The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has today published our  annual Business Plan which explains what we shall be doing during 2024-25 to take forward our strategic aims, as set out in the BSB Strategy 2022-2025. The full Plan can be downloaded here.

In what is the final year of our current three-year strategy, we shall continue to reform our regulatory capability while also completing strategic programmes of work aimed at maintaining high professional and ethical standards at the Bar and promoting both diversity and access.

We are continuing to focus on achieving operational excellence. The quality of our decision-making remains high.  We remain committed to improving our timeliness and we have already significantly improved our productivity over the last year.

We are currently completing a comprehensive independent review of our enforcement work and a parallel review of our authorisations activities. The recommendations and finding from these reports will enable us to improve both the productivity and timeliness of our decision-making so that all those who use our services can be sure that we shall take the right decisions efficiently and swiftly.

Through our work on collecting and analysing data and intelligence and clarifying regulatory expectations of barristers in chambers,  we shall improve our ability to regulate proactively in the public interest.. We shall work closely with consumers, the profession and other legal regulators to meet our regulatory objectives.

Over the coming months, we will also continue to monitor the evidence submitted to the Post Office Inquiry, and we will not hesitate to take regulatory action where warranted by the evidence. We will also be developing our new five-year strategy and plan to consult with the profession and all our main stakeholders, to ensure that their views are taken into consideration as we set out our priorities until the end of the decade.

Commenting on the report, the Director General of the BSB, Mark Neale said “I am determined to ensure that the BSB remains committed to continuous improvement, and that we become a more proactive regulator ready to address threats to the public interest. The interests of the public and of consumers must always guide everything that we do.”