Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 14: 14: Schedule 1 , page 112, line 26, leave out ““never been”” and insert ““not within the last ten years practised as”” The noble Lord said: Amendment No. 14 concerns the definition of a ““lay person””. Paragraph 2(4) of Schedule 1 contains the definition of a lay person, which prohibits, in all circumstances, anyone who has been, "““an authorised person in relation to an activity which is a reserved legal activity””." In other words, it prohibits anyone qualifying as a lay person who at any stage of their career has been a professionally qualified lawyer. In our submission, this prohibition is too severe. I am sure that the noble Baroness can think of a number of examples, as I can, of individuals who, at a very early stage of their lives, qualified as a solicitor or a barrister, and might or might not have practised for a few years, and then went on to do something entirely different, perhaps for as many as 20 years. It seems to me to be unnecessarily limiting the field for selection to exclude people of that sort. Indeed, one might well argue that they were particularly well qualified because they had knowledge of the profession and yet had sufficiently wide experience outside it to put their knowledge in perspective. In sum, we believe that the definition in the schedule is too absolutist and that the Government should qualify it in the way that we have set out in the amendment, or find some other way of including that class of people who have had an early experience of the profession and who have moved on to other activities which would otherwise qualify them as lay people, had it not been for the fact that they became professionally qualified and briefly practised early in their career. I beg to move.