Legal Services Bill [HL]

My name is attached to Amendment No. 2. I was a little unnerved by the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, whose name is also attached to Amendment No. 2, but not to Amendment No. 1. At some stage—I do not know when—the noble Lord must have decided that he preferred Amendment No. 1 to Amendment No. 2. That speaks highly of the eloquence of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, who has obviously returned to your Lordships’ House in sparkling form and, with a few deft flicks of his paintbrush, has portrayed a very attractive case for Amendment No. 1. I congratulate him. Our reason for aligning, in Amendment No. 2, public interest with consumer interest is simply this: the Legal Services Board is entitled to intervene on the basis of any one of the seven criteria in Clause 1(1), so that if you have public interest as a stand-alone category, consumer interest is also left as a stand-alone category. For example, the Legal Services Board could intervene solely on consumer grounds, quite independently of the public interest. That is why we combine public and consumer interest: it forces the Legal Services Board to balance the consumer interest against the public interest before intervening. It is strange that public interest does not appear in Clause 1(1). Before the draft of the Bill became public, all the indications were that there would be a public interest provision. After all, the terms of reference for the Clementi report were the public and consumer interests. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the Joint Committee, chaired so ably by my noble friend Lord Hunt, wanted public interest to be a category in the regulatory objectives. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, and so many other noble Lords who have spoken have rightly said that the public interest and the consumer interest will not always coincide. A number of your Lordships have hazarded a definition of the public interest, but to me the crucial ingredient of the public interest in this context is justice. The courts are here in the United Kingdom to attain justice; that is their role. There will sometimes be a conflict between the attainment of justice and the provision of legal services at a certain price. It is that conflict with which the Legal Services Board has to grapple. Unless the public interest is one of the objectives, there will be no requirement for the Legal Services Board to grapple with it. That is the worry. The noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, has rightly drawn your Lordships’ attention to the letter from the noble Baroness on the three regulatory bodies in the Bill. I am looking at Clause 3, on the Legal Services Board. In Clause 3(3)(c), we see ““the public interest””, but if one looks at the way in which Clause 3(3) is introduced, one sees that the requirement is for the board to ““have regard to”” the public interest. But, at the end of the day, having had regard to it, the board is not obliged to take it into account in its decision-making. This is a very weak provision in favour of the public interest. I very much support all your Lordships who have intervened to say that the absence of the public interest in Clause 1(1) ought to be rectified by the Government.