Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 49: 49: Clause 31 , page 15, line 32, leave out ““an”” and insert ““a significant”” The noble Lord said: These amendments again raise the issue of trigger conditions for regulatory action by the LSB, this time by ensuring that the board can exercise its powers only following a significant rather than a merely marginal adverse impact on the regulatory objectives. Under the new regulatory regime established by the Bill we again emphasise that lead responsibility is intended to rest with the approved regulators. Under the new regime for approved regulators, with the splitting of the regulatory and representative arms, the regulatory bodies will be appointed on known principles and there will be substantial lay involvement. In those circumstances the approved regulators are entitled to expect considerable discretion to act on their own analysis of what is appropriate. The board should not exercise its powers simply because it would have reached a different decision. As long as the board is satisfied that the approved regulator has taken into consideration all the factors that it should have done, the fact that the board might disagree with the decision of an approved regulator should not be grounds for intervention. If it were, then in effect the board would become a front-line regulator, which is precisely what the noble Baroness says that the Bill does not intend to do. Again, as the Government themselves said in their response to the Joint Committee, the Legal Services Board should exercise its powers only when an approved regulator is ““clearly failing””. Those are the Government’s own words. In our submission the Bill as it stands does not reflect this philosophy as it allows intervention whenever there is evidence of adverse impact, whether significant or not. To bring to life the Government’s own vision of a light-touch regulator that intrudes only when one of the professional bodies is ““clearly failing””, there must be some qualifying adjective. We have suggested the word ““significant””, but ““serious”” is another possibility. Any sort of impact or qualification would be better than simply an adverse impact. I beg to move.