What the Legal Services Board Actually Requires on Competence

The Legal Services Board is routinely described as the body that abolished hours-based CPD for solicitors. It did not, and its own documents do not support the claim. Understanding what the LSB actually does on competence matters more than it sounds, because the distinction between what the LSB requires of regulators and what a regulator requires of an individual lawyer is where most confusion in this area starts.

And it is newly relevant: hours requirements are reappearing in legal services, set by a front-line regulator rather than the oversight one.

What the LSB is

The oversight regulator for legal services in England and Wales, established by the Legal Services Act 2007, with the regime becoming active on 1 January 2010. Its remit does not extend to Scotland or Northern Ireland. It is independent of both government and the profession, and must consider how best to promote the Act's eight regulatory objectives in all its work.

Its oversight covers four things: regulating the approved regulators and the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal; overseeing the Office for Legal Complaints, which administers the Legal Ombudsman scheme; making recommendations to amend the list of reserved legal activities; and setting up voluntary arrangements to improve standards where required.

Its powers over approved regulators are: making statutory decisions on proposed rules, practising fees and applications to regulate new areas; assessing regulatory performance generally and thematically; agreeing and monitoring action plans; formal enforcement powers; and requiring information or reports.

Section 4 of the Act also gives it a duty to assist in maintaining and developing standards both for regulation and for the education and training of authorised persons — which is the hook for everything below.

The approved regulators, and which can license ABSs

Nine approved regulators are designated under Part 1 of Schedule 4. Seven are also licensing authorities, meaning they can license alternative business structures:

Two footnotes worth carrying. ICAS is an approved regulator for probate only but does not currently authorise anyone to offer it. And ACCA, which was an approved regulator for probate only, ceased to be one on 29 February 2024 — a detail that still appears incorrectly in a good deal of secondary material.

The LSB also notes explicitly that the Notaries Society, the Society of Scrivener Notaries and the Society of Licensed Conveyancers do not fall under its remit. They are representative bodies, not regulators.

The ongoing competence policy: four outcomes, no hours

The operative document is the Statement of Policy on Ongoing Competence, 28 July 2022, issued under section 49(2) of the Act with regard to the LSB's oversight role under section 49(3).

It requires approved regulators to deliver four outcomes:

• Set standards of competence that authorised persons should meet at the point of authorisation and throughout their careers.
• Regularly determine levels of competence within the professions they regulate, and identify areas where competence may need to be improved.
• Make appropriate interventions to ensure standards of competence are maintained across the profession.
• Take suitable remedial action when standards are not met by individual authorised persons.

What it does not do is set anything numerical. It contains no hours, no cycle lengths and no content requirements. It is deliberately non-prescriptive: regulators may adopt different approaches, and the measures it lists — including mandatory learning requirements and reaccreditation models requiring periodic proof of competence — are described as considerations, not mandates.

The LSB's own position on CPD, recorded in its 2023 review, is instructive: all regulators have some form of CPD requirement, many now outcomes-focused, but CPD "in isolation, it is not a guarantee or determination of competence". That is the reasoning behind setting outcomes rather than hours.

What it required regulators to do, and by when

The programme ran from a call for evidence in January 2020, through a summary of evidence in February 2021, commissioned research on other jurisdictions and consumer views, a consultation from December 2021 to March 2022, and the policy in July 2022.

Two deadlines followed. Progress updates and action plans were due by January 2023, which eight regulators provided. And regulators were expected to provide assurance that they had met the four outcomes by January 2024.

The LSB's April 2023 assessment is worth reading if you are inside one of these bodies. It found good progress overall, strongest on the second outcome. But it identified the key gap plainly: all regulators had robust arrangements to ensure competence at the point of qualification, and that "is not sufficient to ensure competence throughout all stages of authorised persons' careers". On remedial action it noted that few specific examples had been cited.

Most regulators were expected to meet the outcomes by 31 January 2024. The BSB and IPReg indicated later in 2024, which the LSB accepted subject to continued progress. The Faculty Office said it already met all four. The LSB said it would look more closely at the Faculty Office and the Council for Licensed Conveyancers, whose assurance was more limited. Regulators were also required to explain how they would monitor and evaluate changes, because the LSB wanted assurance that new measures could be assessed for effectiveness — and compliance is assessed through its regulatory performance framework.

The downstream effect is visible in the rule changes the LSB has since approved: the CLC's Ongoing Competence Code in 2024 and 2025, ICAEW's CPD Regulations in 2023, and the CLSB's training rules in 2022. Those are where the obligations on individuals actually live. The CLSB points scheme for costs lawyers is a good example of an outcome being translated into a concrete individual requirement by the front-line regulator.

