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Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am not going to take this issue to the wire, partly because I know that I would not have the support of the Liberal Democrats but also because I see where the Government are coming from. However, I think that before they arrived, they took the wrong turning. The issue is not whether the board ought or ought not to have a lay chairman or a lawyer; the issue is how that person is selected. I entirely agree that if the legal profession played a role in selecting members of the Legal Services Board, there would be a serious question mark against a legislative proposal of that sort. However, to link what we are talking about now with the previous vote, we are suggesting that the judiciary are something quite different from the legal profession; and their involvement, far from being something that would undermine the independence of the board, would cement its independence. The notion that a lay chairman would make the board more independent is misplaced; what would make the board independent is that it is selected by an amalgamation of a Minister and a judge.