Legal Services Bill [HL]

The noble Lord is correct; we are not making a distinction, because the Bill makes no distinction between service and conduct complaints handling. Complainants will be able, in a sense, to have a one-stop shop for their complaints. Often, if you are complaining about service, regardless of what that service is, you have a complaint about how things were handled, about the way you were treated, or whatever, and you may not, as a consumer, as an ordinary member of the public, necessarily know whether that is about the conduct of the individual or whether it is just a matter of poor service. Frankly, why should you? You write or make contact to say that you have a problem that needs to be addressed. The distinction, as the noble Lord says, is who provides redress and who can deal with disciplinary matters. I do not think that there is a huge difficulty between the wits of the organisations concerned to deal with consumers effectively in relation those two issues. So I am less worried about that—the Financial Services Ombudsman operates in the same way and it seems to work well. We do not have a difficulty here.