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Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, my proposition is that we already do that in the Bill. We have addressed the question in the way in which the board has been set up, the requirement for the way it has to operate, its relationship with the front-line regulators and the requirement for it to issue statements on what it proposes to do to enable the regulators to have discussions with it. We believe that the ambition in the amendment is achieved. Noble Lords who are legal experts, which I am clearly not, will know better than I do that the difficulty in putting in legislation a requirement for how people must behave, in this context in partnership, is the potential for difficulty if the overarching regulator—the supervisory regulator—has to operate in a way that is not in partnership but unfortunately has to take action against a front-line regulator. Discussions with our legal advisers showed that that could be a difficulty. When we reflected on the Bill, we felt that we had captured the essence of what noble Lords were seeking. I hope that my words, in the context of how I have described this, will bring some comfort to the organisations concerned. On costs—