Legal Services Bill [HL]

I, too, have appeared on behalf of a barrister before the Bar Council’s disciplinary proceedings. He was charged with having failed to manage his diary to such an effect that he was in two courts at once. On the other side of things, I declare that I have advised people who have been in trouble with the Law Society. The price of referring to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, as the sole voice of the consumer in previous debates means that I have been asked by him and others to speak to his amendments, which are contrary to everything I said at Second Reading—it has been said much more fluently by my noble friend Lord Carlile. It is necessary to look at the larger picture in this part of the Bill. The current position is that the Law Society and the Bar Council have their own disciplinary procedures. A Legal Services Ombudsman was set up under the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 to accept individual complaints. The Legal Services Ombudsman reviews individual complaints that are handled by all six regulators. I will refer only to the Bar Council and the Law Society because setting out the whole list every time will no doubt weary noble Lords. Complainants can go to the existing Legal Services Ombudsman. The Legal Services Complaints Commissioner was established under the Access to Justice Act 1999 because the Law Society was failing to handle its complaints, and the current Legal Services Ombudsman, Zahida Manzoor, was appointed Legal Services Complaints Commissioner as well. It has been her function to review the systems and processes in relation to complaints—not individual cases but the way in which the Law Society deals with its complaints. She sets targets, makes recommendations, and last year fined the Law Society for failing to provide an appropriate plan for improving complaints handling. She found that the Law Society had failed in five out of seven targets she had set, so undoubtedly the Law Society’s complaints system has not been functioning at all well. On the other hand, as my noble friend Lord Carlile and the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, have both pointed out, Zahida Manzoor stated in her report that the performance of the Bar Council complaints system was extremely good and that she was satisfied with 88 per cent of the small number of investigations she had to carry out in relation to the Bar. We therefore have a complete imbalance: the Law Society system is failing and the Bar Council system is succeeding in the terms mentioned by my noble friend. Now we are to introduce a new system through this Bill. The positions of Legal Services Ombudsman and Legal Services Complaints Commissioner are to be abolished. The monitoring done by Zahida Manzoor and her office will be thrown out of the window, and that is an end to that. Instead we are to have the Office for Legal Complaints, which is to control both the Law Society and the Bar Council and to monitor what they do. That sounds good, but the Law Society’s failing system was based in Leamington Spa. It has already been announced that the new Office for Legal Complaints will be set up in the West Midlands, and the people who now work for the failed system, whose activities have been criticised so heavily, have been given an assurance that the TUPE regulations will apply to them. That means that they are entitled to a job in the new organisation that will replace the failed one. Noble Lords can appreciate how the Bar feels about that. Its system is low in cost and has highly qualified people always acting de bono. It is successful, but now it is to be lumped in not only with the Law Society but also with the bones of the failed organisation. Obviously that is the motivation behind the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland: why should the Bar Council system be ruined by being thrown in with a failed organisation? That is likely to happen, and I shall make more criticisms of that in later amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty—I speak as an advocate here because I want to put forward his point of view, and I am under a duty to do so—has spotted the flaw in the Government’s position: if they allow the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and the OLC can devolve its disciplinary procedures and complaints system back to the Bar, and if they allow that to happen with the patent agents, who have a very successful system, the trademark people and so on, what will they be left with? They will be left with the OLC and probably a rebadged Law Society complaints system. They will have abolished the Legal Services Ombudsman and the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner, who monitored what that failed organisation did and imposed discipline upon it. I have already said that Miss Manzoor has fined the Law Society and has made severe criticisms of what it does. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, spotted this problem, and his amendments are designed to prevent any delegation of the powers of the OLC back to either the Bar Council or the other organisations that are operating well. If that does not happen, the whole system will be a complete waste of money. Rebadge the Law Society complaints system, call it something else, delegate the powers back to the Bar Council’s Bar Standards Board, which is doing a very good job, and so on, and you have spent £35 million only to have achieved the abolition of the ombudsman and the services commissioner, who exercised some discipline over the Law Society. That is why the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has put forward his amendment. I have endeavoured to advance the case that the noble Lord would have advanced and to explain to the Committee what he would have said, although he might have put it slightly differently. Putting on a different hat and speaking from the Front Bench of the Liberal Democrats, we wholly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland.