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Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, this group of amendments deserves serious consideration by the Government. Here is a Bill to introduce a super-regulator, the Legal Services Board. They have said that it can be clothed and armed with heavyweight powers but that it will operate with a light touch. Such confidence in regulatory self-denial suggests inconsistency with ordinary human experience. I therefore invite the Minister to consider this state of affairs. If you have a series of separate objectives which can be separately considered, and any one of them will allow the trigger of intervention, the legal services world, to be so regulated, would reasonably expect the board at the very least to have a statement of policy on how it will implement these single objectives at any one time or in combination. These amendments suggests, by the introduction of the words ““one or more? or ““significant?, that you create a state of affairs where there is a policy base for the Legal Services Board to act on. ““Significant? is a pretty poor adjective, but if it is there to achieve compromise then it is better than nothing. It might be said that it is the kind of word which is so vague as to be incapable of challenge legally or intellectually, but I remind the House that in the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill we enacted the use of the word ““substantial? as a core ingredient in the creation of a new criminal offence, confident that any jury would understand how it was to be understood and applied. I hope that in dealing with the amendments it will be accepted that this is a desire not to control power exercisable by the Legal Services Board but rather to seek a framework in which the legal services world can operate more efficiently.