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A final consultation on the Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates has been amended at the last minute to take into account objections raised by the board of the Bar Standards Board.

The recent debate on the Bar Standards Board’s (BSB) plans to regulate advocacy-focused business structures – entities – pitted Bar Council old-timers against BSB modernists, and it was the latter who came out on top. The motion was bland enough but it soon became clear that what its proposers actually meant by this was “entities will open the door to solicitors flooding (and eventually taking over) the Bar’s institutions and that by inviting solicitor-advocates into its regulatory ‘tent’, the BSB will weaken the distinctiveness of the barristers’ offering”.

There are more positive messages from the judiciary that they will take part in the new Quality Assurance Scheme for Advocates, and they are relaxed about the prospect of assessments being used for appeals against conviction, it was claimed last week.

The Legal Services Board and Office for Legal Complaints were today given a clean bill of health by the government, although it acknowledged that in the long term transforming the LSB into a ‘super regulator’ is an option.

The Bar Standards Board narrowly defeated a motion proposed by a former Bar chairman that its plans for entity regulation are unhelpful to the justice system, in a debate held in London last week.