Committee stage in the Lords
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Baroness Butler-SlossCrossbench- Quote
- I support the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. He rather stole the words that I might have used, which I used previously. Of course, I declare an interest as having been at the Bar and a judge. He made the point that there is no question about the high standards of the Bar. I am very concerned about the hybrid nature of the complaints that will come to the OLC. Some will be on discipline; some will be seeking redress. It is extremely difficult to differentiate between them. Indeed, I am told that about 70 per cent of the complaints have been hybrid. We have the great problem that there will be the same facts, possibly two bites at the same cherry with two different organisations—the approved regulator and the OLC—dealing with the same case. There is always the possibility of different conclusions. I am not for one moment suggesting that the OLC is or should be obliged to delegate, but it seems entirely appropriate that, as the amendments suggest, the OLC should have the power to delegate as and when it chooses. Not to have that power seems to me to constrain the OLC quite unnecessarily. Clause 154 has that specific effect. As the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, said, there are real cost implications to that. The OLC has a vast task. I hope that solicitors in the Committee will accept that the vast task largely relates to the very much larger body of lawyers who are solicitors. It will be sensible from time to time to delegate, rather than bringing the extra cost of buying in the expertise of the Bar under Schedule 15, paragraph 15, which states: “The OLC may make arrangements for such persons as it considers appropriate for assistance to be provided to it or to an ombudsman”. If I may say so to the Minister, the crunch words are: “Arrangements may include the paying of fees to such persons”. As I understand it, the noble work done by the Bar on the regulation of its members is done either without cost or at a relatively low cost. It will not be a low cost if the lawyers are bought in. That is a power that the OLC, dealing, as it will have to, with solicitors, might find an extremely valuable adjunct. I respectfully say that Schedule 15, paragraph 15, will not meet the case, so I strongly support the amendments.
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Lord Carlile of BerriewCrossbench- Quote
- I too support the amendments, other than those tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, which as I see it are inconsistent with those to which the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, have spoken. In addressing this issue, I shall compare the disciplinary procedures of the Bar with those of the medical profession and those for solicitors. I should say in that context that, on two occasions, which I shall mention in a few moments, I have represented barristers who were the subject of significant disciplinary procedures. I spent 10 years as a lay member of the General Medical Council between 1989 and 1999, and sat throughout those 10 years on one or both of the professional conduct committee and the health committee, which has procedures analogous to the professional conduct committee. I have also represented solicitors on several occasions by advising them when they have faced proceedings before the solicitors’ disciplinary system. I shall talk about those two latter bodies first. My experience of the General Medical Council was that, although it was thorough, it was extremely legalistic. It operates its disciplinary procedures just like a criminal court. There are paid advocates on both sides. There is also a huge legal back-up system that includes in-house lawyers and out-of-house lawyers, whom the General Medical Council in effect employs—it certainly pays for them. Every case is fought as though it were a Crown Court criminal trial. Delays are endemic in the system, which is cumbersome, and despite the GMC’s efforts to reform that system, it has become ever more legalistic. I have not appeared before the solicitors’ disciplinary system but, as I said earlier, I have in a number of cases advised solicitors who were before it. Again, my experience of giving advice to those in trouble as solicitors is that it, too, is legalistic. It involves quasi-criminal procedures and a huge paper trail that can be very time-consuming. Of course, there is a very much larger number of solicitors than barristers. Nevertheless, the delays in the solicitors’ system are disproportionate to the sort of delays that occur in the barristers’ system. For the past five years or so, I have been the head of a large set of mainly criminal barristers’ chambers, which has about 80 barristers. The nature of such a set of chambers is that it deals with a very fast and large turnover of work involving a huge number of cases. The nature of the kind of work that is done in my chambers means that it is inevitable that complaints are made from time to time against barristers, particularly in criminal cases. People tend to protest their innocence in criminal cases, even when they have been convicted, because it provides a better explanation for the relations, if your Lordships see what I mean. It is sometimes much more satisfactory at home to claim that the noble and learned Baroness—or, indeed, the rest of us; we all have interests here, and many of us sit as recorders—might have got it wrong than to accept the result of the court proceedings. I have appeared twice as an advocate before the Bar disciplinary system. I hope that these are useful examples for informing the Minister of how the system works. On one occasion, I appeared for a barrister from a set of chambers other than my own with which I am associated—it is outside London. It was not a major complaint, but it was justified. He pleaded guilty, as it were. He appeared before the tribunal; a minimum amount of paper was involved; there was a delay amounting only to weeks; and there was a satisfactory outcome for all concerned. The case was “prosecuted” by someone who appeared pro bono, and it was defended by me, appearing pro bono, although I think I later received a single bottle of wine, very good though it was, for my trouble. The other occasion was an extremely substantial case, in which I had to appear for another Queen’s Counsel who was accused of potentially extremely serious disciplinary offences that raised huge issues of law and principle. The case was dealt with as quickly as it could be, given the amount of paper involved. It eventually came before an interlocutory procedure. The nature of the system is that the Bar Council was able to obtain the services of Mr Justice McKinnon, the senior Queen’s Bench judge, to sit and judge this interlocutory procedure. He gave a judgment of magnificent cogency and great detail, upon which he worked extremely hard. I note that my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford is appearing before the same judge at the moment, which I suspect produced the mutterings in front of me just now. I hope he does as well next week.
