Bar Council sets up working group to encourage greater local government direct access
The Bar Council has established a new working group with the aim of encouraging more local authorities to instruct the Bar directly as the chairman of the Bar Council promised that the Bar would be “completely” open for direct access within two years.
Speaking at the annual conference of the Association of Council Solicitors and Secretaries (ACSeS) last month, the (then) chairman of the Bar Council, Nicholas Green QC, said that although many authorities were already using the Bar directly, the process could be “cumbersome”.
“We are looking to make chambers more familiar with and amenable to the way that local authorities work,” he said. “The Bar can do a lot more in partnership with local authorities.”
The working group – which the Bar Council expects to in place by Christmas - will be made up of barristers and clerks from chambers with experience in working directly for local authorities. Its first task will be to produce two pieces of guidance: one for the Bar on how to contract with local authorities, and one for local authorities on how they can go direct to the Bar.
Green also promised that the remaining “anachronistic” rules limiting chambers' ability to conduct litigation and handle client money would be gone in less than two years time, enabling chambers to offer advocacy, litigation and advisory services on a level playing field with solicitors.
“We are going through a period of transformational change and we will be a very different profession in two years' time,” he said. “We will be of much more use to local authorities. Our cost structure means that we are very good value, but we need to make the Bar more accessible and our structures more modern.”
The move follows the Bar Council's development of the ProcureCo model (see related articles below) earlier this year, partly as a method to enable chambers to pitch for local authority tenders that would otherwise be reserved for solicitors firms.
Green also restated his campaign to local authorities not to omit the bar from tender exercises, which has seen him write to local authority consortia to complain when chambers have been left out of recent tender exercises. However, he said that he recognised that the Bar itself still had work to do to explain to local authorities what it was able to do for them.
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