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Legal Services Bill [HL]

I agree with the noble Lord that we do not want to be clogged up with changes, but how do we get to that point? We are arguing about means, not ends, in this case. My concern is that the Legal Services Board will be required to think about every aspect of how changes could be made and how alterations could be dealt with. It will require quite a lot of resource to do that and will need to work out for the different regulators precisely what might be altered, and when and how it might be altered. In addition, it will need to decide, by looking very carefully and thinking very hard, what to and what not to exempt, how to make sure that it does not miss something by accident and how to know what might or might not be covered. It would have to span the entire spectrum of what might or might not be put forward. Our drafting says, ““If you are making an alteration, you tell the Legal Services Board””. In the process of its work, the LSB will have exempted certain things altogether. But alterations will be put forward. They can then either be ticked off immediately or further information can be sought. But the LSB will be working on reality, not speculation and conjecture, about what might or might not happen. For me, clogging up the system would be the other way around. If you say that the board has to think about everything and then determine the exemptions, it would have to consider the full panoply of what could come before it, which would be very resource intensive. It would reasonably be nervous that it had covered everything—not because regulators would behave badly, but it could miss something that it felt later was important. The regulator quite reasonably could say, ““Well, I am sorry. You did not mention it before; therefore, it was exempt””. In this way, the LSB deals only with changes that the regulators really want to make and it will become quite apparent, quite quickly, the areas in which the LSB would want to be more interested and more involved. Our ends are in the same place, but this is not the way to make sure that the Legal Services Board is not resource intensive. If you want to make sure that the LSB deals only with things that it needs to, it needs to be in a responsive mode to those alterations being put forward. To achieve what is wanted, as I have indicated, it needs the ability to exempt large chunks of things, the ability to tick things immediately they come in—on the nod—and the ability to explore further. It does not mean that I do not accept the need to continue talking to the regulatory bodies to ensure that we have thought through, for example, the areas where the board might begin to think about exemption. To say everything is exempt unless the board says differently requires it to do a completely different job, which I think would be resource intensive.