Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for trailing the amendments standing in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford. He is right in describing their purpose, which is not to empower the Legal Services Board to initiate new investigations but, rather, to give it a power that already exists in the hands of the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner, for which no provision is made in the Bill. It is the power to intervene if the OLC is failing to meet the purposes for which it has been established and to consider strategically what is being done by the OLC. If the OLC is not seen to be handling complaints effectively and efficiently, some such power is required. The purpose of my amendments is to spell out how those powers might be exercisable. It is important, and I understood it to be an underlying purpose of the Bill, that the whole system of legal complaints should be subject to independent scrutiny and review. If the operational decisions by the Office for Legal Complaints are not giving rise to the satisfaction that it is hoped that they will elicit, the system ought to provide a remedy. That is the purpose of the three amendments that I have tabled.