Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 110A: 110A: After Clause 111, insert the following new Clause— ““Regulatory objectives of the Office of Legal Complaints In this Part a reference to the ““regulatory objectives”” is a reference to the objectives of protecting and promoting the interests of consumers, having regard to the public interest.”” The noble Lord said: The noble Baroness may recall that, on the first day in Committee, I suggested that a better approach to the structure of the Bill would be to have a separate set of regulatory objectives for each of the three regulatory bodies:the Legal Services Board, the Office for Legal Complaints and the various approved regulators. The principle for this series of amendments is to remove problems caused by drawing an artificially wide set of objectives to encompass each of the bodies. I refer to Clause 1(1), which contains the seven objectives. At an earlier stage in Committee, I think I said that they were too loosely defined to give specific guidance to each individual regulator and that in some cases the objectives were clearly inappropriate. Part 6 deals with the Office for Legal Complaints (OLC). The amendment is designed to invite the Government to consider very carefully what regulatory objectives they should give to the OLC. We believe that the main, if not the only, purpose of the OLC should be to protect the interests of consumers. Its task must be complaints handling and seeking the best result for individual clients. Of course, attention should be paid to the wider public interest in the exercise of its powers, so that has been included in the drafting of the amendment; but the interest of the consumer must be paramount in its case. We simply do not understand why the OLC should be concerned with promoting competition. What does access to justice have to do with the OLC? It should be a complaints-handling body. Why give it the power to promote the independence or diversity of the legal profession? Those are matters for the board or the approved regulators. Giving the OLC unnecessary regulatory objectives will give it a licence to act beyond its remit. As well as allowing it to interfere where it should not have any right to interfere, it could jeopardise the exercise of its proper functions. As Members of the Committee identified in earlier debates, the regulatory objectives can conflict with each other in certain cases. If the OLC has to have regard to all seven objectives in reaching a decision, it could end up overlooking or even going against the one objective that has any justified relevance, which is the interests of consumers through the effective handling of complaints. I beg to move.