Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 249: 249: Clause 81 , page 47, line 4, after ““make? insert ““suitable? The noble Baroness said: My Lords, in moving the amendment, I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 250, 251, 257 and 276. I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, for raising the point in Committee on 6 February about the role that the LSB would play as a licensing authority. I agreed to look at the drafting of Clause 81, and said that I would explore further possible amendments to emphasise the Government’s policy intentions in this area more clearly. After further consideration, I concluded that the general obligation in Clause 81(1), which provides that the board is required to make licensing rules within12 months of a date set by the Secretary of State—now the Lord Chancellor—should be amended, and that the board will have to make licensing rules only when there is evidence and a decision made under Schedule 12 that the board needs to act. That is when there is no other licensing authority with suitable arrangements in place for a particular type of body, or in the case of non-commercial bodies, there is no licensing authority able to offer appropriate terms. That approach reinforces the role that the Bill sets for the board as a licensing authority of last resort and avoids requiring the board to automatically make licensing rules. This would have required it to formulate different sets of licensing rules for categories of bodies that it may never have needed to license. The amendment provides that the board writes licensing rules only when there is a clear need for it to do so, which allows the board to focus on its primary role of oversight regulator during the crucial time of implementation, while assuring existing regulators that it will not be competing with them to formulate licensing rules. I am confident that this amendment reinforces our intention that the board should act only as a licensing authority as a last resort and should not compete with other approved regulators. Again, with grateful thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, for raising the matter, I beg to move.