Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 109: 109: Clause 110, page 60, line 1, at beginning insert ““Subject to certain exceptions,”” The noble Lord said: I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 137 to 139. Amendments Nos. 114A and 129A in the group have been tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. Amendments Nos. 109, 137 and 139, in sum, provide for the delegation of complaints handling to an approved regulator by direction of the Legal Services Board. When such a direction is given, the approved regulator would be empowered to award redress to the complainant, which is currently prohibited by Clause 154. The Legal Services Board would continue to have power to vary or withdraw a direction although, in deciding whether to give, vary or withdraw, it would be bound to act compatibly with the regulatory objectives of the Bill. The intended system is described in Part 6, which sets out provisions for the establishment of a new independent complaints-handling body, the Office for Legal Complaints—the OLC. The OLC is not the first port of call. All legal service providers will be required to establish an in-house system for dealing with complaints. If that system responds to the complainant satisfactorily, matters will end there. If not, the second stage is activated, and that is the stage that involves the OLC. It will consider complaints that have not been satisfactorily dealt with by the in-house arrangement. Under Part 6, it is intended that the OLC will investigate consumer service complaints, but will refer complaints about misconduct to the approved regulator. However, as the Bill is presently drafted, the approved regulator will no longer have the power to award redress, even in respect of complaints about conduct. This structure is of particular concern to the Bar, which considers it inappropriate. The vast majority of complaints against lawyers concern solicitors. That is not really surprisingsince there are about 115,000 solicitors, but only 14,000 practising barristers, and solicitors are most intimately involved with clients; so one would expect the volume of complaints to be higher. However, the proportions are startling: something like 85 per cent of complaints are about the conduct of solicitors. The number of complaints against barristers is typically well under 1,000 a year, and the total cost to the Bar for dealing with them is little more than £500,000 a year. The Bar estimates that, in future, complaints will account for no more than about 3 per cent of the work of the OLC. The principal difficulty about complaints against members of the Bar is that in about three-quarters of cases it is extremely difficult to distinguish between complaints that involve inadequate professional service and complaints that involve misconduct. We share the Bar’s view that the approved regulators should be in a position to deal with both aspects at the same time. There are a number of reasons for that. It is inconvenient for consumers to have to deal with two different bodies regarding different aspects of a single complaint. It would also be confusing, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, pointed out at Second Reading, if one body accepts the facts to which the complaint related but the other did not. In any case, there is bound to be duplication of work and the potential for inconsistency of treatment. There can be no question about the high standards that the Bar has met so far in dealing with complaints. That has been endorsed on more than one occasion by the Legal Services Ombudsman. She was reported, for example, in the Lawyer of 20 March 2006 atpage 18 as saying: "““There are substantial delays in the way the Law Society handles its casework. The Bar Council is better at it. I think the Bar Council continually tries and reviews and improves on its processes. Invariably I find it does what it has said””." The Legal Services Ombudsman in her annual report for 2005 said that the Bar Council achieves a very high rating from her office, "““one that is substantially higher than that of other professional bodies””." She concluded: "““The Bar Council seeks to ensure not only that it is complying with its own procedures, but that it offers a fair, consistent and good-quality service generally to the consumers who use its services””." Those findings were again echoed in her most recent annual report, when she commented that: "““The Bar Council continues to deliver good results in respect of speed of service””" and that the number of investigations with which she is satisfied has risen to 88 per cent. Apart from the high quality of the disciplinary service that the Legal Services Ombudsman finds the Bar disciplinary authority attains, there is the distinct, though linked, question of cost. At the moment, a very substantial input into the Bar’s investigation is made by well established qualified barristers at no cost to the investigation. By contrast, if the investigations are undertaken otherwise, it will often be by persons who are not legally qualified, and who may not be able to distinguish issues which a qualified person would. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, addressed that matter at Second Reading. In the absence of the delegation recommended by the amendment, it is clear that the Bar would be involved in a great deal of extra expense. So, in addition to the high quality of the approved regulator in the Bar’s case, it will also be a much more economical system to operate. Amendment No. 109 is a paving amendment for Amendment No. 137, which will insert a new clause after Clause 139 providing for the delegation of complaints handling to an approved regulator by the direction of the Legal Services Board. Amendment No. 138 will amend Clause 154 to protect the position of consumers whose complaints are outside the jurisdiction of the legal ombudsman’s scheme. That is inserted because the Bill excludes any corporate or quasi-corporate complainant from the scheme, which seems to us unjust. Amendment No. 139 complements Amendment No. 137, amending Clause 154(1) to enable an approved regulator to award redress to a complainant, which Part 6 otherwise prohibits. In conclusion, I ought to remind the Committee, although I am sure that it already has it in mind, that the Joint Committee recommended that the OLC should have the power to refer service as well as conduct complaints to an approved regulator where it considered it appropriate. I beg to move.