Strategic Plan for 2022-2025

From this page, you can download a copy of our 2022-25 Strategic Plan.

As the regulator of the Bar in England and Wales, our strategic aims for the 2022-25 period reflect the key risks that we have identified in the market for barristers' and advocacy services. These have played a significant role in helping us to prioritise our resources during the period of this Strategic Plan. 

This Strategic Plan should be read in conjunction with our Risk Outlook on the market for barristers' services, because the risk themes which we have identified in the Outlook are the basis on which we have prioritised our work for the 2022-25 strategic period. The Risk Outlook provides the evidence for why we believe these risk themes are so significant, and why we are focusing our regulatory attention on them in the period ahead.

Strategic aims

Our strategic aims for 2022-25 are:

• Efficiency – delivering core regulatory operations quickly, economically and to a high standard.
• Standards – ensuring that barristers provide a high quality and responsive service throughout their careers.
• Equality – promoting equality, diversity and inclusion at the Bar and at the BSB and the profession’s ability to serve diverse consumers.
• Access – promoting consumer understanding of legal services and choice and good value in using those services (covering both the supply of, and demand for, barristers’ services).
• Independence – strengthening the BSB’s independence, capability self-confidence and credibility.

You can read more about these in the Strategic Plan.

Overview of our planned regulatory activities during 2022-25

Our Strategic Plan outlines the regulatory activities we propose to undertake to underpin the above aims, and their expected outcomes.

Our Strategy sets out a new vision for the BSB that “We will ensure that the BSB regulates the Bar in the public interest by promoting high standards, equality and access to justice”. Central to that vision are our core regulatory operations. We agree with those who responded to our consultation that our top priority must be to ensure that we regulate the Bar as efficiently as we can.   We must in particular deliver our core regulatory operations more quickly, with no loss of quality or rigour.  To that end, all our work has been carefully prioritised so that we can focus on doing fewer things better.  While we want to enhance our effectiveness and independence as an organisation, we also know that not everything we want to achieve is best achieved through regulation, so we want to work in partnership with others where we can.

You can read a full list of our planned high-level regulatory activities within the 2022-25 Strategic Plan document.

Communications and public engagement strategy

To support our Strategic Plan for 2022-25, we have also published a communications and public engagement strategy for the same period. This is because we can only fully achieve our statutory objectives if our work is widely known and understood and key stakeholders are able to contribute to our policy-making.