Welcome back to the Bar. I hope you enjoyed the holidays and found time for some rest and recuperation. I am deeply honoured and humbled to have been elected as the Chair of the Bar for 2025.

As the first specialist family practitioner to take up the position in 37 years, I would like to raise the profile of the family Bar. This is particularly timely given the new government’s focus on tackling violence against women and girls – much of which goes through the family courts. I also intend to highlight the commonalities and challenges that exist across the whole Bar.

Early on in my career I joined the Conduct and Complaints Committee that existed before the creation of the Bar Standards Board. I was struck by the length and breadth of the work carried out by the Bar Council. I was struck by the fact – and it remains the case – that governments and policymakers were interested in what the Bar Council does.

This year I want to draw more colleagues into the Bar Council, and I’d like the Bar to feel – whether you’re working in Newcastle or in Newport – that you’re a part of, and matter to, the Bar Council.

I know that the publicly funded Bar is disillusioned and exhausted. They are working harder than ever, doing work that is demanding and often unpaid. Barristers working on criminal cases, like family, immigration and housing practitioners, are often working for no money or working on cases that are bounced out of the list at the last minute.

Just before the Christmas break the Ministry of Justice announced a welcome – and long overdue – increase in criminal legal aid fees for solicitors. But what about the criminal Bar? We need to see a change, not only in remuneration but also in relation to workload and predictability, as well as parity between defence and prosecution. Otherwise, we will continue to lose talented barristers from the Bar.

I want to renew our work on wellbeing and begin a conversation about how we weave wellbeing into part of practice and it is not something only dealt with in times of crisis. I have been in listening mode for the last year and have travelled up and down the country; the general consensus seems to be that we now need to do more in terms of wellbeing.

Heads of chambers have told me they have lost junior tenants in the first few years of practice. The reason most give is that they need a better life-work balance. They cannot look after themselves properly and engage in the demands placed on them. So, they have gone through the hard work involved in pupillage only to say, this is not for me. The young Bar is the lifeblood of our profession, so we need to do better for them.

That is why I want to launch a new wellbeing project focused on finding measures that will offer effective support. As a first step I have established a working group to look at the practicalities of what we could do to help the profession more.

We also have to make a career at the Bar sustainable. We have to promote movement between the self-employed and employed Bar and different practice areas as needed and as suits. We need to make it easier to return to the Bar after a career break. We need to provide support for barristers to effectively plan a whole-life career at the Bar.

Another area of focus this year is continuing the important work on equality, diversity and inclusion. Since we published the Race at the Bar report in 2021, we have seen some progress, but there is more to be done across race, gender, disability and social mobility where the scales require rebalancing.

Last year the Race Panel published an updated report showing that the number of Black barristers at the Bar is slowly increasing, as is who gets pupillage. But Black/Black British barristers are less likely to get immediate tenancy and, in all areas of practice and at all career stages from young Bar to silk, Black and Asian barristers are still earning less than White colleagues. The earnings gap between men and women at the self-employed Bar also remains a problem. We have been making steady progress, but there is still work to do and we need to double down on that work.

I am looking forward to working with the Bar Council team and colleagues from across the Bar to take forward these priorities and represent our wonderful profession.