Chair of the Bar 2025: Barbara Mills KC

The family law community is ‘very energised’ by the appointment of Barbara Mills KC as Chair of the Bar, she tells me in her inaugural interview. No surprise to see how much support she has received from family practitioners: it is more than 35 years since the top job was held by one of their own. But others are equally enthused.

Mills is the first Black barrister to lead her profession – though when we meet at her chambers in December she proudly observes that the Chair of the Young Barristers’ Committee and two of the six Circuit Leaders are also people of colour.

I learn that she was born in Ghana. To escape political unrest, she and her siblings were brought to England as children by their mother. A bursary from a charitable foundation allowed Mills to attend ‘a very good boarding school in Hertfordshire’. The charity also supplemented her grant at the University of Hull and supported her at Bar school.

But there is another reason why Mills is the ideal person to lead the Bar in 2025. Last September, the Bar Standards Board (BSB) proposed replacing one of the profession’s core duties. At present, it says barristers must not discriminate unlawfully against any person. The regulator wants to impose a new duty on them to ‘act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion’.

What does Mills think the BSB was trying to achieve?

‘I think they want what the Bar Council wants, which is a profession that reflects the society it serves – one that is diverse, that invites people from underrepresentated groups into the profession and where they can expect to be treated well and feel included.’

If that was the regulator’s aspiration, Mills would have no quarrel with it. But she had ‘huge difficulty’ with the proposals as set out by the BSB. It was moving towards outcomes-based regulation with no clear idea of what a good outcome would be. The BSB used ‘promoting’ and ‘advancing’ interchangeably, not understanding what each term meant. Above all, practitioners needed to know what actions or inactions might lead to disciplinary proceedings.

The regulator’s proposals had already created what Mills described as ‘the most enormous division’ within the profession, as I reported last autumn. That led Mark Neale, the BSB’s Director-General, to assure me that the new duty would not lead to effective quotas or undermine the cab-rank rule.

‘It’s a very genuine consultation,’ Neale said. The regulator would certainly consider clarifying any new core duty before it was introduced.

‘I was very pleased to read Mark Neale’s interview with you in September where he said that this was a consultation,’ Mills tells me.

But did she think there was any room for compromise?

Opposing the proposed core duty was not a decision the Bar Council had taken lightly, she explains. ‘At the moment, we would say to the BSB you have to think again.’ But she remains optimistic about the scope for positive dialogue.

Might the regulator back down?

‘I don’t yet know whether the BSB will listen to us because I haven’t yet had a conversation with them,’ she says pointedly. ‘But I was encouraged by Mr Neale’s interview with you in which he said, “We are in listening mode; we want to hear from the profession; this is a consultation.”

‘All of that leads me to believe that their position isn’t set in stone and they’re not going to force this through regardless,’ Mills continues. ‘In the end, any change will require participation of the Bar Council. We would have to provide, for example, guidelines. We’re not in a position to do that because we don’t agree with it.’

Could the BSB draft its own guidelines? ‘There is trouble ahead if this is simply forced through,’ she says. ‘And my sense is that isn’t what’s happening with the BSB.’

The Bar Council believes the BSB’s proposals are unlawful. Might barristers take their regulator to court?

This is where Mills draws on her professional experience. ‘I did all aspects of family law for about 10 years and then I chose to specialise in children’s work. Five or 10 years into that specialism, I decided to qualify as a mediator.’

That did not go down well with her senior clerk, she recalls. ‘In these chambers,’ he told her, ‘we go to court; we don’t stop people from going to court.’ She replied, with a confidence that surprised even her, that clients who now instructed her to litigate would instruct her not to go to court in future. And so it proved.

Being a mediator, she regards legal action against the BSB as a last resort. ‘At the moment, I can assure you that isn’t on my mind.’ The BSB had started from a good place, she believes, and she hopes it now understands that its proposals simply wouldn’t work.

Mills tells me that there is much to celebrate in terms of race at the Bar. She was co-chair of the Race Working Group three years ago. Now known as the Race Panel, it published a report in December which found that overall representation of ethnic minority barristers was improving by about 0.5 percentage points a year to 16.9% of the Bar.

But Black barristers were less likely to be given tenancies on completion of pupillage. And the report found that, at the self-employed Bar, White barristers earned significantly more than Black and Asian barristers.

