Legal Services Bill [HL]

There is an issue which I did not mention but have been thinking about. I talked about the principles upon which we operate and about the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments, which works across government. The implication of the amendment could be that a Minister appointing in this set of circumstances did not agree with those principles and would prefer something else. I am not suggesting that any Minister would go by a different set of principles, but let us go through the theoretical proposition. I am a bit nervous about the language that the noble Lord has chosen because it implies that a choice rests with the individual. We believe that there are clear guidelines and principles for appointments made by Ministers; the commissioner has a duty to engage with the Minister at the moment of appointment. The Minister is in that process, because that is the right and proper process; I agree that processes change over time—indeed, the code of practice has been updated to reflect changes in thinking—but I would not want to give the individual Minister the right to disagree with the principles and do something different, and the amendment provides the potential to achieve that.