The smallest legal regulator in England and Wales is the only one rated sufficient on everything
The Legal Services Board rates every approved regulator against three standards. The Costs Lawyer Standards Board — 763 costs lawyers, £226,024 a year — passed all three. The two regulators covering over 90% of the profession did not.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
Above the seven registers this site reads sits one more body. The Legal Services Board was created by the Legal Services Act 2007 to regulate the regulators: it approves their rules, assesses their performance, and is paid for by a levy on them.
Once a year it rates each approved regulator sufficient, partial or insufficient against three standards — well-led, effective approach to regulation, and operational delivery. Its 2025 assessment covers four of the six regulators behind this site, and both of the two that cover everybody else.
| Regulator | Well-led | Effective approach | Operational delivery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Costs Lawyer Standards Board | sufficient | sufficient | sufficient |
| Institute of Chartered Accountants | partial | sufficient | sufficient |
| Intellectual Property Regulation Board | sufficient | partial | sufficient |
| Council for Licensed Conveyancers | partial | sufficient | partial |
| CILEx Regulation | partial | partial | partial |
| Faculty Office | partial | partial | partial |
| Solicitors Regulation Authority | partial | partial | insufficient |
| Bar Standards Board | insufficient | partial | insufficient |
Every word in that table is the oversight regulator’s own.
Size is not the problem
The regulator that came out best regulates the smallest profession here. The Costs Lawyer Standards Board authorises 763 costs lawyers on an income of £226,024 a year, and is the only body in the assessment rated sufficient against all three standards.
The two that came out worst are the two that matter most by volume. The LSB puts it plainly: the SRA and BSB “together cover over 90% of regulated legal professionals” and “both received ratings of insufficient assurance against at least one standard. This means that we have serious concerns which these regulators need to take immediate action to address.”
The concerns it names are not procedural. For the SRA they “primarily relate to the effectiveness of its authorisation, supervision and enforcement processes”, following the LSB’s review of the events leading to the intervention into Axiom Ince — which identified “a failure to put in place proper mechanisms to supervise firms which pose a higher risk to consumers, and a failure to properly protect client funds”. For the BSB, the LSB “cannot take assurance that the BSB is well-led with the capacity and resources to carry out its work effectively”.
What the small regulators were marked down for
Nobody here escaped entirely. The Faculty Office — which regulates notaries with 3.4 full-time-equivalent staff — was rated partial on all three standards. The Council for Licensed Conveyancers was rated partial on well-led and on operational delivery, sufficient on its approach. IPReg was rated sufficient on two and partial on one, an improvement on the partial assurance it was given the year before.
A partial rating is not a finding of failure. It means the regulator has given the LSB some but not all of the assurance it looks for — and for a regulator with three staff, the volume of evidence a national oversight body expects is itself a burden the assessment does not adjust for.
The levy nobody is billed for
The LSB is “publicly funded, although our costs are recovered from a statutory levy on the approved legal regulators. They in turn derive their funding from fees paid by the legal profession.”
So every notary, licensed conveyancer, costs lawyer and patent attorney on the registers here pays for it, through their own practising fee, and none of them is ever shown the figure. The LSB publishes it:
| Year | Levy raised | Per authorised person |
|---|---|---|
| 2021/22 | £4.287m | £22.11 |
| 2022/23 | — | £22.80 |
| 2023/24 | £4.679m | £24.20 |
| 2024/25 | £5.142m | £26.09 |
| 2025/26 | £5.873m | £27.88 |
Up 26% per person in four years, and up 55% in total since 2018/19, when the levy was £3.8m.
That average is the LSB’s own illustration, spread across everybody authorised to carry on a reserved legal activity. It is not what any one regulator is charged — the levy is apportioned between them — so a small profession’s real share may be higher or lower. IPReg’s accounts show £92,524 for the LSB and Legal Ombudsman levies combined in 2024, against 3,695 attorneys: £25 a head for both bodies together.
Against the cost of regulation per head on this site — £861 for a notary, £296 for a costs lawyer, £249 for a patent attorney — the LSB levy is a small share for the notary and a noticeable one for the others.
What it does not hold
The LSB is also the only body in this chain that is subject to the Freedom of Information Act along with the immigration regulator, which makes it the obvious place to ask about regulators that cannot themselves be asked.
That does not work. Asked for a list of the legal practices under its regulation, the LSB replied: “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 — the offence at the centre of what these professions may lawfully do — it replied that it does not hold those figures either.
An oversight regulator that rates its regulators annually, and holds neither a list of the practices they regulate nor a count of the people prosecuted for practising without them, is an unusual shape for a regulator to be.
The figures
Ratings read from the LSB’s Regulatory performance assessment 2025; levy figures from its annual reports and accounts for the years ended 31 March 2019 to 2026. Every one is on the reports page with the sentence it came from, and each regulator’s own rating appears on its profession page.
The LSB has published an annual report every year since 2009 and a business plan since 2009/10 — 38 documents, the deepest archive of any publisher here, and the only one that reaches back to the Act that created it.