Legal Services Bill [HL]

I have enormous respect for the noble Baroness. She always thinks and applies her mind very carefully, but I seriously believe that she is quite wrong on this and that she will find she is muddled when she looks at what she has said. However, she has said one thing that is completely right and which should be her lodestar. She said that the objective is that the scheme should be operated in an equitable manner. That is absolutely right. Therefore, to be equitable, it must follow that if a complaint is made against someone which turns out to be unfounded, it would be totally unfair for that person then to be charged the cost of that complaint having been made. Before the noble Baroness intervenes—I can anticipate what she might say—I ask her to reflect on this. She started talking about frivolous and vexatious complaints and the opportunity of the OLC to refund costs, and so on, in certain circumstances. I believe we need to have firmly on the face of the Bill the obligation to do what is fair. I believe that what my noble friend has put forward in his amendments does that in a perfectly straightforward way. Perhaps the noble Baroness wishes to go away and think about other ways of making it perfectly clear that the OLC must be fair. I hope that she will agree that it would be almost impossible to devise a circumstance in which someone had had a complaint made against them which had proved to be unfounded yet it was fair to charge them for that, unless something in their conduct had been unreasonable and had brought the complaint on them. That particular wrinkle might be properly dealt with in rules, but the principle must be set out on the face of the Bill. At the moment it is not and I sincerely believe that the noble Baroness is not quite on the right lines at present.