Ongoing Competence: Call for Evidence Themes and Summary of Evidence

The Legal Services Board (LSB) is currently reviewing how legal regulators ensure that the legal professionals they regulate remain competent throughout their careers. Our ongoing competence project goes to the heart of the LSB ambition to reshape the legal services sector to better meet society's needs and to provide consumers with fairer outcomes, stronger confidence and better services. Consumers should be able to trust that legal professionals have the necessary and up to date skills, knowledge and attributes to provide good quality legal services. The project is intended to promote the regulatory objectives to protect and promote the public interest and the interest of consumers; encourage an independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession; and promote and maintain adherence to the professional principles. We completed a call for evidence in the first six months of 2020 to inform our work on ongoing competence. This report sets out who engaged with the call for evidence, key themes from our analysis, our emerging findings and a summary of all of the evidence shared with us.

Call for evidence
The aim of the call for evidence was to gather as much information as we could across the following areas:
- defining competence and competence assurance
- consumer expectations of competence
- competence in the legal services sector
- competence in other sectors.

We engaged with a wide range of stakeholders, including:
- the regulatory bodies and approved regulators within the legal sector
- regulators in other sectors e.g. Financial Reporting Council (FRC), Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), General Medical Council (GMC), Engineering Council
- government agencies e.g. Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), Her Majesty’s Land Registry (HM Land Registry)
- consumer representatives e.g. Legal Services Consumer Panel (LSCP), Citizens Advice Law Centres Network (LCN)
- complaints bodies and tribunals e.g. Legal Ombudsman (LeO), Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT)
- judicial circuits
- representative bodies e.g. specialist bar associations
- accreditation providers e.g. STEP.

Our call for evidence resulted in:
- 30+ formal responses to the call for evidence (see Annex A)
- 50 targeted stakeholder meetings (see Annex B)
- 50+ additional datasets, research and other relevant information shared with us or sourced through LSB desk research.