Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am grateful for all the contributions. The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, reasonably refers us back to day one in Committee when we had some interesting discussions about the regulatory objectives. I know that he is thinking about what he will bring forward for us to consider in future. We begin, of course, with Sir David Clementi’s report. He said that we need to set out the regulatory framework principles that all the bodies concerned will adhere to. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, takes a different view, but that is the founding principle from our perspective: the principles apply to all partners involved in the regulatory framework. That is critical. We have also said—and, again, we discussed this on day one of the Committee—that the regulatory objectives may not always apply in the same way to all regulatory partners. I envisage that, once the board is established, we shall further clarify the different way the objectives apply to each of the regulatory bodies. That is perhaps something the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and I could discuss; it takes us to where his thinking was on day one—whether we need different objectives or the same objectives with different emphases, and so on. There is certainly room for discussion on that. I said on Clause 48 that the board can make policy statements. That may indeed be an appropriate medium where the board could define how the objectives might apply to each partner. Trying to set out separate objectives would be very difficult—in practical terms, impossible—because we want the cohesion and consistency that one set of objectives would give us. Like the noble Lord, Lord Neill, and my noble friend Lord Borrie, I would be concerned about limiting the OLC to a single objective as defined in the noble Lord’s amendment. Protecting and promoting the interests of consumers will be a fundamental principle for the OLC, but there will be times when other objectives need to be weighed against it. I shall give a different example: when the OLC is setting the charges payable by respondents under Clause 133, it will need to weigh up a broad range of considerations, not just the interests of consumers and the public. It will need to consider specifically the need to encourage an independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession, the need to promote competition in the provision of services and the importance of access to justice. Each of those objectives could be undermined if the OLC were acting solely in the interests of consumers, even if in doing so it had regard to the wider public interest. The same conflict could arise in relation to the desirability of the OLC assisting approved regulators to carry out their regulatory functions through information-sharing, as spelt out in Clause 141. Those issues, and the issues raised today, start to unravel as we begin to think about how to implement the amendment in practice. My view remains what it was on day one of Committee stage: the OLC should share the same overall regulatory objectives as the LSB, albeit with the ability to attach different weights to different objectives depending on the circumstances. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will be able to withdraw the amendment.