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Legal Services Bill [HL]

I would not wish the noble Baroness to be in any doubt about the importance that the Opposition attach to Amendment No. 38. Inevitably, our debate on this amendment has foreshadowed many of the issues that will be raised when my noble friend Lord Hunt introduces Amendment No. 38A and the other amendments in the same grouping. Amendment No. 38A seeks to put a practitioner panel in the Bill. In response to Amendment No. 38, the noble Baroness said quite simply that there is no practitioner panel in the Bill because it is unnecessary: the approved regulators and their associated representative bodies are powerful, well-informed and highly professional communicators, who can perform the role of a practitioner panel just as well. That is one reason for accepting Amendment No. 38. I am not saying that the Opposition accept the noble Baroness’s view that a practitioner panel is unnecessary but, just supposing that we did, that should provide her with a golden opportunity to say that she accepts Amendment No. 38. The cost of not accepting the amendment is to invite the criticism that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, levelled against the government Benches—that the Bill as drafted does not provide a level playing field. Why should there be an obligation for the Legal Services Board to consider what the Consumer Panel proposes but no obligation to consider the representations of the bodies that the noble Baroness said are a perfectly acceptable substitute for the practitioner panel? I confess that I find it very difficult to see how the noble Baroness can advance any sensible argument against that. The fact is that there is no level playing field at the moment. If the noble Baroness wants a solution that avoids a practitioner panel, it seems to me that she has no alternative but to accept Amendment No. 38. As the noble Viscount, Lord Bledisloe, said in one of his typically perspicacious interventions in a debate on a legal matter, if the Government accept the principle, why on Earth do they not put it in the Bill? Not to do so is wholly inconsistent with the contentions advanced by the noble Baroness when she first intervened. In my submission, this is an extremely important issue. It will not go away.