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The Bar Standards Board is prepared to regulate entities that do not have any barrister owners, it decided last week. The shift comes shortly after the Solicitors Regulation Authority granted an alternative business structure licence to a chambers – the first without a solicitor owner.

The Bar Standards Board has waded into the controversy over government plans to introduce price competitive tendering in criminal work by warning that it risks causing irreparable harm to the credibility of the criminal justice system and incentivises lawyers to encourage guilty pleas.

A barristers’ chambers which offered an unfunded pupillage to a former police chief constable has lost its appeal against a Bar Standards Board decision that the move ran foul of equality rules designed to stop ‘rich kids’ from self-funding.

The chairman of the Criminal Bar Association has launched a wide-ranging attack on the government, Stobart Barristers, Bar Standards Board and the “muzzled” judiciary, while warning that plea-only advocates could damage the unity of barristers and solicitors against price competitive tendering.

A last-minute Law Society bid to delay the controversial Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates (QASA) until after the government’s consultation on price competitive tendering for criminal work was yesterday rejected by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.