Legal Services Bill [HL]

rose to move, as an amendment to the Motion that this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 15, at end insert ““but do propose Amendment No. 15A as an amendment to Commons Amendment No. 15””. The noble Lord said: I thank the Minister for Amendment No. 15, which, once again, is a considerable improvement on the original text as well as being expressed far more elegantly than before. However, despite his tranquilising observations, I still wish to press Amendment No. 15A. The noble Lord will no doubt recall from the homework he will have had to do over the summer that all this started with the report of Sir David Clementi. Towards the end of his report Sir David said in terms that, "““the LSB should be a small oversight body””." In the Government’s response to that, they said that the MSB should intervene only if an approved regulator was ““clearly failing””. Yet that philosophy was not reflected in the Bill as it arrived in your Lordships’ House. Noble Lords will recall that, throughout all the stages in your Lordships’ House, we repeatedly challenged the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, that the Government put their money where their mouth was; that is, to express in concrete terms in the Bill what they had said in their response to the Clementi report. Unfortunately, we were insufficiently persuasive, so we had by amendment to achieve our objective. We achieved all our objectives by amendment; they have for the most part been reversed in another place. In the case of one of them, we ought to put the words back in the Bill. One of the amendments would have introduced ““significant”” to qualify the adverse impact. We thought that one approach would be to require the LSB to intervene only when the adverse impact had been significant. We took into account all those observations made in your Lordships' House, which carried great weight and said that ““significant”” is a difficult word for the judiciary to interpret. We have therefore left that aside and decided not to reintroduce it, but wish to reintroduce the other amendment, Amendment No. 15A, which would add a paragraph (c) to Amendment No. 15 to, "““ensure that the board exercises its powers only where it considers that the action or inaction of an approved regulator is not an approach which the approved regulator could reasonably have taken””." We feel completely justified in tabling the amendment, because the Minister will see that the composition of all the approved regulators reflects most accurately the composition of the Legal Services Board. The professions have separated their representative from their regulatory function; a substantial number of individuals on the approved regulatory board is lay; and all the members of the authorised regulators will be selected on the basis of the Nolan principles. So it would be only in rare circumstances that the LSB would be required to second-guess the activities of the approved regulators. Those circumstances are set out in Amendment No. 15A. I draw a great deal of support for my proposal from what the Minister said when addressing the thresholds at Third Reading in another place two days ago. She said that the LSB, "““should not be in the business of micro-managing or second-guessing approved regulators””.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/10/07; col. 655.]" We have tabled the amendment to ensure that the Legal Services Board behaves exactly as the Minister wishes it to do in the way that she expressed it two days ago. I beg to move. Moved, That as an amendment to the Motion that this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 15, at end insert ““but do propose Amendment No. 15A as an amendment to Commons Amendment No. 15””.—(Lord Kingsland.)