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Legal Services Bill [HL]

The first four parts of the Bill deal with two important features relating to the independence of the legal profession. The first is appointment to the Legal Services Board and its structure, and the second is the board’s enforcement powers to intervene. We are concerned with the second of those features. I sympathise with the intent of this group of amendments, but I doubt their effectiveness. The phrase ““taken as a whole”” does not raise a threshold; it fudges it. It introduces a legal state of affairs in which seven objectives, one of which has a subset of four principles, can all be looked at as a whole. That is an extremely difficult intellectual task and one which, rather than creating a sensible threshold, in my view works to the opposite effect. The next amendments, referring to ““one or more of”” and inserting an adjective before ““adverse””, could serve to be far more effective.