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Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for spelling out the detail on this matter and I will try to respond. I do not think that anything divides the Committee and the Government in terms of wanting the front-line regulators to do the regulation and the Legal Services Board to act in the manner that we have described. The difficulty is twofold. First, the amendment would not do what noble Lords want it to, because it would make the LSB be more active than the Government want. It would give it a more positive role, in making it check that things are being done, rather than being able to act and operate, as we all agree that it should, when there is clearly a problem or issue that needs to be resolved. I know that that is not the intention, but the odd thing about the amendment is that it would make for more activity rather than the right level of activity, which is what noble Lords want. The second part of the twofold issue is that, in many ways, what the noble Lord seeks is in the Bill as a whole. Noble Lords are dissatisfied; if I am reading them correctly, they are saying, ““That’s all well and dandy, but the issue about supervisory function needs to be clearer, earlier, rather than being there but being there in a totality sense””.