Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am not sure that my twelfth intervention will make a huge amount of difference. For the benefit of noble Lords who have not had the joy of participating in debates or reading Hansard, let me say that we were looking at two things: first, whether you had a situation where the board gets all the changes and then makes a decision on whether it wishes to have certain changes exempt from the process or with minimal review by the board; and, secondly, whether the board at the beginning says, ““We don’t want to see the following things? and that only those it wished to see should come forward. We looked at the matter in great detail. We considered how it would look if we redrafted it, and we had a good think about it. It is a choice we had to make, which I still think is the right one. We sought to say that our principle in setting up this new framework would be that changes should be sent to the board and that the board can say, either in the course of receiving those changes or, indeed, in advance, that it does not wish to receive certain ones, that some can be exempt and that some require merely minimal approval. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, made a point about wanting to have the code of practice changes. I note his tribute to my noble friend Lord Brennan, which I share. We would want those done in the same way. We do not want this process to be bureaucratic. The question really came down to whether it is right that the board in advance says, ““We don’t need to see any of the following aspects?, or should it receive them and then make a decision later about which it wishes to have exempt. So the question was: did the decision on that rest with the board or the regulator? It is not a question of trust. We hope that this will be one ofthe ways they will work closely together in partnership. However, we felt that it was important to leave the matter with the board. It was a choice we made. We do not think that the outcome will be hugely different because we believe that the board will swiftly move to say, ““It is quite clear there are areas where we do not need to see the changes that are being made, or where we can deal with them very quickly?. What I do know is—not in this area but in other areas of life—that small changes sometimes have big effects. Therefore, it is important for the new regime to enable the board to see the kind of changes being made and to be able to consider the effects being made. That was a decision we took.