Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am sorry that the noble Lord does not agree with me. I want to make one point about a matter that puzzles me. One of the threads of our deliberations in Committee over the past few days—it feels longer—has been to ensure that there is the right level of accountability. Noble Lords—particularly those with professional experience within the legal world—have been concerned about issues such as public interest and making sure that no funny business can go on. One issue that I have been interested in in this Bill—as the noble Lord knows, it is not my policy area, so in a sense I look at it in a slightly fresh way—involves providing the opportunity for Parliament to be able to hold to account when you have independent bodies. The traditional way, which has worked through generations of different Governments, has been that the Secretary of State and the Lord Chancellor—I agree that it should involve the Lord Chancellor—are able to be held to account. If there was a feeling that the Legal Services Board had acted inappropriately for whatever reason—we do not expect that and I know that noble Lords do not do so—the Secretary of State would have to have agreed that and would be accountable to Parliament, a Select Committee or whatever for that decision. To remove that is in a sense to move away from what I understood to be one of the threads underlying the Bill.