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Legal Services Act 2007 (Functions of an Approved Regulator) Order 2009

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, for that lengthy explanation of the two orders, and assure him that I will be considerably briefer; I want to make only two or three points. He dealt with the instruments in inverse order, so I will follow him and start with the Legal Services Act 2007 (Consequential Amendments) Order 2009. I was not involved with that Act—I think Lord Kingsland dealt with it—but I remember its passage. As the Minister made clear, the purpose of the instrument is to amend both primary and secondary legislation. It is obviously appropriate that secondary legislation be amended by secondary legislation but, in the main, we regret Henry VIII powers—they are obviously used here—that allow the amending of primary legislation. I say "in the main"; having looked at what the consequential amendments order tries to do, I think that it is probably right that the powers were there and were used. On this occasion, we are content with the order and what it is seeking to do. We think it is right to ensure, as the noble Lord put it, that members of bodies such as ILEX who are managers of legal disciplinary practices are able to continue to advise on compromise agreements as set out in the order. I have no further comment to make about that. The second order regarding the functions of an approved regulator appears at first sight to be innocuous. The Minister made clear that it amends an inadvertent drafting error in the Legal Services Act 2007. He ought to think long and hard about those words, "inadvertent drafting error", and remember the remarks of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, on the second day of the Queen’s Speech debate when he referred to the torrent of legislation emanating from departments, particularly the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. If there had not been quite such a torrent of legislation and the Government had confined themselves to properly drafted Bills dealing with single subjects—for which I commend the Bribery Bill, which we are dealing with next week, and which was also commended by the noble and learned Lord—we might not have had those inadvertent errors that have involved the Government having to come back with obscure orders of this sort later on. Those are my only comments on this and I hope that the Minister will take them on board, particularly with regard to future orders that he might want to put before us.