Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am grateful for the last intervention, since I, too, came to the subject very late in our deliberations, when this new amendment was tabled. The old Latin tag of construction, "““inclusio unius est exclusio alterius””," popped into my head and I wondered whether we had a series of regulatory objectives applying to the Office for Legal Complaints that were different and that excluded one of the criteria or objectives. There would be considerable uncertainty about why that was so. My mind is by no means closed on this, but if the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, were to come up with some specific examples of where it would be inappropriate to apply some of the proposed regulatory objectives to all the bodies that the Bill seeks to regulate or to provide the means for regulating, then perhaps the case might be a little stronger. In principle, it is likely that each case considered by the Office for Legal Complaints or the Legal Services Board would give rise to different factual circumstances, which may mean that different weights would be given to different objectives. But I think that the objectives broadly spelt out—particularly if they are amended to include the general objective of the public interest—would be pretty transferable between the bodies to which the Bill applies.