Legal Services Bill [Lords]

No, that is not what I am saying. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman’s lack of knowledge of the trade union movement is rising to the surface. The work that lay officials of trade unions do on behalf of their members, whether in employment tribunals and elsewhere, is generally of a very high quality. I do not want trade union members to be any less well-off than anyone else, and I want to ensure that they are not. We have been working with the TUC and the Law Society to deal with that matter, and I think that we have agreed an appropriate way forward. Under part 6 of the Bill, every authorised person must have internal complaints-handling arrangements, and approved regulators must set standards for that. The Bill recognises the importance of the legal professions disciplining their members, and provides for potential professional misconduct matters to be referred to approved regulators for consideration of disciplinary action. There are two areas in which amendments were made in another place. First, there were amendments to restrict the circumstances in which the OLC may impose a charge on a respondent when a complaint is received, as under the case fee arrangements operated by the Financial Ombudsman Service. Again, I have sympathy for the arguments expressed in the other place, but the Bill already provides for that fee to be reduced or waived, and I am not yet fully convinced of the merits of restricting the OLC’s flexibility in that way. I therefore intend to table amendments to reverse those changes. Secondly, following calls primarily—or, I suspect, exclusively—from the Bar, amendments were made providing for the delegation of complaints handling from the OLC back to the legal professional bodies. That point was raised earlier. That change defeats the whole purpose of this part of the Bill, and flies in the face of the deepest felt consumer concerns about complaints handling. Indeed, even the Law Society’s complaints-handling body accepts that"““delegation of complaints handling would dilute the Bill and the Office for Legal Complaints and be more complicated for consumers. The Bar Council seeking to ‘opt-out’ weakens the structure of the Bill and the Office for Legal Complaints.””" I agree. As far as consumers are concerned, that is a clear red line. I shall, therefore, table amendments to reverse those changes, and I shall be interested to hear the views of the House on that important issue.