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Lord Thomas of GresfordLiberal Democrat- Quote
- All I said was, “Alex won”.
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- Lord Carlile of BerriewCrossbench
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- I am grateful to my noble friend for telling everyone that; it is true. The point of this story, which is direct experience, is that what was provided, at very low cost to the public, was a satisfactory procedure for the complainant—who was treated better than any complainant I ever came across in the General Medical Council—a judgment of superb quality and a fair procedure, all again at minimal cost compared with proceedings before the General Medical Council. So I say to the Minister: it ain’t broke, so why on earth is she trying to fix it in this cumbersome, bureaucratic, paper-creating and unecological way, both intellectually and in the most literal terms? Of course the Bar Council, and I think everyone at the Bar, accepts that we cannot have a different rule because we happen to be rather good at these things. That recognition is in subsection (2) in Amendment No. 137. By this amendment, we seek to ensure that the public have the sort of service which they are receiving currently from the changed Bar arrangements, which now have the independent injection of the Bar Standards Board. But of course we recognise that we cannot be made an exception, although these procedures have been running as it happens—this is an accurate figure—for the past 399 years. We recognise that we have to accept that the board should have the power to withdraw or vary a direction that these proceedings should be determined by the approved regulator—here, the Bar disciplinary procedure. But we invite the Government to recognise that they should accept the best of what is available. I argue that the Bar’s procedures could well be replicated elsewhere, save that it is difficult to create afresh when new professions—for example, the osteopaths, whose disciplinary procedures I have some knowledge of—seek to create their own disciplinary procedures. To turn history into regulations or a statutory form is very difficult. The point I seek to make is that these procedures are well tested and work. It seems to me to be completely pointless to introduce this huge edifice to replace something that is perfectly functional.
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- Lord Thomas of GresfordLiberal Democrat
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- I, too, have appeared on behalf of a barrister before the Bar Council’s disciplinary proceedings. He was charged with having failed to manage his diary to such an effect that he was in two courts at once. On the other side of things, I declare that I have advised people who have been in trouble with the Law Society. The price of referring to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, as the sole voice of the consumer in previous debates means that I have been asked by him and others to speak to his amendments, which are contrary to everything I said at Second Reading—it has been said much more fluently by my noble friend Lord Carlile. It is necessary to look at the larger picture in this part of the Bill. The current position is that the Law Society and the Bar Council have their own disciplinary procedures. A Legal Services Ombudsman was set up under the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 to accept individual complaints. The Legal Services Ombudsman reviews individual complaints that are handled by all six regulators. I will refer only to the Bar Council and the Law Society because setting out the whole list every time will no doubt weary noble Lords. Complainants can go to the existing Legal Services Ombudsman. The Legal Services Complaints Commissioner was established under the Access to Justice Act 1999 because the Law Society was failing to handle its complaints, and the current Legal Services Ombudsman, Zahida Manzoor, was appointed Legal Services Complaints Commissioner as well. It has been her function to review the systems and processes in relation to complaints—not individual cases but the way in which the Law Society deals with its complaints. She sets targets, makes recommendations, and last year fined the Law Society for failing to provide an appropriate plan for improving complaints handling. She found that the Law Society had failed in five out of seven targets she had set, so undoubtedly the Law Society’s complaints system has not been functioning at all well. On the other hand, as my noble friend Lord Carlile and the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, have both pointed out, Zahida Manzoor stated in her report that the performance of the Bar Council complaints system was extremely good and that she was satisfied with 88 per