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Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, if the noble Lord disagrees, he can divide the House; that is fine. It is up to him. I want to be clear about what I understood that I did, and the noble Lord can perfectly legitimately challenge that. I accepted the principle of the amendment; I did not accept the wording, or I would have accepted it on the Floor of the House. I said that there was an issue about enabling the professions to talk to and be consulted by the Legal Services Board on a level with that of the Consumer Panel. My noble friend Lord Whitty indicated, and noble Lords are in broad agreement, that there is an understanding that we need to set up the Consumer Panel to enable it to be formally consulted because it exists in a different way and will come into being only by being brought together by the Legal Services Board with the current regulators. I absolutely agree that I took the amendment away. I talked with my ministerial colleagues and took advice on it; we talked to a variety of people, and my honourable friend Bridget Prentice, the Minister responsible for the policy, looked at the issue very carefully. The advice that I got back was that the Bill provides a variety of means whereby consultation is available, both specifically as the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland indicated—