Legal Services Bill [HL]

The noble Lord makes an important point, and one that I have discussed with those who drafted the amendment. Do you have a sunset clause at all? If you have one, after what period can you decide that whatever new provisions you have introduced are either working or not working? I agree that it is a key part of all this, but again in many ways we are probing all the time. I would compare this with the conditional fee arrangements, which came in against a background of general acceptance by everyone concerned that we had to try to find a way of making access to justice work, given that the civil legal aid fund would no longer have the necessary resources to allow the old system to continue. We therefore had to find a way of ensuring access to justice. I pay tribute to the previous Lord Chancellor, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, for trying to find a route whereby we could introduce access to justice under conditional fee arrangements. As I pointed out at the time, however, there was no real research into how those CFAs were going to operate, and there was no constant monitoring. Much of the information technology that was necessary did not come in in time. In fact, although the judges wanted to direct some of the cases under the new civil law procedures themselves, they had to go outside and use public telephone boxes because telephones had not been installed. The thing started to go wrong, but there was no constant monitoring to highlight what was going wrong and put it right, with the result that we are now constantly trying to revise CFAs. As we saw with the Compensation Act, CFAs have resulted in the growth of claims management companies, which should have been avoided. I do not think that anyone realised how many people would suffer as a result of TAG and then Claims Direct going into liquidation, but that was an aspect of CFAs. I do not think that we really anticipated that. Had there been a study and an advisory group as well as the constant need for a report to be given to the House, we may well have avoided many of those situations. At the very least, they would have been flagged up at an earlier stage so that we could have done something about them. When we have this sense of uncertainty about what exactly will happen, particularly with the effect on access to justice, I hope that my amendment—again, I am grateful to the Law Society of Scotland for drafting it—gives the Committee cause to reflect on the best way forward to ensure that we do not fall into the sort of traps that we have seen before, when uncertainty has ruled the day and events have taken place that have militated against the whole purpose of this new legislation. I beg to move.