Five of these six legal regulators cannot be made to answer a question
The Freedom of Information Act reaches exactly one of the regulators whose annual reports this site reads — and it is the one regulating the profession whose register is hardest to get.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
Everything on this site was read from something a regulator chose to publish. The obvious next question is what happens where it chose not to.
The Freedom of Information Act 2000 applies only to the bodies listed in its Schedule 1. Of the six regulators whose annual reports this site reads, one is listed:
| Body | Subject to FOIA? |
|---|---|
| Immigration Advice Authority | Yes — as “The Immigration Services Commissioner” |
| The Faculty Office | No |
| Council for Licensed Conveyancers | No |
| Costs Lawyer Standards Board | No |
| Intellectual Property Regulation Board | No |
| Enforcement Conduct Board | No |
This is not a quirk of the small professions. The words “conveyanc”, “notar”, “solicitor”, “barrister”, “bailiff” and “enforcement agent” do not appear anywhere in Schedule 1. Neither the Solicitors Regulation Authority nor the Bar Standards Board is listed. Legal regulation in England and Wales is, with one exception, outside the Act.
The exception, and what it means
The Immigration Services Commissioner is in Schedule 1 in the original text of the Act — not added later. The office was created by section 83 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Home Office, which is why it lays annual reports and accounts before Parliament and the others do not.
Its regulated community is also the one this site cannot collect. The Authority’s adviser search will not enumerate; there is no register file to read. So the one profession here with no register is the one whose regulator can be compelled to produce it.
That is not hypothetical. A request on WhatDoTheyKnow in 2020 asked for the register of regulated advisers as it stood on 1 January that year. The OISC released it as a spreadsheet: the organisations registered on that date, with addresses and contact details.
The same route has produced complaints and investigation statistics, and counts of advisers registered under the EU Settlement Scheme advice category. It has also produced refusals: the policy on how investigative discretion is exercised was withheld under sections 31(1)(b) and 31(1)(g), the law-enforcement exemption, which is the one a regulator reaches for.
The two ways round it for everybody else
The Legal Services Act 2007 added two bodies to Schedule 1, and the choice of which two is instructive. It added the oversight regulator and the complaints body, and not one of the regulators in between.
The Legal Services Board supervises the approved regulators — the Master of the Faculties, the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, the Costs Lawyer Standards Board and IPReg among them. What those regulators have given the LSB is held by a public authority even though they are not one.
That sounds like a route round the problem, and this piece originally said so. Reading what the LSB has actually been asked shows how narrow it is. In 2020 somebody requested a list of the legal practices under its regulation. The answer: “The LSB does not hold this information. We are the oversight regulator. You would need to contact the front line regulators directly.” Asked how many prosecutions there had been for carrying out reserved legal activities without authorisation, it replied that it “does not hold figures as to how many such allegations have been prosecuted or led to criminal convictions.”
Two direct tests, nothing held. The route exists in law and reached neither thing anybody would want from it. Being subject to the Act says what a body must disclose; it says nothing about what it keeps.
The Office for Legal Complaints, the body behind the Legal Ombudsman, receives complaints about any regulated provider. So complaints data is obtainable at one remove from a regulator that is itself unreachable.
There is a third, narrower one: the certificated enforcement agent register is published by HM Courts & Tribunals Service, an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice, and government departments are covered by Part I of Schedule 1.
Which gaps this could close
This site has several series that stop. Whether asking would restart them depends entirely on who holds the answer.
| Gap | Askable | |
|---|---|---|
| Adviser headcount, last published for 2008 | Yes | Immigration Advice Authority |
| Level 1 assessment pass rates, last published 2017/18 | Yes | Immigration Advice Authority |
| Complaints for 2018/19, missing from every report | Yes | Immigration Advice Authority |
| Prosecutions and cautions, last tabulated 2013/14 | Yes | Immigration Advice Authority |
| CLC licence counts before 2025 | No | Try the Legal Services Board |
| Notaries on the Roll in 2021 | No | Faculty Office is outside the Act |
Every askable gap belongs to the same body. Every unaskable one belongs to a regulator that publishes voluntarily, on its own timetable, in whatever form it likes — which is exactly the position the rest of this site describes.
What this does not mean
Being listed in Schedule 1 settles whether a body is subject to the Act. It does not mean any particular request will succeed: every exemption in Part II still applies, and the one above was used. None of this is legal advice.
It is worth saying plainly, though, that the asymmetry cuts the wrong way for consumers. The professions whose regulators answer to nobody under this Act are the ones with public registers you can read. The profession whose register you cannot read has the regulator you can question. Neither arrangement was designed; both are the residue of which statute happened to create which body.
The figures
Checked against the text of Schedule 1 to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 as it stands on legislation.gov.uk, searching for each body by name and then for the occupational terms above. Released requests from WhatDoTheyKnow. The full position for each body, with its statutory basis, is on sources and licences.