‘The experiences of ethnic minority barristers is still something that needs to be looked at,’ she says. ‘People still feel not included, still feel othered.’

In addition to promoting equality, diversity and inclusion, another priority for Mills is to raise the profile of the publicly funded family Bar.

‘The family world is not just about parents divorcing or worrying about the future of their children,’ she says. ‘It covers financial cases. It covers assisted reproduction and surrogacy. We’re talking about the welfare and financial issues to do with incapacitated adults, protection of individuals. All life is here and we manage it all.’

Ministerial purseholders might not think that family justice was as important as criminal justice. In reality, says Mills, the two are equally important. And if Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill becomes law and the High Court is required to declare itself satisfied that other requirements in the legislation are met, the Family Division would be the natural jurisdiction for these cases.

Mills praises the government’s commitment to halve violence against women and girls within 10 years but points out that this is not solely a problem for the criminal justice system: it’s a matter for the family courts too.

However, members of the publicly funded family Bar are disillusioned and exhausted, she tells me. ‘They are working harder than they’ve ever done, often doing pieces of work that are simply not paid for.’

Weren’t practitioners moving from the criminal Bar to the family Bar because legal aid rates were better? ‘It might be relatively better, but it doesn’t mean it’s good,’ she says. ‘The rates haven’t changed for decades and need to be looked at.’ She had enormous sympathy for criminal practitioners whose work went unpaid when their cases were bounced out of the list.

That led us on to the subject of wellbeing at the Bar. ‘When I was a junior barrister,’ she recalls, ‘a well-meaning senior silk said to me that if I had a family, I was to come back six weeks after every birth because the expectation was to keep the show running. I’m very pleased I ignored her because I was not fit to come back after six weeks – and I took a full year.’

Barristers are much more alive to the challenges now. ‘What I would like to do in 2025 is to begin a conversation where wellbeing is a part of practice and not something that we go to in crisis.’

During her visits to barristers across the country over the past year, Mills happened to ask someone she met in a robing room how she was doing that day.

‘She then began to share her difficulties. She was a criminal barrister. She felt that her life-work balance was out of control. She was missing her children, one of whom was doing public exams. And just that question – how she was doing – almost reduced her to tears.’

Barristers now understood the dangers of vicarious trauma: if clients were traumatised, their advisers can be affected.

‘A silk said to me the other day that, when one of her juniors came in to tell her about a sexual abuse case she was doing, the silk had to stop her because she herself was flooded with her own stuff that day. She said they had to arrange a time when she could speak to that junior member. It concerns me that that was the stress that that person was under. We are working more remotely now: not everybody’s coming into chambers so that need to talk and share that we used to have – you’d come out of court, go back to chambers, make a cup of tea and download – that isn’t available to us. And yet we have a need to share and talk.’

It’s not just those who work in family and crime. One junior commercial barrister asked whether the Bar Council could make it possible for him to claim a tax deduction for his therapy.

‘He was having psychological help, primarily as a result of the sheer volume of work and the expectations and pressures on him. I have spoken to a number of heads of chambers, top sets, who have lost tenants at very junior stages. They’ve gone through the rigorous process of securing pupillage. And then they’ve said, I can’t see this as a way through for me. On the basis that the young Bar is the lifeblood of the profession, we have to do better for them.’

Was there resistance to the sort of support the new Chair was considering? Senior barristers could see that the world was changing, she replies. People who claimed they had managed perfectly well as juniors understood the need to retain talented youngsters and were open to providing the assistance that colleagues might now need.

And barristers needed to plan ahead. ‘A sustainable career requires you, from the beginning, to understand what it is that you would want your career to look like.’ Should you switch to the employed Bar at the time when your family responsibilities are particularly demanding? Are you planning a career break and, if so, what’s your re-entry strategy?

Mills had wanted to be a hands-on mother without sacrificing her career. ‘So the choice I made was to work pretty much full-time during the school term and take most of the holidays off.’ She simply told clients she was unavailable and nobody knew she was at home with her daughter.

That didn’t deter her from giving her time to Bar Council over the years. She had been struck by the fact that successive governments and policymakers were always interested in the council’s views and hopes now that others will be drawn into helping the profession in this way.

And the future? I decide not to press her on this. But she is well aware that the last family lawyer to chair the Bar became a much-respected High Court judge. Perhaps Mills will feel that further public service, in a role that will inspire others, would allow her to give something back to the many people she thanks for making her what she now is.