Legal Services Bill [HL]

I confess that I find the Minister's reply on this amendment somewhat disappointing. Although she has given some praise and support to the changes in regulations in respect of other professions and other bodies, and suggested that the rules applicable to them are, by general consent, working well, in this debate I do not believe that she has applied herself to regulation of the legal professions and services. Her tidy implication that what is good for the financial services in this country can be transferred simply to the legal professions seems to me to have ignored the special circumstances and the history of the independence of the legal professions and the provision of legal services. It is not entirely satisfactory to say that she will return to some of these arguments later, because this amendment has been advanced as a proposal very closely following the argument that was deployed by the Government in advocating the arrangements for the appointment of the judiciary in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Those arguments are much closer to the present circumstance that we are considering in this amendment than are the arguments about the regulation of financial services. It is extraordinary simply to seek to sidestep it. It is very difficult to understand where the objection comes from to what is proposed here. We are not picking holes in other systems of regulation, but what holes are the Government picking in this proposal? It seems to me that that has not even been hinted at.