Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, I beg to move that the House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 15B and do not insist on its Amendment No. 15A. Noble Lords may recognise the substance of the amendment made in the other place. When we considered this important issue of the relationship between the overarching board and the individual regulators, the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, tabled Amendment No. 15A that added to Commons Amendment No. 15 and would mean that policy statements published by the board must: "““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””." I agree very much, as I said at the time, with what the noble Lord said in the debate about the role of the oversight regulator and the individual bodies, and making sure that the balance is right and that the individual regulators are not micromanaged by the board. The concerns that I raised were that an absolute reasonable success must be shown before taking any action that might fetter or restrict the board from taking action in appropriate circumstances. Commons Amendment No. 15B, however, requires that the board’s policy statements must have regard to the principle that the board should not exercise any of those functions by reason of an act or an omission of an approved regulator unless the act or omission was unreasonable. With the existence of any such policy statement, the board would clearly have to demonstrate how it had had regard to that principle when exercising its powers. I hope that noble Lords would agree that this amendment now satisfies concerns raised previously. Moved, That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendment No. 15B and do not insist on its Amendment No. 15A.—(Lord Hunt of Kings Heath.)