Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his remarks about the meeting that I had yesterday with both organisations. It was a very good meeting. I plan to correspond with them and to put copies of the correspondence in your Lordships’ House. There were misunderstandings on a number of issues that I was very pleased to clear up and which I shall set down in writing. We discussed the issue that the noble Lord has brought forward in this amendment. I do not think that it will come as any surprise that I shall not accept the amendment but I am mindful of three points which I discussed with the organisations yesterday and which are worth commenting on. The first concerns the issue that I believe we have already touched on; that is, making sure that regulation is simple and straightforward to enable the firms which, as the noble Lord rightly says, are perfectly legal and are doing a fine job, to be regulated without feeling that it is a burdensome or additional pressure. The second issue that we discussed was cost. We will continue to talk about our desire to make sure that it is not in any way a prohibitive feature of what we put in place. The Bill is deliberately flexible to allow that. The third issue that they were concerned about was the transitional time. Again, I am very keen to hear their thoughts and views on what that might be, so that we can have a discussion on how to approach that. I am not minded to allow an exemption, not surprisingly, because the way in which the amendment works would mean that it would be a widespread exemption. I know what the noble Lord is seeking to achieve. We know that a number of the firms concerned would, under Clause 106, fit in the low risk, 10 per cent status. Those will have rules modified to suit the lower risk that they present. As I have indicated, we are in discussion with them about their concerns about how it would work in practice. I am not minded to exempt, but I am very clear that we want to make sure that this works effectively for them, that it is not burdensome, that we deal with issues of cost, and that the transitional period is appropriate. I hope that we will be able to allay their fears in that way, which may get us not quite to the same point, but at least to the point where they will be content.