Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, all of us who tabled the amendment are extremely fortunate that it was introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen. He brings to what he said the enormous prestige of his career. He has been chairman of the Bar and chairman of the Senate of the Inns of Court, and he has had a towering practice at the Bar for many years, as well as great experience of public life in different roles. The mere fact that the amendment was introduced by the noble Lord ought to take us to at least a 75 per cent chance of victory, even before the Minister stands up and speaks. When the Minister does stand up and speak in the next few minutes, I anticipate that she will say three things. She will underline the point, made by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, that the Lord Chief Justice is a lawyer, although she may not make that point quite as strongly as she would have done had the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, not spoken in the intervening period. Nevertheless, given the fate ofthe noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor over the past few years, it may well be just a matter of time before there is no requirement for the Lord Chief Justice to be a lawyer, either. I hope that it will not come to that. Two other points that I know the Minister will make deserve more weight in my reply. First, we already have the guarantee of the Nolan procedure to select the chairman of the Legal Services Board. The noble Baroness is right: the rules will apply. But the advertisement and terms of reference for the appointment are drafted solely by the Government. The chairman of the selection committee is almost invariably a senior civil servant. Although I have enormous respect for the Civil Service, particularly for its senior branch, that is an insufficient guarantee of the independence that your Lordships’ House seeks. Secondly, the Minister will say that the Legal Services Board is a regulatory authority and that the chairman will be like the chairman of any other regulatory authority, such as that for electricity, gas or communications—Ofcom, for example. In those circumstances, the Secretary of State always has the last word on who gets the post, so why should it be any different for legal services? The Minister will say that legal services are just like those other public services. That argument is totally misleading. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice, put his finger on the essential reason why: the intimate link between the independence of the judiciary and that of the Bar and the solicitor’s profession. The link is particularly close because of our adversarial system. When a judge listens to counsel arguing in front of him, he takes it for granted that they are people of probity, that all the evidence relevant to the case will be brought before him by those lawyers and that nothing will be hidden. If one or other of those lawyers knows something that is adverse to his case, he will put that evidence before the court. If you do not have an independent legal profession appearing in front of the judiciary, the judiciary cannot take independent decisions, because it does not have independent and dispassionate evidence on which to base them. You cannot have an independent judiciary without an independent legal profession appearing in front of it. Why, on the one hand, were the Government so obsessed with ensuring that the selection of judges be done wholly separately from the government mechanism by the Judicial Appointments Commission, with another commission to select that, yet in this case they endorse a selection that is done solely by somebody who everybody now accepts is likely to be, in future, a person without a legal qualification? The independence of the judiciary and the profession are intimately linked. The approach of the Judicial Appointments Commission, and the manner in which it is appointed, is the correct one for the appointment of the chairman of the Legal Services Board. I urge the Minister to be influenced by what she has heard tonight and to change her position on the amendment.