Legal Services Bill [HL]

In speaking to the question of whether Clause 1 should stand part of the Bill, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 3A. I apologise to your Lordships for tabling that amendment so late, but the point that underlines it only came to me yesterday when I was looking through the Bill—not, I hasten to add, for the first time, but again. I asked to speak on clause stand part and tabled the amendment because I have come to the view that Clause 1, the regulatory objectives clause, applies to too many disparate regulatory authorities. Clause 1 applies not only to the Legal Services Board but also to the Office for Legal Complaints and to all the authorised regulators. These three different types of regulators have distinct and disparate functions. Perhaps the most startling difference is between the Legal Services Board and the authorised regulators. The Legal Services Board, as the Government have said on many occasions, is essentially a supervisory board, supervising the work of the other regulators. By contrast, the authorised regulators are the front-line regulators. Under the Bill, the Legal Services Board, in principle at any rate, intervenes in the work of an authorised regulator only if that authorised regulator is alleged to have been in some way delinquent. To have one set of regulatory objectives to cover three types of regulatory authority with very different responsibilities is not a sensible way of proceeding. It means that the regulatory objectives have to be so broad and loosely defined that they cover all three types of authority, but, because they seek to cover all three, each one is insufficiently pinned down by the objectives for the Bill to give an accurate picture of what it ought to do. Therefore, the regulatory authorities will have far more freedom of manoeuvre to act than they ought to have. The basis on which I oppose the question that Clause 1 stand part of the Bill and tabled Amendment No. 3A is that there should be not one, but three, objectives clauses inthe Bill: one for the Legal Services Board, one for the Office for Legal Complaints and one for the authorised authorities. That will enable the draftsmen to be much more specific about what it is that each one of these separate categories of regulatory authority ought to do. My draft of the new clause in Amendment No. 3A is submitted almost in the spirit of a probing amendment. Proposed subsection (1) seeks to set out what I consider the board’s regulatory objectives ought to be—the objectives of the board alone—but I entirely understand that other noble Lords might take a different view. On mature reflection, I, too, might want to change the categories in proposed paragraphs (a) to (e) either to alter one or more of them or to add to them, but the point of principle is that each separate regulatory authority ought to have its own distinct objectives. We would then get from the Bill an understanding of the precise relationship that each of these authorities has one with another. It ought to have an extremely beneficial effect on the disease of whatis often described as ““regulatory creep””, which we find so often in other fields of regulation. I emphasise as I did when promoting the previous amendment that, because this is a self-financing scheme, it is particularly important that those who are paying for this regulatory regime are very clear about what they are getting for their money. The present structure of the Bill does not provide that.