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Legal Services Bill [HL]

It has just occurred to me that it might be desirable to have a Consumer Panel as is proposed in the Bill, but not a practitioner panel. The reason I say that is that in relation to the consumers of legal services, although there are in existence today a number of bodies—the CAB movement, the Consumers’ Association, Which?, the National Consumer Council—that from time to time consider the consumers of legal services and offer advice and research and so on, they are general bodies interested in the interests of consumers as a whole for the purchase of goods and services of all kinds. It is only occasionally that they alight on legal services as something on which they ought to comment. The Legal Services Board, as I understand it, will from time to time want to have the views of consumers of legal services, and the convenience of a panel is that it is a group of people who are interested in consumers of legal services as such and will be available on tap to give that advice. When the Legal Services Board wants the views of practitioners, there are in existence bodies such as the Law Society and the Bar Council, but also the patent agents and the trade marks attorneys, which have their own organisations—as we know because they have given their views on these matters. They are available now and will be available in the future, once the LSB is set up, and they will be there on tap, just like the Consumer Panel will be there on tap to consider the consumer aspects and to give advice on that angle.