Sixteen of forty-two: what these regulators do not publish about the professions they regulate
Seven things a regulator could tell you about its profession, six regulators. Sixteen of the cells are empty — and twenty-one of the fifty measures here have no figure for 2024 or later.
By Rose Traviss · 29 September 2026
A hundred and six annual reports from six legal regulators is a body of evidence about the professions. Read sideways rather than downwards, it is also evidence about the regulators.
Take seven things a regulator could tell you about the people it regulates — how many there are, how many joined, how many complained, what was done about it, what regulation costs, who the profession is, and how it is checked — and ask which of the six answers each.
| Size | Intake | Complaints | Discipline | Money | Diversity | Inspections | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Faculty Office | 2017–26 | 2025–26 | 2026 | — | 2018–25 | 2011–23 | 2021–24 |
| Immigration Advice Authority | 2006–08 | 2015–17 | 2001–24 | 2001–13 | 2015–16 | — | — |
| Council for Licensed Conveyancers | 2025–26 | 2010 | 2018–23 | — | 2011–24 | — | 2015–23 |
| IPReg | 2017–25 | 2019–25 | — | — | 2017–24 | — | — |
| Costs Lawyer Standards Board | 2025 | 2025 | 2011–25 | — | 2025 | 2023 | — |
| Enforcement Conduct Board | 2024–26 | — | 2026 | — | — | — | — |
Sixteen of the forty-two cells are empty. No regulator fills all seven. The Faculty Office fills six, the Immigration Advice Authority, the CLC and the CLSB five each, IPReg three, and the Enforcement Conduct Board — which is three years old — two.
The column that is almost entirely blank
Discipline. One regulator of the six publishes a countable series of what it did about misconduct, and it stopped in 2013/14. That was the Immigration Advice Authority’s table of prosecutions and formal cautions — and it counts only because giving immigration advice unregulated is a criminal offence and the regulator prosecutes it itself.
The others all run disciplinary processes. The Faculty Office has a Court of Faculties; the CLC has an Adjudication Panel whose chair reports to Council annually; IPReg has a Disciplinary Procedure Rules 2015 and recovers costs from disciplinary cases. Each publishes individual outcomes. None publishes a count you can put in a column and compare with last year.
The one that is nearly full
The Faculty Office answers six of the seven — more than anybody — and it is by a distance the smallest regulator here — 3.4 full-time-equivalent staff for 760 notaries. Its core metrics sheet is a page and a half of plain text with the profession size, income, expenditure, staff count, staff costs and reserve position, each with the previous year in brackets. It is the most useful document in the corpus and among the shortest.
The largest documents are the least informative per page. The CLC’s 2023 annual report is 479KB of extracted text; the Faculty Office’s 2024/25 core metrics is 1.5KB, and yields more countable figures.
Twenty-one series that have stopped
Of the fifty measures assembled here, twenty-one have no figure for 2024 or later. Some are surveys on a multi-year cycle and will return. Others have simply gone:
- Adviser headcount — the Immigration Advice Authority stated a total in prose until 2008. After that it reported advisers only split by advice level and fee-charging status, with no total, and since 2020/21 it gives none at all.
- Prosecutions and cautions — tabulated every year to 2013/14, then never again.
- Level 1 assessment pass rates — published for three years to 2017/18.
- CLC examination results — one year, 2010: “A total of 585 candidates sat CLC examinations in 2010. Of these candidates, 401 achieved the required pass mark — a success rate of 68.5%.” Nothing since.
- Legal Ombudsman case volumes for conveyancing practices — 2018 to 2023, in a table the CLC reprints each quarter and which has not been extended.
Nothing announces any of these. A series ends by not appearing in the next report.
“2025” means two different years
Three of these regulators close their year on 31 March and three on 31 December. The Faculty Office counts a Roll at 1 April; the CLC a licence at 31 March; IPReg a registration at 31 December; the CLSB its profession at 31 December; the Immigration Advice Authority reports to 31 March.
So no two columns of the table above are aligned, which is the first reason nothing on this site is added across regulators. The second is that they count different objects: a Roll, a licence, a registration, a certificate.
How long they take
Months between the end of the period a document covers and the file appearing:
| Regulator | Fastest | Median |
|---|---|---|
| Costs Lawyer Standards Board | 1 | 3 |
| Council for Licensed Conveyancers | 0 | 4 |
| Faculty Office | 1 | 6 |
| IPReg | 7 | 7 |
Measured from the upload date in each file’s own path, which is not quite the publication date — a document re-uploaded years later carries the later path, so the extremes are unreliable and the medians are not. The gov.uk publications carry no such path and cannot be measured this way.
Three to seven months is respectable. The point of measuring it is that nobody had, and that it varies by a factor of two across bodies doing the same job under the same oversight regulator.
Four documents that cannot be read at all
Of 106 documents, three are images of pages with no text layer: two Faculty Office inspections reports and the CLC’s 2025 Annual Financial Statements. They are unsearchable, unquotable, and unreadable by a screen reader.
A fourth is a link the Faculty Office still publishes to a file that is no longer there — its 2016/17 inspections report, which 404s.
The gov.uk publications, by contrast, are issued in web, print and 20-point large-print editions, and for two years the accessible version is the only one there is. Whatever else the Freedom of Information Act does for the one regulator it covers, publishing to a government platform has made its documents materially more usable than the WordPress sites of the five it does not.
The figures
Computed from the manifest of 106 documents and the 50 measures read out of them, all on the reports page. The coverage table counts a cell as filled if any measure of that kind could be read for that regulator, which is generous: a single year of one measure fills a cell that a complete series would also fill.
Which of these bodies can be made to answer for a gap is a separate question, and the answer is one of the six.