LSB must focus less on minutiae and more on big issues for regulators, CLC says

The Legal Services Board (LSB) should be “a more vocal and visible advocate” for frontline regulators, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) has said in response to a public consultation on the oversight regulator’s draft business plan and budget for 2026-7.

The CLC has urged the LSB to focus its efforts on “system-wide issues rather than the minutiae of frontline regulation”. In particular, it pointed to recent developments such as HMRC’s plans to make conveyancers register as tax advisers, the FCA taking over AML supervision – which the CLC argues would weaken the regime, and calls for estate agents to be regulated.

The consultation response, available on the CLC’s website, adds:

“There are several incredibly significant developments on the horizon which stand to have a considerable, and potentially adverse, impact on the regulated professions and how they operate, as well as on the consumers they serve who will also be impacted by these changes. The LSB could be a very powerful voice at a cross-government level, i.e. beyond simply the Ministry of Justice, in lobbying government and other decision makers to address these issues and help mitigate the impacts. We are therefore calling on LSB to focus its efforts on these system-wide issues rather than the minutiae of frontline regulation.”

Describing the continued increase in regulatory burdens as unjustified, the CLC calls on the LSB to “play a greater role in enabling higher-level conversations between the wider legal sector, government and other key decision makers”.

The regulator suggests the LSB consider a “more flexible and less expensive” model, as well as focusing on smaller, targeted projects rather than its current “ambitious” list of priorities. It should make decisions that are “evidence-based and include assessment of the risk profile of individual regulators/their sector” rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach, it said.

The CLC also criticises the LeO’s failure to provide up-to-date data, which it says it has repeatedly requested to inform its own regulatory work.

“LSB and LeO reports never hesitate to highlight that conveyancing is one of the most complained about legal services… To that end, we have for several years been trying to obtain usable, accurate and timely data reports from LeO.

“Despite several letters and meetings over the last few years, we unfortunately continue to encounter difficulty.”

The LSB should champion the sector more, including promoting more accessible routes into law to encourage diversity, and make “measurable improvements” over the coming year, the response adds.