Legal Services Bill [HL]

I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Brennan. It is important to take the balanced approach that has been earlier contended for. There are times, when I read literature that I receive from the National Consumer Council and when I listen to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—for whom I have the greatest respect and indeed for whom I had the greatest admiration when he was on the Front Bench—that I think that they see the Legal Services Board as the consumer council writ large. If the suspicions expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, were to form a part of the ethos of a Legal Services Board with a lay chairman and a majority of lay members, it would be asking for trouble; it would be a bad day for the legal profession as a whole. When the board considers how to use its powers, it should not take a single contravention, as it sees it, of one of the objectives as a trigger. It should look at whatever objectives may be involved—it will not be seven; it may be two or three—and decide whether there is a sufficient case for it to intervene. That is not fudging; it is sensible.