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Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am most grateful to the noble Baroness. As I said, this is a probing amendment; and we have had an opportunity to air the matter. I reassure the noble Baroness that I will certainly not press it to a vote today. I was confused by the noble Baroness’s reference to Clause 159, entitled ““Voluntary arrangements””, in Part 7, whose title, ““Further provisions relating to the Board and the OLC””, appears at the top of page 82. I had always taken Clauses 158 and 159 to deal solely with the relationship between the board and the OLC. I hasten to add that I have not considered the matter in detail, so I may well be wrong about that. But if I am wrong and it is possible to deal with paralegals under Clause 159, it raises the concern referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen. Paralegals have an institute, but one of its main concerns is standards of education and training for paralegals. We decided in our discussion on the previous amendment that training and education were pre-eminently extremely expensive activities to undertake. If the noble Baroness is suggesting that the Legal Services Board could use Clause 159 partially to embrace paralegals, my preoccupation would be whether that could result in considerable cost.