cent of the small number of investigations she had to carry out in relation to the Bar. We therefore have a complete imbalance: the Law Society system is failing and the Bar Council system is succeeding in the terms mentioned by my noble friend. Now we are to introduce a new system through this Bill. The positions of Legal Services Ombudsman and Legal Services Complaints Commissioner are to be abolished. The monitoring done by Zahida Manzoor and her office will be thrown out of the window, and that is an end to that. Instead we are to have the Office for Legal Complaints, which is to control both the Law Society and the Bar Council and to monitor what they do. That sounds good, but the Law Society’s failing system was based in Leamington Spa. It has already been announced that the new Office for Legal Complaints will be set up in the West Midlands, and the people who now work for the failed system, whose activities have been criticised so heavily, have been given an assurance that the TUPE regulations will apply to them. That means that they are entitled to a job in the new organisation that will replace the failed one. Noble Lords can appreciate how the Bar feels about that. Its system is low in cost and has highly qualified people always acting de bono. It is successful, but now it is to be lumped in not only with the Law Society but also with the bones of the failed organisation. Obviously that is the motivation behind the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland: why should the Bar Council system be ruined by being thrown in with a failed organisation? That is likely to happen, and I shall make more criticisms of that in later amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty—I speak as an advocate here because I want to put forward his point of view, and I am under a duty to do so—has spotted the flaw in the Government’s position: if they allow the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and the OLC can devolve its disciplinary procedures and complaints system back to the Bar, and if they allow that to happen with the patent agents, who have a very successful system, the trademark people and so on, what will they be left with? They will be left with the OLC and probably a rebadged Law Society complaints system. They will have abolished the Legal Services Ombudsman and the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner, who monitored what that failed organisation did and imposed discipline upon it. I have already said that Miss Manzoor has fined the Law Society and has made severe criticisms of what it does. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, spotted this problem, and his amendments are designed to prevent any delegation of the powers of the OLC back to either the Bar Council or the other organisations that are operating well. If that does not happen, the whole system will be a complete waste of money. Rebadge the Law Society complaints system, call it something else, delegate the powers back to the Bar Council’s Bar Standards Board, which is doing a very good job, and so on, and you have spent £35 million only to have achieved the abolition of the ombudsman and the services commissioner, who exercised some discipline over the Law Society. That is why the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has put forward his amendment. I have endeavoured to advance the case that the noble Lord would have advanced and to explain to the Committee what he would have said, although he might have put it slightly differently. Putting on a different hat and speaking from the Front Bench of the Liberal Democrats, we wholly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland.
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Lord BorrieLabour- Quote
- I, too, support the paving amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and particularly his Amendment No. 137, which seeks to introduce a new clause allowing for the possible—I put it no higher than that—delegation to an approved regulator of the power to give redress, which is otherwise with the Office for Legal Complaints. Dealing with the point that under Clause 154 it is prohibited for any redress to be given by approved regulators in the Bill as it stands, we have—I cast no aspersion on the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, let alone the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss—loosely talked about delegation by the OLC. Amendment No. 137 stresses that the whole basis of any grant to the Bar of responsibility for handling complaints is in the hands of the Legal Services Board (LSB). I am happy to talk also about delegation in the loose sense because, if the amendment is carried, as long as the LSB so directs, the Bar—no doubt it will be the new Bar Standards Board, with its mixture of lay people and lawyers—will handle complaints.
