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Legal Services Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord and I am sure that he is right. I had hoped that I had finished the point I was making to him about my willingness to look at the issue of when the approved regulator does not have direct control. I will, of course, ponder on the other points that have been raised. I have talked about good practice in the way that regulators work and linked that again to Clause 3 in terms of the way that we would expect them to operate. I am not at this stage prepared to go that step further and say that a fine cannot be imposed unless all other measures have been tried—not least because the question arises as to whether all those other measures would be taken in the context of a particular complaint, or whether a series of issues had arisen for a regulator and a series of other methods had been tried on those different issues. Might the regulator not say at that point, ““Actually, yet another thing has occurred. We wish to move directly to a fine””? That would be my difficulty with the use of last resort, because there could be a question of last resort on one issue or last resort on a series of failures. In terms of general good practice, Clause 3(3) moves us in the right direction without setting that in stone, given that other circumstances might occur. However, I have said that I will look at Amendment No. 61 again and I hope that that is of some help to the Committee.