Legal Services Bill [Lords]

The hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) was right: this is not a Bill for which colleagues have come in numbers from all parts of the UK to ensure that the first day back after the half-term break is the most exciting parliamentary event in the Commons before the new Prime Minister comes to his first Prime Minister’s Question Time. However, as colleagues have said, it is an important Bill. All the time I have been in this place—like many others, I came from a legal background—I have been conscious that the legal system has not always served the public in the way it should have done. In all my time here, there has been a regular trickle of complaints to me as an MP and when I have had responsibility for the subject, and to other colleagues, that the system has not been working. That has been a slow but long fuse, so it was right that the Government addressed the issue. As I have done before, I pay tribute to the Labour Government in 1997 for seeing the reform of the Courts Service, the justice services and therefore the legal services as an important matter of public policy. It is notable that the Bill is the first to come to the House of Commons from the new Ministry of Justice, under its new colours. That is important because this is a justice Bill. I want to start where the hon. Member for Stafford finished. Clause 1 sets out what the legal services of this country should be about. In parenthesis, I am going to have a slight carp. I always have a complaint about the way in which Bills are set out. It is frustrating that even now Bills are not written in the ways in which the public read things. To start a Bill with definitions, without saying whom one is defining and who has that obligation, strikes me as the wrong way around. I hope that we will be able to tidy that up, so that the Bill starts by saying, ““This Bill sets up the legal services board””—that comes in clause 2—““which has responsibility for making sure that the following are achieved””, and then sets out the objectives. If we are going to try to make the law of the land useable by consumers and non-lawyers, we need to write our legislation in such a way that non-lawyers would read it, as opposed to paying people to do that. Everyone else has declared their interest. It will not give the public huge confidence to hear everyone, apart from the Minister and other honourable exceptions, saying, ““I am a non-practising solicitor or barrister””. They will think that they cannot be up to speed as to what is going on. To exculpate colleagues, the answer is that people gave up their full-time jobs doing those things when they came here. People should do that. I am a non-practising member of the Bar, but still a member of chambers in King’s Bench Walk and I value my continuing links with that profession. This morning, I was at a meeting on behalf of a constituent at the headquarters of ACAS, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, which does a very good job. We all wish that more people would end up going to organisations such as mediation centres and ACAS, rather than to lawyers. One of the frustrations in our world is that we are producing a society in which people have increasingly to use lawyers. It is a reflection of the sort of society that we live in that the number of lawyers and accountants—those who make legal and financial interpretations—increases but the number of people who actually make things decreases. However, the fact is that there are more lawyers and there is more law—not least because we pass more law. I join others in paying tribute to Sir David Clementi and all those who have done the work that has led to us reaching our current position. The Bill seeks to address the difficult questions of how to produce a good complaints system and how to regulate in respect of people who are not directly a public service, or who are not a public service at all. As I was preparing over the weekend for today’s debate, I thought about the fact that we regulate and allow complaints in different ways. In terms of Government and local government, there are methods of complaining but they cannot be made to do anything. Because they are elected bodies, the ombudsman can recommend but they cannot tell them what to do—if Government or local government say no, there cannot be any further sanction. However, in recent years we have, for example, taken complaints against the police out of the hands of the police, and I strongly supported that; that is a public service and police officers are public servants and they should not investigate themselves. There is a halfway house in respect of doctors—how to deal with them was controversial for a long period. Doctors are generally independent but are contracted to the state. The body that regulates them is the General Medical Council—and there are similar bodies for nursing and dentistry. Therefore people working in the NHS—paid for with public money—are regulated by part-independent organisations. The question in the current debate is how to deal with lawyers. The hon. Member for Stafford made the point that a few years ago we addressed the same question in relation to the financial services industry, which is a private sector industry. We asked whether it should just be left to regulate itself, or if there should be some form of legislative control. We are asking ourselves the same question in this debate. There is a sound logical argument—especially for someone who is a liberal by conviction—that we should allow the market and those working in this field to regulate themselves. However, it is clear that that is unsatisfactory in relation to the public. The hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and others have pointed out over the years how unsatisfactory that has been. People abused their private-market position. Therefore we as a nation—or the nations of England and Wales in this instance—have come to the conclusion that we need a regulatory system. My next point has not been made explicitly, although the hon. Member for Bassetlaw made it indirectly in relation to miners’ compensation claims. It has often been the case—and it frequently remains the case, I think—that when people go to find a lawyer they do not know the professional qualification of the person with whom they end up dealing. People have often said to me, ““I went to see a solicitor”” when they did not see a solicitor; instead, they might have seen a legal executive or a clerk, or someone in training. I hope that we will address how to ensure that everyone who practices these professions or works in their organisations must identify their status and qualification. That point is of relevance to the following conundrum, which has already been posed. If someone goes to a legal firm and they are dealt with by a person who is not a solicitor—by a clerk or legal executive, perhaps—and that person then instructs a member of the Bar, who is by definition independent, and the case then goes wrong, who takes responsibility? To be blunt, the solicitor’s firm—the senior partner or managing partner—should take responsibility for all their staff, and in the past the Bar Council would have taken responsibility for the discipline of its member. The public do not know about the differences between all the various sorts of people who might be involved. In terms of the courts, distinctions have become much less obvious; solicitors can now appear, as it is no longer necessary to be a barrister. That is perfectly reasonable. However, we need to make sure that people know who they are dealing with. It is therefore right that when people want to complain, they in effect go through one door marked ““Complaints””, because they should not have to do the run-around. The old system was really confusing, and I accept that the ““maze””—the phrase used—of different regulatory authorities, ranging from the Master of the Rolls to individual organisations that people have barely heard of, has to be replaced. People need to go through one door, and there needs to be a proper system for dealing with complaints on the other side of that door. I want to add my tribute and thanks to the tributes and thanks already paid and given to those who have done the work on this Bill. I am a great fan, as I think everyone now is, of important and difficult legislation such as this going before a pre-legislative scrutiny Committee. The Committee in question did an extremely good and robust job, and Lord Hunt of Wirral, who is very well respected, was clear. The Committee did not consist of all lawyers. For example, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), who certainly is not a lawyer, came to the issue from a business point of view and from a local government background. Others were also not lawyers. The Committee did an excellent job and I pay tribute to it.