Our fifth full Board meeting of the year took place in person in London on 30 September 2025. The minutes will be published on our website in the usual way, but in the meantime, CRL Chair, Jonathan Rees outlines the key discussion points.
Litigation Practice Rights
We spent some time discussing the way forward in the light of the recent Mazur judgment, working through the implications for those practising in this field. This included considering questions the Board received directly following the publication of the Board papers as well as concerns channelled through one of the Board’s professional members.
We recognised the huge distress and uncertainty the judgment had caused for many and agreed that we would do all we could to provide clarity and to support the regulated community. We agreed the following actions:
a) approved the submission of an early application to the Legal Services Board (LSB) to change the rules to allow those eligible to apply for standalone litigation practice rights. We have already asked the LSB to treat this expeditiously and hope this option will be available later this year or early next.
b) ensure CRL has sufficient capacity to process practice rights authorisation applications so there is no adverse impact on service times. This includes streamlining our process as far as we can, consistent with our duty to maintain standards.
c) recognising the fluidity of the situation, we agreed to issue interim guidance together with related FAQs (which we will supplement in the coming weeks). We will also shortly be announcing dates for webinars with the regulated community in November.
Finally, we noted that we needed to work closely with partners, notably CILEX, the SRA and the LSB, and those affected on the way forward.
Equality Diversity and Inclusion
Making progress on EDI is one of our key priorities. We reviewed progress since we published our first strategy in 2022 and agreed a new strategy for 2025-28, with 4 key objectives: Improving access to the legal profession, helping the regulated community realise their potential, serving all consumers fairly, and being a more inclusive CRL. We also agreed to publish the latest Diversity report detailing the characteristics of those we regulate, and changes in the last couple of years. Both documents will be published shortly.
Operations
We had our regular series of reports on performance and were pleased to see improvements in a number of areas. For instance there has been a notable reduction in the length of time to complete the authorisation of Practice Rights applications, with the average length of time now at 11 weeks compared with 33 weeks in Q2 2024.
Governance
We discussed the independent Board Effectiveness Review commissioned earlier in the summer. We were pleased with the Reviewer’s conclusion that the CRL Board displays a high level of Board effectiveness in our governance, structures, process and behaviours. We will now draw up an action plan on the recommendations made and publish both before the end of the year. We also continued our regular engagement with our Committees hearing this time from Angela Hesketh, Professional Disciplinary Tribunal member and Lisa Haythorne from the Professional Conduct Panel. These discussions were immensely helpful, and we agreed a programme of improvement.
Practising Certificate Fee
We considered the feedback to the consultation we launched in July on the proposed PCF charges for 2026. We noted a mixed bag of responses: recognition that CRL is operating in a pressured economic environment and acceptance that we were asking for a below inflation increase whilst others noting they were already struggling and any increase was unwelcome. We agreed to submit a final application to the LSB later this month.
Our next full Board meeting is on 9 December 2025.
As always, if you would like to know more, please visit our website, read our Board papers or get in touch.
