to be engaged and proactive as a regulator, anticipating risks and opportunities, making better use of the intelligence we gather and seeking to ensure that the chambers to which most barristers belong, are themselves effective in overseeing standards, equality and access.  And the BSB aims to embed a culture of continuous improvement grounded on our values of fairness and respect, independence and integrity and excellence and efficiency.

The BSB’s budget for 2023-24 is £9.3 million. In addition, we will contribute £5.4 million to the common services (such as IT and Finance) which we share with the Bar Council.  The BSB’s work is undertaken in the public interest, and we remain committed to providing value-for-money to the profession which funds our work. There is more information about our planned income and expenditure in the Business Plan.

Alongside the Business Plan, the Bar Standards Board is also publishing a letter to the Legal Services Board and an associated action plan setting out its response to the Legal Services Board’s most recent Regulatory Performance Assessment.  The action plan captures reforms set out in the wider Business Plan and sets milestones for their achievement