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Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 65: 65: After Clause 38, insert the following new Clause— ““Approved regulators: judicial review Nothing shall restrict the right of an approved regulator to bring judicial review proceedings in respect of any order, direction or statement of public censure made by the Board under sections 30 to 35.”” The noble Lord said: I hope that the Minister will be able to say that this clause is completely unnecessary. It should be possible for her to say that. I simply included the amendment to extract that admission, so there should be no quibbling about it. My motivation for placing the proposed new clause after Clause 38 was that I, too, was very concerned about the ouster provision in Clause 38(7). I suppose that I should amend the wording in my amendment to read ““sections 30 to 38”” rather than ““sections 30 to 35”” but, with the amendment as it stands, I just want to make the following point. In this part of the Bill, powers of discipline are given to the LSB. It can impose performance targets and monitoring, but the Bill requires only that the board must consider any representations that are duly made before taking action. When it comes to the section concerning directions, there is a safeguard in Clause 33, but it is a very poor one: the board has to make an application to the High Court when an approved regulator is said to have complied with the direction that is made, but nothing there gives the approved regulator any chance of challenging that direction in court. We have already had a debate about censure and, as I understood it, the Minister conceded that judicial review was fully available. We then come to the subject of penalties, which I should like to put into some context. These penalties, or methods of discipline, will be used in highly controversial situations. It was highly controversial of the ombudsman to impose a large fine on the Law Society in the way that we recently discussed, and it will be highly controversial for the LSB to start giving directions and censuring the Law Society, the Bar Council and any other approved regulatory body, and even more controversial to fine them. We are not dealing with situations where everyone gets along well and is happy but those where recourse to the courts becomes necessary. No one wants that to happen; everyone hopes that things can be sorted out by agreement. As I said, I shall be content if the Minister says that the amendment is completely unnecessary. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is not in his place, which is a pity. I shall reserve what I have to say about his stance until he is here. In the mean time, I look for the ranks of lay consumers behind the Government eagerly pressing this Bill on the public. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is a lone voice, as no one else seems to be bothered to turn up.