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Legal Services Bill [HL]

As always, I declare my interests: I am a practising barrister and a former chairman of the Bar, and I was on the Joint Committee that looked at the Bill. At the weekend, I was surprised to receive a letter from the Institute of Paralegals, a body that I do not think I had heard of before. The extremely informative letter states that there are 500,000 paralegals and that 50,000 of them serve with ordinary law firms, mainly with solicitors and other people who would be authorised under the Bill. But that leaves another 450,000 paralegals who are not linked with any law firm and, as I understand it, the amendment deals with employees of authorised or exempt bodies, essentially those within the legal profession. I am sure these people have the most admirable intentions, and their letter claims that they are trying to ensure that high standards are required of all paralegals wherever they may be engaged. It seems that what they want—and the amendment reflects this—is support in training, which is slightly counter to the argument that we have just been listening to. There are already excellent bodies that provide training, such as the Inns of Court and the universities, and it is hoped that the LSB will not interfere. This argument seems to be the other way round as it comes from an aspirant body that started life calling itself an association. Another bit of law I learnt over the weekend is that an association is upgraded to an institute if it gets enough people to back it. It has now become an institute, and the people behind this have the highest aims. I will be corrected by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, if I have this wrong, but my memory is that we heard not one whisper about this on the Joint Committee. I see a bit more body language; I think I am getting support to suggest that we did not hear anything about it. The last-minute appearance on the stage of a cast of an extra half a million is quite surprising. All I am saying is that these people who are in the legal net need to be thought about with a bit of care. I address the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis: of course it is correct that those law firms, or whoever may be the employers in the strictly legal world, will be responsible for claims of negligence or anything like that, but we do not know who will be responsible for these other people outside that. I just think that it needs a bit of thought, even though it comes up at the last minute.