Legal Services Bill [HL]

That is not how I see it from my perspective, if I may say so to the noble and learned Baroness. It is also about the service that you are providing to the consumer—we spent some time discussing the definition of ““consumer””—in terms of the credibility of the organisation and of what we have sought to do. If all we do is say, ““Actually, what we are really doing is regulating the Law Society””, and we are dealing with complaints regarding the Law Society—in what noble Lords have indicated this evening is a system that might be considered to have been less than successful or possibly a failure, depending on where one sits on this—we have not done what we set out to do. We set out to think about complaints across the legal professions. There is no suggestion in what we are doing of saying, ““Everyone is a failure; therefore we need to do this in this way””. If you are going to have legal complaints dealt with by the Office for Legal Complaints, it needs to deal with all of them. From the consumer or client perspective, that is very important. Noble Lords may have been in discussion with members of the Bar who disagree with that, and I, too, have had the pleasure of conversations with members of the Bar who disagree with it. But from the Government’s perspective, it is very clear. If you want to have a system that builds confidence, you have a system that deals with complaints across the legal professions. Within that, we have made it clear that the expertise and experience can be bought in; but the decision-maker is the OLC. The difficulty that we would have relates to the delegation of the decision-making. I take on what noble Lords have said about the way in which the amendments have been framed, but as far as we are concerned it is important to have it crystal clear that the Office for Legal Complaints makes the decision.