The Assize

The other regulated legal professions of England and Wales, on one footing

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Sources and licences

Eight registers, eight different positions on re-use, quoted in each body’s own words. One of them is openly licensed. The other seven are not, and this page says so rather than leaving a reader to assume they are.

What these positions mean for what you can read here. This edition publishes the analysis and not the directory. There is no page about any practitioner, no firm, town or court page, no practitioner’s name in the site search, and no register offered as a file.

Reading a register in order to count and compare it is one thing. Rebuilding it as a public directory is the thing the terms quoted below address, and four of these regulators — the Faculty Office, the CLC, the CLSB and IPReg — have either not been asked yet or have not yet answered. Until they have, the counts, the comparison and the figures the regulators published themselves are here, and the register is not.

One exception runs the other way: the certificated enforcement agent register is openly licensed, and it is still not published here, because the Open Government Licence expressly does not cover personal data and the data protection work that would settle that is not finished. The licence question and the data protection question are different questions and both have to be answered.

Notaries public

Regulator
The Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury
Register
https://www.facultyoffice.org.uk/notaries/find-a-notary/
Terms
https://www.facultyoffice.org.uk/disclaimer-copyright/
Position on re-use
Closed: re-use not permitted without consent
Collected here
817 entries

Copyright asserted in the whole site; "Any other storage, copying, transmission or distribution of the content of this website is strictly prohibited without the consent of The Faculty Office", and -- unusually -- "Electronic links to this website are not permitted without the consent of The Faculty Office".

Costs lawyers

Regulator
Costs Lawyer Standards Board
Register
https://clsb.info/find-a-costs-lawyer/register-of-costs-lawyers/
Terms
https://clsb.info/
Position on re-use
No re-use terms located
Collected here
789 entries

Only "(c) Copyright CLSB" located; no re-use terms page found. The register itself is served as one open JSON file with no authentication, which is a design decision and not a licence.

Licensed conveyancers

Regulator
Council for Licensed Conveyancers
Register
https://www.clc-uk.org/consumers/find-a-clc-lawyer/
Terms
https://www.clc-uk.org/terms-of-use/
Position on re-use
Closed: re-use not permitted without consent
Collected here
2,410 entries

"You are welcome to copy excerpts of our information for purposes of review, discussion, academic study and other legitimate pursuits"; "We will vigorously pursue any violation of our copyright that seeks to exploit our material for commercial gain". Nothing on database right or scraping.

Patent and trade mark attorneys

Regulator
Intellectual Property Regulation Board
Register
https://ipreg.org.uk/register
Position on re-use
No re-use terms located
Collected here
3,924 entries

No terms or copyright page located on ipreg.org.uk. The register has per-attorney pages at /register/<id> -- the only one in this set that does. Those pages rank for 0.3% of the attorneys on them: see data/serp_analysis.md, which measured it after an earlier note here inferred from the URLs that IPReg must already rank for its registrants' names.

Certificated enforcement agents

Regulator
HM Courts & Tribunals Service (certificates issued by County Court judges)
Register
https://certificatedbailiffs.justice.gov.uk/
Terms
https://www.justice.gov.uk/terms-and-conditions
Position on re-use
Open Government Licence v3.0
Collected here
1,211 entries

justice.gov.uk: Crown copyright, "licensed for use under the Open Government Licence" unless otherwise indicated. OGL v3 does not cover personal data in the Information, so the copyright and Crown database-right question is answered and the data-protection question is not.

Claims management companies

Regulator
Financial Conduct Authority
Register
https://register.fca.org.uk/s/
Terms
https://www.fca.org.uk/legal-information-and-policies
Position on re-use
Open Government Licence v3.0
Collected here
Not collected — no rows in the cache: not collected yet

The Financial Services Register is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and the FCA's API terms permit re-use with attribution. Reaching it needs a free API key (FCA_API_EMAIL and FCA_API_KEY); there is no unauthenticated bulk route, and the Salesforce front end is not one.

Regulated immigration advisers

Regulator
Immigration Advice Authority (formerly OISC)
Register
https://portal.immigrationadviceauthority.gov.uk/s/adviser-finder
Position on re-use
No re-use terms located
Collected here
Not collected — no rows in the cache: not collected yet

No terms located. The portal is a Salesforce Experience Cloud app that renders nothing without JavaScript; the register is reachable through its Aura endpoint, which is a public endpoint rather than a published interface.

Which of them can be made to answer

Every figure on this site was read from something a body chose to publish. The next question is what happens where it chose not to, and the answer is not the same for all of them. 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 there.

Subject to the Act

Immigration Advice Authority
Listed as “The Immigration Services Commissioner”. Freedom of Information Act 2000, Schedule 1, Part VI. The statutory office is the Immigration Services Commissioner, created by section 83 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999; the Authority is its current operating name. The Schedule 1 entry is original text, not a later insertion.
Legal Services Board
Listed as “The Legal Services Board”. Freedom of Information Act 2000, Schedule 1, Part VI, inserted on 7 March 2008 by the Legal Services Act 2007. Oversight regulator for the approved regulators, so what it holds about the CLC, the CLSB, IPReg and the Master of the Faculties is reachable even though those bodies are not. In practice it holds very little of it: asked for a list of regulated legal practices it replied that it does not hold one and to ask the front line regulators, and asked for prosecution figures for unauthorised reserved activities it replied that it does not hold those either.
Office for Legal Complaints (Legal Ombudsman)
Listed as “The Office for Legal Complaints”. Freedom of Information Act 2000, Schedule 1, Part VI, inserted by the Legal Services Act 2007. Complaints about any regulated provider reach the Ombudsman, so complaints data is obtainable here even where the provider's own regulator is outside the Act.
HM Courts & Tribunals Service
Listed as “Ministry of Justice (government department)”. Freedom of Information Act 2000, Schedule 1, Part I. An executive agency of the Ministry of Justice, and the publisher of the certificated enforcement agent register.

Not subject to the Act

The Faculty Office
Not listed. An ecclesiastical office of the Archbishop of Canterbury exercising statutory functions under the Public Notaries Act 1801 and the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990. Statutory functions do not by themselves bring a body within the Act.
Council for Licensed Conveyancers
Not listed. An approved regulator and licensing authority under the Legal Services Act 2007. The Act put its oversight regulator into Schedule 1 and not the regulator itself.
Costs Lawyer Standards Board
Not listed. The independent regulatory arm of the Association of Costs Lawyers, which is the approved regulator.
Intellectual Property Regulation Board
Not listed. A company limited by guarantee, carrying out the regulatory functions of CIPA and CITMA.
Enforcement Conduct Board
Not listed. A voluntary oversight body with no statutory footing at all, so the question does not arise in the way it does for the others.

Checked against the text of Schedule 1 as it stands. The words “conveyanc”, “notar”, “solicitor”, “barrister”, “bailiff” and “enforcement agent” do not appear anywhere in it. Neither the Solicitors Regulation Authority nor the Bar Standards Board is listed either, so this is the position across legal regulation and not a quirk of the small professions.

The two ways round it

The Legal Services Act 2007 put the oversight regulator into Schedule 1 and not the regulators it oversees. So what the Legal Services Board holds about the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, the CLSB, IPReg and the Master of the Faculties is reachable even though those bodies are not themselves covered.

In practice it holds very little of it. Asked in 2020 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, it replied that it does not hold those figures either. Two direct tests, nothing held: the route exists in law and reached neither thing anybody would want from it.

The same Act covered the Office for Legal Complaints, so complaints data about any regulated provider is obtainable at one remove.

What has already been released

Answered requests are evidence about what a body will hand over, rather than a guess at what it might.

What they have actually been asked

Knowing a body is covered is not the same as knowing what it has been asked. Every request on the WhatDoTheyKnow page of all three covered bodies was read — 275 of them.

BodyRequests With a released file Most common outcomes
Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner
The only one of the six regulators this site reads that is a public authority under the Act.		 114 30 unclassified 51, successful 33, partially successful 13, long overdue 10
Legal Services Board
Oversight regulator. What the approved regulators have given it is reachable even though they are not.		 53 30 successful 16, unclassified 13, long overdue 12, partially successful 8
Legal Ombudsman (Office for Legal Complaints)
The Legal Ombudsman's governing body: complaints about any regulated provider, at one remove from the regulator.		 108 95 successful 44, unclassified 21, long overdue 17, partially successful 16

102 of them touch something this site is short of — a register, a headcount, complaints, assessments or enforcement.

