News from the Board
Reflections on our June Board meeting - Anna Bradley
09 June 2023
Our June Board meeting was a quarterly monitoring session, so we looked at our operational and financial performance, delivery against our business plan and the strategic risk register, as well as considering our response to the Legal Services Board (LSB) revised performance assessment framework and to the independent review of our Board effectiveness.
Firstly we heard from our committee chairs about their work, which included discussion with our auditors on the governance element of environment, social and governance (ESG) with more sessions planned on the other components. We also took the opportunity to remind ourselves of our cyber security measures after recent high-profile incidents at other organisations.
Our Chief Executive updated us on the just completed Keeping of Roll exercise. It was great to hear that more than 31,000 non practising solicitors had applied to remain on the roll, and that their feedback on the process had been very positive. We also heard that the Office for Professional Body AML Supervision had welcomed our increase in fining powers in its annual report, and used our work in several examples of good practice.
We keep our performance reporting under regular review and we welcomed changes to our balanced scorecard, which now includes further measures on how we assess complaints made to us, and investigations closed within ten months. These new measures will help everyone to see the impact our major continuous improvement programme is having - dealing with cases as promptly and as effectively as possible is the key focus for us over the next year.
Board went on to approve updates to our risk management framework – it's a key part of our work to make sure the organisation can properly understand, assess and manage risk. And then we considered our response to the LSB annual performance assessment, reviewing our own mapping of our work against the requirements. We liked the proposed assurance approach and will be adding it into our regular performance reporting meetings, so that the Board can scrutinise progress at every meeting.
And finally, we discussed the recommendations of the recent independent review of our Board effectiveness. We have also taken the opportunity to review our governance handbook, and are using that to implement the changes we have agreed.
As you can see, it's a busy time for us – not least because we are consulting on our future Corporate Strategy and Business Plan. There are lots of opportunities to get involved so please so let us know what you think.