Banning lawyers from chairing SRA will enable 'faster progress'

Banning lawyers from chairing the boards of legal regulators will lead to "faster progress" towards modern, risk-based regulation, the Legal Services Board has said.

A rule change requiring lay chairs for legal regulators, such as the SRA and BSB, will come into force immediately and apply to future appointments.

Charles Plant, former partner at Herbert Smith and the chairman of the SRA, comes to the end of his term in December this year.

The rule change was strongly opposed by professional bodies, such as the Law Society and Bar Council, but backed by consumer groups.

Announcing its decision to go ahead with the requirement for lay chairs, the LSB said "strong ties to the history, culture and rules" of a profession could act as a "significant drag" on the principles of better regulation.

The super-regulator said five years of experience had shown that the change was a "wholly rational route to embedding and strengthening independence in legal services regulation".

The LSB said it did not believe the rule change impinged on the principle of appointment by merit.

"Qualifying criteria are imposed in many cases where selectors are obliged to select candidates on merit. For example, the Judicial Appointments Commission is under a statutory duty to appoint judges on merit.

"Lay status is already accepted as a criterion for over half of the appointments to the regulatory boards. We are not suggesting removing a professional board member and adding a lay member.

The LSB said it considered it "logical" that "if a professional body denounced a policy as being contrary to the interests of its branch of the profession, a chair who is also a member of that profession is more likely to be influenced by professional considerations, either consciously or unconsciously, than a lay person would be".

Along with the requirement for lay chairs, the LSB launched a consultation on further steps to weaken the powers of professional bodies over regulators, specifically in response to proposals from the SRA.

This would give the SRA the ability to design and manage the appointments process for board members and its chair, and transfer the task of appointing chairs to an independent panel.

The LSB said the new rule on lay chairs would not apply to accountancy bodies, while the number of their members delivering legal services remained "small", nor would it apply to the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, which has no representative functions and currently has a lay chair.

Director of the Bar Standards Board, Dr Vanessa Davies said: "Chairs of regulatory boards should be appointed on merit. For us, what matters most is that the right calibre of person, with sufficient expertise, is appointed to this challenging role.

"The LSB's decision is based on an assumption that lay chairs will behave independently in circumstances where legally qualified chairs would not, and we believe there is little evidence to support this conclusion."