---

Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, reference has been made to an amendment that I tabled, with the subsequent backing of other Members of the House, which is a long way down the batting list at No. 637A. Those who followed our debate in Committee may recall that I spoke about Part 5. I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, was there, but I picked up from what he had said earlier a worry, from a consumer point of view, about access to justice. I certainly quoted the views of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, and of his colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who is no longer in her seat, expressed fears about access to justice in the West Country. Suffice it to say today that I am looking forward to the opportunity to present that amendment. Naturally, I sympathise with many of the statements of fact and projections that have been made by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. In essence, we are rushing into this on an inadequate basis of fact, testing and research. As a House of this calibre, we have no right to be doing this without trying to inform ourselves very much better than we are informed today. I know that the Minister will say, ““Ah, but I have sent you a lot of books since then?. It is certainly true: there is a stack of papers starting with papers from Sydney, New South Wales, from the Commission in Brussels and—a little nearer to home—from learned professors and so on. It is very good for me to read all this, or part of it, but the projections made by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, about what may go wrong are very telling, and I shall return to the theme later.