The Bar Council is set to vote through measures to significantly widen direct access to the Bar in a bid to head off a wider shake-up of its practices by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).

The new direct access regime, which is due to go before the Bar Council’s ruling council this Saturday (12 October), has been drawn up in response to the 2001 OFT report on the professions, which called for the Bar’s remaining restrictive practices to swept away.