Legal Services Bill [HL]

This has been a debate of great passion and I will think very carefully about all that has been said. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Carnegy of Lour. I knew when I saw her in the Chamber that I needed to have the Scottish information in front of me. Indeed, she is absolutely right. The Scottish Parliament has taken a view on the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission and the role of the Lord President of the Court of Session exactly as she identified. I do not accept her briefing about the potential for some kind of superstructure. I have not received a copy myself, but I will look carefully at what the Law Society of Scotland is saying. I was trying to say in our previous debates, clearly not as effectively as I would wish, that the model of regulation is one from which I begin. It is not an attempt to say that I do not recognise the importance and value of the independence of the legal professions at all. It is to say that the model of regulation—because this is a regulatory regime—is the one from which we begin. But I take the points that have been made about independence. I hope that Committee Members will realise that although I will not agree to the amendments, I none the less understand the point that has been made and I am thinking carefully about these issues and listening very carefully to what has been said. I cannot resist going back to the 288 references, because I went through them on the back of what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, said at Second Reading. There were so many of them. A whole range of other clauses—45 clauses have been added over time—are actually about the Secretary of State being the conduit back to Parliament, so although it feels like a huge number, I ask Committee Members who are concerned about it to recognise that it is quite often the best and most effective way of making sure that, for example, we have affirmative action by the Government. Indeed, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee refers in a number of cases to that. Although it feels like a huge number, Committee Members should recognise that the vast majority are positive because they are ways in which Parliament is able to hold the Government to account about what is happening. My right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been very careful never actually to say that he expects to be Prime Minister. He has said that decisions will be made by whoever leads the Labour Party and is therefore Prime Minister. For my part, I will be perfectly delighted if he becomes Prime Minister, but he has never said it and I should make that clear. The noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, and other noble Lords made interesting points. I am grateful to the chairman of the Law Society and indeed the chairman of the Bar Council, who have discussed the international perspective with me. I will spend a weekend in Dresden with the Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting of Ministers under the presidency of the German Justice Minister, and I have already planned to talk to her about the position. I know that the German Bar has often been raised as an issue. I have also talked to the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, in my capacity as the representative of the DCA on European Union matters. She is very keen and interested in what we are doing on legal services and has a positive perspective about the opportunities that there could be. I have not received any representations of any kind from international bodies, and I do not believe that there have been any to the department about what this might do, but I will do my own research by talking to colleagues in other countries. If I find any information, I will put it to your Lordships’ House as well as to my colleagues in the department. The noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, also mentioned the value of pre-legislative scrutiny. I agree completely. The importance of that may be the only thing I agree with him completely about. My noble and learned friend’s remarks have been referred to two or three times. He was not referring to his own view of either the office or the office holder of Lord Chief Justice, which both he and I would hold in the highest esteem, both as an individual and as an office. He was referring to the perception that exists—of which I have heard. I am not saying for a second that it is correct, but there is a perception that the Lord Chief Justice is an eminent lawyer, of the profession and therefore part of it. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, talked about perception in the context of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Inevitably, if you are trying to deal with consumer confidence, you have to be alive to the issue of perception. It is not the prime reason why I do not accept the amendment, but it is important. My noble and learned friend was referring to that. He would be the first to argue the eminence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips, and the first at the barricades to support the role of the Lord Chief Justice, so I hope that his words will be taken in that context. I am positive that that is what he meant, having looked at Hansard. We should not forget that perception is important, and think about it in this context. There are lots of issues relating to the debate about concurrence or consultation. I understand what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, is saying and agree withthe differences that my noble friend made between the two. The noble Lord argued that you could not actually appoint somebody if you were doing it in consultation with anybody else and they disagreed with you. But other organisations would feel strongly that they should also be consulted, not least perhaps some of the more eminent consumer organisations that have worked closely on this Bill and feel passionately about the importance of the issue, and there may be others. We are not saying under any circumstances that the Lord Chancellor would not consult people; we are saying that we do not want that specified in the Bill. If an amendment were proposed to make a change about consultation, I fear that the Government would reject that too. We do not think that it is right to have one individual as the only person who would be consulted. There would be opportunities—indeed necessities—when the Secretary of State concerned would be keen to consult people about the right appointment.