CILEX spent four years trying to hand its members to the SRA. Its own regulator called it unlawful
Announced in 2022, formally signalled in 2024, abandoned in 2026. CILEx Regulation told its board the plan was unlawful and it was ready to litigate; the Legal Services Board convened peace talks to avoid 'costly legal action'; members demanded a vote and were told a vote would be improper.
The 11,603 people on the CILEX registers are regulated by CILEx Regulation. For four years, the professional body that created that regulator was trying to hand the job to somebody else — the Solicitors Regulation Authority — and the two organisations came close enough to court that the oversight regulator called a meeting to head it off.
None of this was secret. All of it is in board papers, financial statements and strategic risk registers published by both bodies, and now in the index of 2,236 documents they publish. Very little of it reached anybody regulated by the outcome.
The sequence
Early 2022. CILEX announces its intention to redelegate regulation of CILEX members to the SRA. The regulator’s later account:
there followed a period of uncertainty which created challenges both strategically and operationally
2022–23. The Institute’s financial statements record only that directors “remain in discussions in respect of the proposed redelegation”, then that “no final decision has been made”.
2023. Members put resolutions to the Institute. One asks it to explain why it refused to join CILEx Regulation in an application for declaratory relief to test the lawfulness of what it was doing. Another asks for an electronic vote of all members on whether redelegation “is in the public and member interest”.
2024. Members propose amendments requiring that “any re-delegation is to be subject to a vote by all members of Cilex and must be passed by a two thirds majority of those voting.”
The answer to that is the most striking document in the sequence:
CILEX has to be able to demonstrate that any decision on re-delegation has not been influenced by representative considerations (in a way which would be undermined if matters were put to a member vote).
In other words: a membership vote would make the decision unlawful, because a regulator’s structure must not be set by the people it represents. That is a coherent reading of the Legal Services Act. It also means the members of a professional body were told that their opinion on who regulates them could not properly be counted.
October 2024. CILEX formally signals its intention to apply to the LSB, “to achieve the objectives set out in the published Case for Change”. The SRA begins preparing: its consultation papers describe the ancillary rule changes, the consumer communications and the evaluation it would put in place “if CILEX proceeds”.
2025. CILEx Regulation’s position, in its own board papers:
CRL’s position remained that we consider CILEX’s original plans for regulatory redelegation to be unlawful and we were prepared to challenge this through the courts.
A Part 8 claim is live enough that the LSB’s review of the Internal Governance Rules is put on hold because of it. On 10 September the LSB convenes CILEX, the SRA, the Law Society and CILEx Regulation “to discuss the CILEX/SRA redelegation proposals and possible ways forward that may avoid costly legal action”.
Q2 2026. It ends:
we welcomed the decision taken by both the SRA and CILEX that redelegation is no longer part of their immediate plans
The regulator records that it “began the process of rebuilding relations with CILEX as the membership body”.
What it cost while it ran
The strategic risk registers name it directly. Under the risk that regulatory performance fails to meet expectations:
This also includes the existential threat posed by the CILEX re-delegation proposals and impediments to CRL’s operational independence resulting from eg access to reserves.
Two things there. A regulator describing a proposal by its own professional body as an existential threat to itself, in a public document. And, in the same sentence, the observation that its operational independence is impeded by its access to reserves — that is, by who controls the money.
The register also lists, among the influences on that risk:
Low brand awareness of CRL in the market place leads to lower growth and strengthens case for redelegation
The regulator was tracking its own obscurity as a factor in whether it would continue to exist.
Why this matters to somebody on the register
Because for four years the answer to “who regulates me, and under what code” was genuinely unsettled, and almost nobody affected was in a position to follow it. The practice rights people hold, the compensation arrangements their firms pay into, the disciplinary process they are subject to — all of it was contingent on a decision being taken elsewhere, contested in correspondence, and reported in board papers nobody reads.
It also puts the Mazur judgment in context. The event that gave 1,338 chartered legal executives standalone litigation rights in a single year landed in the middle of this, handled by a regulator that was simultaneously preparing to argue its own professional body’s plans were unlawful.
Sources, and what is not claimed
Everything quoted is verbatim from documents published by CILEx Regulation, the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives or the SRA, all in the document index. Dates are as the documents give them.
What this piece does not do is adjudicate. Whether redelegation would have been lawful was never decided — the proceedings did not run to judgment, and the plan was withdrawn rather than defeated. Whether it would have been good is a question about which reasonable people in this profession plainly disagreed, and nothing here is evidence either way. The account is of what happened, from the record the participants themselves left.
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