The 16-hour question, answered carefully

The claim that the LSB drove solicitors away from the 16-hour regime does not survive the chronology.

The SRA's own submission to the LSB's call for evidence states that between 1985 and 2015 all solicitors had to undertake a minimum of 16 hours of CPD each year, and that the SRA reformed its approach in 2016. It attributes the change to its own Training for Tomorrow response to the Legal Education and Training Review — not to the LSB. The same submission characterises the LSB as having welcomed the move, which is the SRA describing the LSB, in an SRA document.

The LSB's role in such changes is statutory approval under Part 3 of Schedule 4, where it may refuse an application only on specified grounds and must otherwise approve it. Its clearest own-document statement on hours-based CPD is the BSB CPD decision notice of 2 November 2016, granting the BSB's application to remove the 12-hour annual minimum from the Established Practitioner Programme and replace it with planning, learning objectives and a written record and reflection. The notice records that the changes addressed weaknesses identified by the LETR, including "the obligation to complete an arbitrary number of hours of CPD activity", and concludes that there was no reason to refuse the application.

And the decisive point: the LSB's own ongoing competence programme did not begin until January 2020, four to five years after the SRA's change, with its policy following in July 2022.

So the accurate formulation is that the front-line regulators moved away from hours, drawing on the LETR, and the LSB approved those changes under a statutory test that obliged it to approve absent a refusal ground. It later built an outcomes framework on top. Describing it as the LSB abolishing CPD hours inverts the sequence.

Hours are coming back — from the SRA, not the LSB

This is the development to watch. The SRA consulted between April and July 2026 on Strengthening our continuing competence approach, proposing:

• A rule requiring solicitors to record how learning needs were identified and addressed, with evidence kept for at least three years, proposed to start in the 2027/28 practising year.
• At least three hours a year of facilitated group discussion on professional ethics, in groups of three to twelve, with a facilitator who has at least three years' post-admission practice and no regulatory record — confirmed at practising certificate renewal.
• A power for the SRA to require targeted learning where it identifies a competence concern.

The SRA says this builds on the expectations in the LSB's statement of policy on upholding professional ethical duties of 26 March 2026, revised in May. That policy sets five outcomes, the first being that authorised persons have the right knowledge and skills on professional ethical duties — requiring regulators to set training standards both before qualification and at regular intervals afterwards, covering how to apply ethical duties in practice including prioritising conflicting duties, and using practical resources such as case studies. It sets no deadlines, but regulators must demonstrate they meet the expectations, evidence any alternative approach, and evaluate effectiveness.

Note the pattern precisely: the LSB sets an outcome about ethical competence; the SRA translates it into three hours a year with a facilitator specification. The hours are the SRA's, not the LSB's. That is how this system works, and it is why attributing an individual obligation to the oversight regulator is almost always wrong.

Other 2026 LSB work

Two further items, neither about CPD:

The conduct of litigation review produced an interim report on 29 January 2026 and a final report on 27 July 2026, prompted by the High Court's Mazur judgment in September 2025 and the Court of Appeal's clarification in March 2026 that unauthorised individuals may conduct litigation under an authorised person's supervision. It sets four actions for regulators — clear guidance on adequate supervision in routine and higher-risk cases, wider sharing of draft guidance on reserved legal activities before publication, better data on the frequency and volume of reserved legal activities, and strengthened assurance processes. No deadlines are stated. It concerns supervision and guidance quality, not continuing competence.

And the Business Plan 2026/27, published in April 2026, contains no ongoing competence or CPD workstream at all. Its only training-related content is taking the ethics policy forward with regulators during 2026/27. No 2026 publication revisits or replaces the July 2022 competence policy — the ethics policy simply cross-refers to it.

What to take from this

• If you are looking for a CPD requirement, look at your approved regulator, never the LSB. The LSB has never set an hours figure for an individual lawyer and its competence policy contains no numbers.
• Do not attribute the end of 16-hour CPD to the LSB. The SRA changed it; the LSB approved it under a test that constrained its discretion.
• If you regulate, the four outcomes are the test you are assessed against, and the historic weak point across the sector was outcome four — remedial action for individuals.
• Solicitors should plan for a recording obligation and three hours of facilitated ethics discussion from the 2027/28 practising year, subject to the consultation outcome.
• Check ACCA is not in your list of probate regulators. It left on 29 February 2024.

The practical upshot for anyone buying or building legal CPD is that the market has nine regulators setting nine different individual regimes on top of one set of shared outcomes — which is why material built for solicitors rarely transfers. The gap between a fully published scheme and one that is barely documented is wide, as the contrast between notarial CPE and the Scottish bar shows, and the obligations that sit on firms rather than individuals, such as the SRA Accounts Rules, run on a separate track again.