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Legal Services Bill [HL]

I feel I ought to apologise for tabling this amendment, because it seems to have consumed so much of your Lordships’ time when it perhaps might have been better served, not in your Lordships’ House, but in your Lordships’ Dining Room. Time is moving on. This issue is just another example of raising the question of the appropriate role of the Legal Services Board as supervisor, as opposed to direct regulator. It is important, if I may say so, that the Minister bears in mind that the regulator is the approved regulator. There are several different regulators who have rather different regulatory problems to confront. They are the experts. They know all about the regulation. The task of the Legal Services Board is simply to ensure that the regulation is done in a way that is satisfactory to all the interests affected by it, not least the consumer interest. That is why the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, is so telling. The issue is not whether or not a particular alteration in regulatory arrangements conforms with what the Legal Services Board thinks is correct, but whether or not the activities of the approved regulator give rise to complaints. If they do not, it is clearly performing its task satisfactorily. It is therefore right—to adopt the language of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss—that the task of the Legal Services Board here should be not proactive but reactive, if it only intervenes when in some way or other the approved regulators are falling below the standards that are expected. The philosophy here for the Government should surely be, ““Trust the approved regulators””. That is the philosophy the Minister told us earlier in the day lies behind the Bill, and it is precisely the philosophy that the amendment seeks to advance. I am not going to attempt to summarise all the arguments that have been advanced by noble Lords in this debate, except to say that I agree with them all.