Every sitting of an entrance exam, from eight separate answers

The regulator published one Level 1 pass rate a year, for three years, and stopped. Its answers to Freedom of Information requests give 51 individual sittings between 2013 and 2016 — in four different shapes: a table inside a Word document, prose inside another, and two house styles of figures typed straight into a reply.

LevelSittings SatPassed RateCovering
Level 1 35 1,663 426 26% August 2013 – October 2016
Level 2 13 235 99 42% August 2013 – August 2016
Level 3 3 19 4 21% August 2013 – December 2013

Not every sitting in the period: these are the ones somebody asked about. The coverage is partial and the rates it gives agree closely with the yearly figures the regulator did publish — 26% against a published 25% for Level 1 in 2015/16.

The one that fills a gap rather than describing one

This site cannot enumerate the register of regulated immigration advisers: the regulator’s search will not return a list. It has handed one over on request, though, and that release is public. 1,844 regulated organisations as at 2020-01-01, across 120 postcode areas, 29% of them at a London postcode.

Town as givenOrganisations Postcode areaOrganisations
London496 E 95
Birmingham64 B 83
Glasgow46 W 82
Manchester41 SE 76
Harrow25 N 71
Ilford23 EC 57
Sheffield21 SW 53
Bradford20 G 53
Croydon20 HA 52
Leicester20 NW 49

Counts and geography only. The released file carries a telephone number, a fax number and an email address against most rows; none of that is reproduced here, and no organisation is named. The request.

Titles and outcomes are WhatDoTheyKnow's own. A request marked successful was answered, not necessarily answered in full: one of these released its statistics and withheld the policy behind them under section 31.

Read through a browser, because the site is behind a challenge no plain HTTP client clears; three seconds between requests, no concurrency, and only the paths its robots.txt allows. Nothing released is reproduced here: one of these files is a regulator’s whole register with a telephone number and an email address against every entry.

Where the gaps are, and whether asking would close them

GapAskableWhat to ask for
The regulator stated a total adviser headcount in prose until 2008 and has published none since 2020/21. Yes The number of regulated advisers and regulated organisations at 31 March in each year since 2008, by advice level.
Level 1 assessment candidates and passes were published for 2015/16 to 2017/18 and not since. Yes Candidates sitting and passing each competence assessment level, per business year, since 2017/18.
2018/19 is missing: that year's report sets its complaints figures in a two-column layout that does not survive being turned back into text, and no later report restates them. Yes Complaints received in 2018/19, split as in Table 8 of the 2017/18 annual report.
Prosecutions and formal cautions were tabulated every year to 2013/14 and not since. Yes Prosecutions brought and formal cautions administered under section 91 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, per year since 2013/14.
The CLC publishes its licence count only from 2025, so it shares no year with its own published fee income. No Not obtainable from the CLC, which is outside the Act. The Legal Services Board is covered but has answered a request for a list of regulated practices by saying it holds none, so that route is unlikely to reach it either.
2021 is missing because that year's core metrics sheet is not on the Faculty Office's website. No Not obtainable: the Faculty Office is outside the Act.

Schedule 1 settles whether a body is subject to the Act, not whether any particular request will succeed. Every exemption in Part II still applies, and the law-enforcement exemption in section 31 is the one these bodies have used. Nothing here is legal advice.

What the positions mean in practice

The Faculty Office asserts copyright in its whole site, prohibits copying without consent, and — unusually — states that linking to it is not permitted without consent either. The Council for Licensed Conveyancers welcomes copying of excerpts “for purposes of review, discussion, academic study and other legitimate pursuits” and says it will “vigorously pursue” anything that exploits its material for commercial gain. The CLSB and IPReg publish no re-use terms this project could find. The Financial Conduct Authority publishes under the Open Government Licence and requires a free API key to reach the data. HM Courts & Tribunals Service publishes under the Open Government Licence with no key at all.

The Open Government Licence does not cover personal data, so even the one openly licensed register settles the copyright question and not the data-protection one. That is what privacy is about, and it is a separate question with a separate answer.

Why some of this is not on the page

Six of these registers publish direct telephone numbers, email addresses or DX numbers for individuals, and one publishes photographs. None of that is republished here. It is a deliberate line rather than an oversight: those details were published so that a client could instruct a practitioner, and putting them on an indexable page changes what they are for. The build refuses to complete if one appears.