Council Meeting of 22nd May 2025

Chair’s Report from Dame Janet Paraskeva

I last reported on our 20^th February Council meeting and today I will look mostly at the next formal quarterly meeting of the year, which took place on 22^nd May. In between those, however, we had another important meeting dedicated to review and sign off the Annual Financial Statements for the calendar year 2024 that you can see at the link. The Statements had been reviewed earlier in March by the Audit and Risk Committee. Although we are not required to do so, we produce our Financial Statements to meet the requirements of Financial Reporting Standard 102. They were signed off by Council on 27^th March and have now been published on the CLC website.

Turning back to our May meeting, this was the second formal meeting of the year and there was much to discuss. Council was pleased that progress against the 2025 Business Plan for the CLC has got off to a good start, with much being achieved in the first three months of the year, most notably perhaps the coming into force of the new Code of Conduct which is underpinned by revised Ethical Principles. The ground was prepared for this by wide consultation and engagement as the new Code was being developed and much communication following the approval of the new Code. Its introduction has been smooth thus far and we believe that this reflects the greater clarity of the new approach which will help to maintain the high standards for which the CLC is known.

A significant contribution to the maintenance of those standards is the detailed insight that the CLC has into the regulated community and the market place. So the report back on the most recent Annual Regulatory Return survey was very useful. We will soon be publishing the findings and they are already informing our monitoring and enforcement work, the next annual Risk Agenda, due to be published soon, and the content of roadshows later in the year.

Another annual update looked at education and training in detail. It is gratifying to see that the number of establishments providing education leading to licence as a CLC lawyer continues to grow and that the number of students continues to grow too. It is vital to the health of the sector that more qualified and experienced conveyancers and probate practitioners joint to ensure that there is sufficient provision of those vital services in future.    

A very important item at this meeting was the review of the Legal Services Board’s latest Regulatory Performance Assessment of the CLC (and the other front line regulators). Which was published in March 2025.  We were pleased to have been assessed as having improved since the last annual report and to have been judged the best performance amongst the large regulators of legal services according to the summary table reproduced below. You can see the LSB’s full report here. The Council is committed to continuing to improve its performance against the assessment and considered a number of actions it could take to do so. There will be more reporting on those soon.

The Legal Services Board invited comments on the Regulatory Performance Assessment and the Council was able to comment on a draft submission that the CLC had already prepared. I am grateful to the Legal Services Board for extending its deadline so that the full Council could have that important opportunity. You can view our full letter here. I can summarise it by saying that the CLC has reservations about the annual frequency of the Assessment because it allows so little time to make changes and measure their impact before the process begins again, as well as concerns about the burden of the detailed process. The CLC also finds it difficult to draw a clear line between the LSB’s narrative report and the overall rating awarded in the summary. This is something that we will continue to explore with the LSB as it is important for confidence in legal regulation.