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Practising Certificate Fee Consultation 2023-24

Thank you for taking the time to participate in our practicing certificate (PC) fee consultation. Below is an introduction to the consultation, providing context to the survey. The survey questions start on the next page and will take no more than 10 minutes to complete. All responses to the survey will be anonymous. If you complete the survey you will be entered into a draw with a chance to win one of five £100 Amazon gift vouchers.

Introduction

As a member of the Law Society, you are part of a community of over 200,000 solicitors. As your professional body, we have been proud to represent the interests of solicitors for almost 200 years. 

Collectively the legal profession contributes £60bn to the UK economy and facilitates trillions of pounds of transactions globally, upholding the law and delivering justice.

Our job is to champion, protect and support your interests and those of the generations of solicitors who come after you, as well as promoting access to justice and defending the rule of law both domestically and internationally. 

The practicing certificate fees you pay to the SRA each year as an individual, or that your firm pays on your behalf, are the main source of income for the Law Society. The income from these fees determines what we can achieve for you, the profession, and wider society. 

We are now in the first year of our new Corporate Strategy (November 2022 to October 2025), which sets out four objectives for the forthcoming three years:
  • promote the value of the profession and provide a compelling member offer
  • protect the justice system and make sure it applies to everyone equally
  • maximise our potential by growing our commercial reach, by being efficient and sustainable
  • be an employer of choice for people who want to make a difference

Keeping to our commitment: Increasing our proportion of the PC fee by £6 in 2023/24 to continue to better support the profession.

We learnt a great deal from the 2022 Practising Certificate fee consultation. We reached over 700,000 people through the consultation process (including more than 100,000 members) across social media and via email-newsletters. This resulted in receiving a total of 1,461 completed responses,1,178 from the online survey and 283 from focus group participants across 43 sessions, all in the space of just over seven weeks.

In 2022 we asked you to rate on a scale of 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree), to what extent you supported our intention to increase the practising certificate fee in 2023/24 by 7% (equating to an additional c.£6 on an individual PC fee). We received 1,177 member responses to this question. A clear majority of respondents, 58% (with a margin of error of +/- 2.8%), agreed with our proposal to increase the PC fee by this amount, with only 17% disagreeing (see chart 1 below).

Chart 1 – Responses to our proposal to increase the PC fee in subsequent years of 2023/24 and 2024/25


The main reasons you gave for supporting an increase in subsequent years, including an additional c.£6 on an individual PC fee in 2023/24 were:
  • So the Law Society could further support its members and the profession
  • The rationale and evidence presented for the increases were clear and justified
  • The Law Society should receive a higher proportion of the PC fee
  • The Law Society was presenting data and insight to a much higher quality than before, and this needed to be supported
  • The Law Society needed to be more ambitious, and the new corporate strategy demonstrated this and should be funded accordingly

We are encouraged by the resilience of the legal sector through the pandemic, with the largest 200 firms reporting record levels of turnover in Q3 of 2022, up £2.5bn from Q3 0f 2019 (see chart 2 below). This is now the same story for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as they also recorded a £0.8bn rise in turnover in Q3 of 2022, compared to Q3 of 2019 (see also the results of our Financial Benchmarking Survey 2023).  

Chart 2 – Legal activities sector turnover reaches record levels in 2022 Q3


 
Source: Turnover data as reported by firm to SRA; legal activities sector turnover data sourced from the Office of National Statistics
 
Delivering more of what you told us is important to you.

The results from our consultation last year showed that over 75% of you agreed that the six value pillars of the current member offer were the things that were important to you. During 2021/22, we increased engagement with our offer:

We launched our new three year Corporate Strategy in November 2022 and we have been making good progress on delivering against the activities outlined in our Business Plan for this year 2022/23.

Objective 1 – we will promote the value of the profession and provide a compelling member offer.

In January 2023 we improved engagement with in-house legal professionals (that accounted for 25% of the profession in 2022), by launching Law Society Connect a messaging board, virtual hangout and online community (with now over 2,200 subscribers).  

We published new insight and research to ensure we continue to support members plan better for the future in areas including Climate Risk, how biodiversity loss could disrupt business in the next 10 years, Law in the Emerging Bio Age and the first substantive report addressing the rapidly advancing Neurotechnology, the Law and Legal Profession. Alongside these reports we have held roundtables with members to explore how different longer horizon issues are impacting their strategic planning and services for clients.

We also had a major success in our international work during March, with the announcement of new rules from the Bar Council of India, under which English and Welsh solicitors and law firms will be able to register to practise in India on a permanent basis.

We strongly believe the profession and our members should be celebrated for the valuable work we do. That is one reason why we launched our Legal Heroes campaign to recognise members who’ve made the biggest difference to the lives of others, their local communities and society in general.

The Solicitors Indemnity Fund will continue to operate from 1 October 2023. This decision follows our work on behalf of solicitors and their clients urging the SRA to work with us, the insurance industry and wider stakeholders to find a long-term solution to the issue of run-off indemnity cover and consumer protection.

Objective 2 – we will protect the justice system and make sure it applies to everyone equally.

We know from previous PC Fee consultations that our members strongly support access to justice and upholding the rule of law as a focus for the Law Society’s work.

Our Reframing Justice programme aims to shape a long-term strategic communications approach to promote the value of the rule of law and a sustainable justice system. We have partnered with FrameWorks UK, who use empirical evidence to help organisations build support for social change, to conduct research into what is understood by the rule of law and access to justice, and what drives these views.

We have also launched our 21st Century Justice project which focuses on civil justice. It aims to lead the debate and identify systemic improvements across several key areas, including big data; power imbalances in alternative dispute resolution; and help for small businesses and those not eligible for legal aid to meet legal costs.

There has been no meaningful increase in criminal legal aid rates of pay in 25 years. The government has failed to take the crisis in the criminal justice system seriously. We've issued judicial review proceedings against the Ministry of Justice, to challenge its decision on criminal legal aid funding.

You were also concerned about threats to the rule of law, attacks on solicitors, progress on diversity and inclusion, and remaining competitive in an ever-changing landscape.  We are also working on these issues as part of our plans.

Objective 3 - to maximise our potential by growing our commercial reach, by being efficient and sustainable.

We have been growing the value for members of our accreditations offer by launching new products and maximising the benefits of our faster digital processes. We have also accelerated our Law Society Learning offer to members with greater ambition to deliver more high-quality, targeted, and relevant courses.

As you can see from our business plan we have listened and want to do all that you asked us to do. But we will not be able to do all this to the standard we believe is acceptable if we do not allow our income base to keep pace with rising costs such as inflation and energy prices.

Our Council, which is elected by members, and Board have urged us to be ambitious in our plans to maximise the value we give to our members.  As your professional body, we want to know from you what you want us to prioritise during 2023/24 and into 2024/25.   

Please help us by sharing your thoughts and expertise for the next 10 minutes and encourage others to do so, too. All responses will be anonymous.
Please note that if you enter our prize draw by providing your email address, and that email contains a name, that will be linked to your survey responses and could make you identifiable. We collect this on the basis of your informed consent at the point you provide an email address. All email addresses will be removed prior to any analysis being undertaken and email addresses will only be used for the purpose of contacting respondents to give them their vouchers. You are not obliged to provide an email address and this will have no effect on the analysis and the importance of your response.
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