Legal Services Bill [Lords]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. I am absolutely delighted that, at last, after much debate in the other place, the Bill has finally reached this House. It is an especially important Bill because above all it puts consumer interests at the heart of legal services provision. The consumer focus, as the volume and nature of amendments in the other place show, was clearly forgotten during the Bill’s long and drawn-out six-month passage there, so I now look forward to this House reacquainting the Bill with its real purpose. This is our opportunity to give voice to the needs and aspirations of consumers as opposed to providers of legal services. Before I deal with the Bill, let me pay tribute to Citizens Advice, the Federation of Small Businesses, the National Consumer Council, the Office of Fair Trading and Which? and particularly to the members of those organisations who have worked tirelessly on the Government’s consumer advisory panel to inform and shape the Bill and to ensure that it properly reflects the consumer interest. I am, of course, also grateful to leaders and members of the legal profession who have welcomed our agenda for reform and who have engaged with the Government, sometimes very constructively, in the development of the Bill. I also want to acknowledge the hard work and foresight of Sir David Clementi, whose independent review and report in December 2004 set very solid foundation stones for our proposals. For too long, regulation of legal services has focused on the suppliers of those services at the expense of the consumer. It has been the consistent message from consumers, who have told us loud and clear—as, indeed, did Sir David Clementi—that their needs are simply not being met. In particular, they told us that they were not satisfied with the way that legal services were delivered, as the focus was on what suited the provider as opposed to the consumer; that they had lost confidence in self-regulation alone; and that their experiences of poor complaints handling had undermined their confidence in the system as a whole. Let us look at some of the underlying problems. Bad experiences with poorly handled complaints, dealt with by the providers’ own bodies, have not only given consumers a raw deal, but undermined the confidence that we all should have in our legal profession. Problems with the quality and speed of the handling of complaints about solicitors are well documented: it is a headline story, but it is not just a problem with the Law Society. In fact, based on figures from the office of the legal services ombudsman, we can see that a higher proportion of the total number of consumer complaints against barristers over the last three years were found to have been handled unsatisfactorily than when compared with complaints about solicitors.