Legal Services Bill [HL]

I do believe we are making progress. I referred to the general principle of ““in the public interest”” and now that my noble friend has spoken to Amendment No. 2, as have a number of other noble Lords, I should give an explanation. It was the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Select Committee that the words in Amendment No. 2 should be added to the Bill. Although the Minister has paid tribute to the previous Lord Chancellor, I do not think that she has yet quite explained why there has been a change in terminology. That is particularly important, in the light of the words of the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton. He reminded us that he is a member of the public; he is also a consumer of legal services, as are many members of the legal profession. But many members of the public do not use legal services; indeed, they spend their whole life hoping that they will never have to. It was once said that you can live without a lawyer but you cannot die without one. Lawyers ultimately catch up with people at some stage. Therefore, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor was quite right to question whether the legal profession was in the public interest. That is the key question. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Kingsland for having spoken to the amendment that was tabled following the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Select Committee. I should like to explain why we were concerned about the Minister’s response. The Government responded to the Joint Select Committee report by saying, "““we do not think it appropriate that the two””—" the interests of the public and of consumers— "““should sit within the same objective””." Therefore we come back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen: is it right that these should be in the same objective? We discussed this in the Joint Select Committee where the view expressed was that of the noble Lord, Lord Graham. The noble Lord said that he was a member of the public but also a consumer. In those two capacities, his interests may not be exactly the same. His wish is to see the two taken into account. The terms of reference set by the Government for Sir David Clementi’s review were that he should consider the public and the consumer interest. Those are the Government’s words; they actually have said that there are two interests—public and consumer—and that both should be considered. As noble Lords know, I am a practising solicitor and I have always declared that interest. My worry is that putting the public interest where it is in the Bill, in the genuine belief that doing so was responding to the Select Committee’s recommendation, has resulted in the worst of all worlds. Instead of the public interest being a regulatory objective and clearly set out on a par with the consumer interest, it is relegated in Clause 3 to something to which the board and the other institutions must have regard. All the Minister’s words are authoritative but we need in this instance a particularly authoritative explanation of the difference between the public and the consumers’ interests. Why have the Government moved from their position that the reform must be in the consumer and public interests, as they said in their instructions to Sir David Clementi, to saying that the regulatory objective must include only consumers? It may well be that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has, behind the scenes, exercised such power and influence that he has won this critical battle. Judging by what he said to us earlier, it is, to him, a very important battle, but it is one on behalf of just a section of the public. We now need to ask the Minister to reflect on putting the public interest right at the heart of the regulatory objectives, not necessarily as the first objective—they are not in any order, and we will debate that a little later—but certainly back where it started under the noble and learned Lord, the previous Lord Chancellor.