Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, for giving me the opportunity to talk about the role of the OLC. As he said, the amendments are similar to those in respect of the Legal Services Board which we debated on the first day of Committee. Let us be clear that the OLC is a completely different organisation from the LSB. First, it is subordinate to the Legal Services Board; the Legal Services Board approves its budget and its rules. Secondly, it will not be involved in the regulation of the legal profession, so concerns about its independence are different from those which were expressed in respect of the Legal Services Board. The role of the members of the Office for Legal Complaints will be to make rules about how the complaints scheme will work; to appoint the chief ombudsman and any assistant ombudsman; generally to run and manage the organisation in which the ombudsman and caseworkers will work, including managing the budget that has been agreed with the Legal Services Board; and to prepare the annual report on its performance of those functions. Looking at the two amendments in that context, at the moment we have set the size of the Office of Legal Complaints at between six and eight members plus the chairman. Paragraph 4 of Schedule 15 sets out a list of nine areas of which we consider it desirable for members of the OLC between them to have knowledge or experience—the handling of complaints, the provision of legal services, legal education and legal training, consumer affairs, civil or criminal proceedings and the working of the courts, the maintenance of the professional standards of persons who provide legal services, non-commercial legal services, the differing needs of consumers, and the provision of claims management services. While we hope that the members of the OLC will have this knowledge and experience between them once it is set up, that may not always be the case. We want to create a system with enough flexibility. For example, if there were six candidates with good experience of the first five attributes set out in paragraph 4, but with little experience of the last four, the LSB might want to appoint further people to fill those skills gaps. Unless there was some way of making the Office of Legal Complaints bigger, that could not happen. On the other hand, we do not want the OLC to become so large that it is unnecessarily bureaucratic or costly. We are trying to balance the interests of both the consumer and the profession. The Secretary of State, who is accountable to Parliament, is best placed to do that and that is why that power exists under Schedule 15. On Amendment No. 113, I have explained the differences between the OLC and the LSB, and those differences are also important in respect of this amendment. Under paragraph 8(2) of Schedule 15, members of the OLC, including the chairman, cannot be removed unless they have failed without reasonable excuse to discharge the functions of the Office of Legal Complaints for a continuous period of six months, have been convicted of an offence, are an undischarged bankrupt, or are otherwise unfit to hold the office or unable to discharge its functions. Members of the OLC are appointed by the LSB and can be removed by the LSB only if those conditions are met. The requirement that the Secretary of State, who is accountable to Parliament, consents to the removal of the chairman does not affect the independence of the OLC in carrying out its duties. Instead, it acts as a check on precipitate or unreasonable removal of the chairman by the Legal Services Board. That is a different proposition to that which the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lyell, are concerned about.