The Bar Standards Board is not in the statute book at all
A full-text search of every Act and instrument on legislation.gov.uk for the name of the body that regulates barristers returns nothing. The Solicitors Regulation Authority manages four documents. The bodies most clients have never heard of are the ones the law names.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
If you are a barrister, the Bar Standards Board sets your Handbook, grants your practising certificate and prosecutes you before the Bar Disciplinary Tribunal. If you are a solicitor, the Solicitors Regulation Authority keeps your name on the roll and does the same three things.
Search the statute book for either name and you will struggle to find them.
| Body | What it is | Documents | Hansard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bar Standards Board | The Bar’s regulatory arm | 0 | 101 |
| The General Council of the Bar | Approved regulator | 232 | 274 |
| Solicitors Regulation Authority | The Law Society’s regulatory arm | 4 | 303 |
| The Law Society | Approved regulator | 477 | 10,746 |
The first column is documents on legislation.gov.uk whose text contains the body’s name. The second is contributions in Hansard that do. Nothing here is sampled: both are the full counts the two services report.
The zero is the interesting one
“Bar Standards Board” returns, in legislation.gov.uk’s own words, “no results”. Not a handful of passing references — nothing. No Act of Parliament, no statutory instrument, no Church Measure, no Order in Council.
That is a statement about an index rather than a proof of a negative, and worth stating precisely: the search covers the English-language text of the revised statute book, and legislation.gov.uk holds Welsh versions of Welsh legislation separately. But it is the same index that finds the General Council of the Bar 232 times, so the comparison holds.
The explanation is in the Legal Services Act 2007. The Act works through approved regulators — the bodies listed in its Schedule 4 — and for barristers that body is the General Council of the Bar, which is to say the Bar Council. For solicitors it is the Law Society. What the Act then requires, in section 30, is that the Legal Services Board make “internal governance rules” ensuring that an approved regulator’s regulatory functions are “not prejudiced by its representative functions” and that decisions about the one are taken independently of the other. Both professions did the obvious thing: they created a regulatory arm and delegated to it.
So the Bar Standards Board is a committee of the Bar Council, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority is a body the Law Society brought into being. Neither is a creature of statute. Both are the only regulator their profession ever deals with.
Four hundred and seventy-seven against four
The solicitors’ figures make the shape of it clear. The Law Society appears in 477 documents spanning 1867 to 2026. The SRA appears in four, and they are worth listing in full, because the list is the argument:
- The Legal Services Act 2007 (Functions of a Designated Regulator) Order 2008
- The Public Interest Disclosure (Prescribed Persons) Order 2014
- The Solicitors (Disciplinary Proceedings) Rules 2019
- The Public Interest Disclosure (Prescribed Persons) (Amendment) Order 2026
All four are statutory instruments; not one is an Act. Two of them are the whistleblowing order and its amendment, which lists the bodies a disclosure may properly be made to. The SRA is in the statute book almost entirely because somebody had to write down where to complain.
The asymmetry runs into Hansard too, where it is 10,746 against 303. Members of Parliament talk about the Law Society thirty-five times as often as they talk about the body that actually regulates solicitors.
The Bar reverses that last part. The Bar Standards Board is mentioned 101 times in Parliament and not once in legislation: absent from the law, present in the debate about it. The General Council of the Bar manages 274 mentions, so on this one measure the delegate is closer to parity with its parent than the SRA is with the Law Society.
Why it matters if you are trying to find out who regulates you
Every one of the professions on this site has this problem to some degree. Ask the statute book who regulates immigration advisers and it will tell you about the Immigration Services Commissioner — a statutory office created by section 83 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. It will tell you nothing about the Immigration Advice Authority, which is the name that office trades under now and the name on every page a complainant will read.
The same is true of the Legal Ombudsman, which is the operating name of the Office for Legal Complaints, the body the 2007 Act actually creates.
None of this is concealment. Operating names are convenient and statutory names are cumbersome. But it means the two obvious routes to the answer — read the Act, or read the regulator’s website — do not meet in the middle, and somebody trying to work out who has power over them has to know both halves before either is any use.
That is the gap these pages are for.
How this was counted
legislation.gov.uk’s full-text search, by quoted phrase, paged to exhaustion:
unquoted, the service ORs the terms and returns everything containing “board”
or “society”. The index is stemmed, so one phrase covers its plural — "notary public" and "notaries public" return the identical 203 documents, compared
by document id, which is why each concept is searched for once and not twice.
Hansard is the same idea against the parliamentary search API, quoted for the same reason.
Nothing is filtered for relevance. “Law Society” also catches the Law Societies of Scotland and Northern Ireland; “solicitor” catches the Solicitor General and the Treasury Solicitor. Those caveats are printed beside every number on the profession pages rather than being quietly corrected away — a sweep that dropped what it judged irrelevant could not be checked by anyone, and the size of the wrong-sense class is itself worth knowing.
A sample of the documents returned for each phrase was re-downloaded and searched for the phrase in its published text, because a search index is a claim about a document and not the document. That check earns its place: the index returns documents whose published text does not contain the phrase at all — EU regulations whose annexes are published as images, and revoked instruments whose default view is a table of contents and nothing else. Where a hit could not be confirmed, the profession’s page names it.
Reading the documents rather than counting them found one more thing, and it is the caveat that goes on every “earliest” figure this site publishes. The oldest document returned for “notary” is the Ecclesiastical Licences Act 1533. Its only occurrence of the word is not in the 1533 text at all: it is legislation.gov.uk’s own editorial note, “S. 11 applied by Public Notaries Act 1843 (c. 90), s. 5”. The revised statute book carries those annotations and the index reads them.
The same trap, in a different form, catches the oldest hit for “solicitor” — the Taxation Act 1640, whose only use of the word is “Solicitor Generall to the Kings most excellent Majestie”. Oldest hits are the least trustworthy figures in the whole collection, and every page that prints one says so beside it.