Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates

On this page:

Recommendation 5.3
Working groups and consultation
Bar Diversity Survey
For further information

Recommendation 5.3

The Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates was a response to Lord Carter's Recommendation 5.3, published in Legal Aid: A market – based approach to reform.

“A proportionate system of quality monitoring based on the principles of peer review and a rounded appraisal system should be developed for all advocates working in the criminal, civil and family courts.

"This system should be developed through a process chaired by a member of the judiciary in partnership with the Bar Council, Law Society, Legal Services Commission and Ministry of Justice to ensure it covers all advocates with relevant rights of audience in these courts.

"The new quality monitoring system should be developed in the first instance for publicly funded criminal advocates, then for publicly funded family and civil advocates, and ultimately for all advocates.

"The scheme for publicly funded criminal advocates should be in place by the time the new graduated fee schemes are implemented in the Crown Court in April 2007. The system should be subject to a full regulatory impact assessment before being implemented.”

Working groups and consultation

A working group was established in August 2006 initially chaired by Lord Justice Thomas and subsequently Amanda Finlay, Director of Legal Aid Strategy at the Ministry of Justice.

Representatives were drawn from:

LSC
Judiciary
Bar Council
Bar Standards Board
Law Society
Solicitors Regulation Authority
Institute of Barristers Clerks
Crown Prosecution Service
Ministry of Justice
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies

Discussions took place at working group meetings and at two ‘walk through’ sessions, attended by a wider group of practitioners. The meetings were convened to consider the finer detail of how the options for a scheme might work in practice.

These discussions were taken forward in our joint consultation paper with MOJ, Creating a Quality Assurance Scheme for Publicly Funded Criminal Defence Advocates. The paper proposed options for a pilot scheme for publicly funded criminal defence advocates practicing at Crown Court level and above.

We received 22 detailed responses which will inform the design of the pilot. We published our analysis of the responses on 17 December.

Full details of the pilot scheme will be available in early 2008 when we will have sufficient data on advocates to meaningfully identify and assess the potential impact of the scheme.

Following the pilot there will be a further consultation and Final Impact Assessment on the proposed scheme.

Bar Diversity Survey

An initial Impact Assessment accompanied the consultation paper highlighting that, depending on the details of any scheme, it may present barriers to certain groups of advocates, such as:

those working part-time
sole practitioners
barristers who have taken a career break
those who work in rural areas

Working with the Bar Council, we are conducting an unprecedented survey of all 14,853 working barristers in England and Wales.

The purpose of the survey is to obtain information on:

diversity
categories and volumes of work as well as working patterns
caring responsibilities
education

The information obtained, and data provided by the Law Society on solicitors with higher rights of audience, will help the LSC assess the impact the Quality Assurance for Advocates scheme will have on all advocates. It will feed into the design of the pilot scheme and also assist with evaluation.

The Chairman of the Bar Council, Geoffrey Vos QC, sent a letter with the questionnaire to all barristers, highlighting the importance of this joint exercise. He said: “The survey is important because it will enable both the Bar Council and the LSC to plan for the future on the basis of reliable up-to-date data, much of which has been unavailable up to now.”

This work is being funded by the LSC but the analyses of the data will be shared with the Bar Council and Bar Standards Board. This data will be essential to assist with policy developments both within and external to the LSC.

The survey closed on Friday 23 November. You can still view the questionnaire, which is available under the Documents panel on the right hand side of this page.

For further information

For further information please contact Karen Watson on 0117 3023157 or email karen.watson@legalservices.gov.uk

>back to top

Last updated: 09 November 2007