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Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour- Quote
- This has been an interesting debate, eloquently put forward by noble Lords who have a great deal of experience, to which I do not seek for one second to do anything other than pay tribute. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. He was indeed persuaded by my noble friend Lord Whitty, with a bit of pressure from me, to speak to the amendments on behalf of my noble friend, because that helps me to talk about the debate in a more rounded way than I might otherwise have been able to. I thought that he put them forward very eloquently, and I am sure that my noble friend will be extremely pleased with the way in which he did so. I accept that my noble friend would have done it differently, but none the less it was forcefully done. The purpose of this legislation is to set out a new structure for how we regulate and deal with issues concerning the legal professions. I feel a bit sorry for the Law Society, actually, after the comments that have been made. I accept everything that the ombudsman said about the Bar Council—there is no doubt that some issues could perhaps be better dealt with—but I also have no doubt that the council done extremely well. I have no doubt that the Law Society accepts that there are real issues to be dealt with, and, having met the trade mark and patent representatives yesterday, that they, too, would like to see an element of delegation. So I sit within the context of recognising the genuine concerns that different parts of the legal professions have about how this would work in practice. I have had the privilege of talking to the Bar Council about this, and will seek to do so again. The point about trying to set up a framework and a process is to ensure that it applies equally and appropriately to everyone. That is not a substitute for trying to criticise the way in which things have been done before. In a way, that is almost irrelevant. I am not suggesting that the Bar Council has not done a good job, and neither is the legislation. It does not seek to say that the council has not handled things well; it seeks to say that we wish to do things for the legal professions differently. Without falling into the trap that I will be accused of—of representing the consumer alone—I should say that that is based on consumer concerns, which are important and which noble Lords in all parts of the Committee have recognised as being an important element of what we are seeking to do. A different weight and emphasis have been put on that, but it is very important. The idea that we could simply have a system that is then delegated back does not work for me. I say this as neither a lawyer nor a consumer of legal services. If you are going to set up a system, you have to make sure that it applies equally to all to give the greatest confidence in that system. The issue that the Bar Council raised with me and is particularly concerned with—and this brings me to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Whitty—is to ensure that the quality of the work done by the Office for Legal Complaints is as good as the quality of work that is currently on offer. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, as his shorthand way of describing a system that works well and which he sees no reason to alter. Because it works well, there is a concern that the emphasis on the work done by the Office for Legal Complaints will not be on ensuring that there are high-quality people able to deal with these matters appropriately. That brings us to paragraph 15 of Schedule 15, which is an important part of how this might operate, and to my noble friend’s amendments. We are trying to recognise expertise and experience and to enable the Office for Legal Complaints to buy in that expertise so that the quality of how complaints are dealt with does not suffer. We are trying not to do that in a way that fails to recognise the genuine concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, on behalf of my noble friend, that this is not a delegation by the back door. Part of the conversations that we will continue to have with the Bar Council and others is to ensure that the Office for Legal Complaints is high quality and able to tackle issues appropriately by buying in and building on experience and expertise currently in existence in a cost-effective way. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, was particularly concerned about the fact that the West Midlands decision would be a replication of the Leamington Spa experience in a different location. First, no guarantee has been given that 100 per cent of the staff will transfer; TUPE’s application does not guarantee that. A number of factors will come into play with regard to how that works, including whether there are roles for staff to transfer to. We want to make sure that the Office for Legal Complaints is built from the ground up, so it will be an entirely new organisation. It would be a foolish Government who, when looking at how to deal with a new organisation, did not look at what had happened before. Almost inevitably there will be high-quality staff who are able to perform functions in the new organisation. The reason behind the West Midlands proposal is to recognise that there will be people—and I am sure that they exist and are doing a good job—in the current operation who could transfer across and continue to offer a high-quality service. That does not suggest anything other than that we buy in appropriate expertise from those individuals; it does not suggest that we do not need to think structurally very differently about the new organisation in management and process terms and so on. But the idea that nobody should be made available from the previous organisation would be wrong. Given the cost-benefit analysis that has to be done, it is appropriate to consider the West Midlands as a location, but that does not mean that we are simply replicating an organisation that is not seen to be successful in a new one.
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- Lord Thomas of GresfordLiberal Democrat
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- Did the cost-benefit analysis take into account redundancy at the current office? After all, it is not government money that is being spent but the profession’s money and, ultimately, the consumer’s. On what criteria is the cost-benefit analysis done? Does redundancy come into it? Let us suppose that you sacked the lot of them, or gave them redundancy terms—has that been considered?
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- Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour
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- I am very happy to give the noble Lord more detail on the cost-benefit analysis and I shall do so. He is right that this is not government money, but in a sense that makes it even more important that the Government think very carefully about it. But certainly one of the factors that one has to consider is what would need to be available if you moved the whole operation to another location and thereby made it impossible for anybody to transfer across. One would have to consider what the redundancy costs would be but also take into account the loss of some expertise. I have never met anyone working in the Leamington Spa operation, but I am convinced that, as in any organisation that I have ever dealt with, it will have high-quality people who could carry out specific roles in the new organisation. We should not lose that. That is really the point that I am making.
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- Lord Carlile of BerriewCrossbench
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- Can the noble Baroness tell the Committee whether the Government have made any cost comparison between the cost per case under the current system of complaints against barristers and the cost per case under the proposed new system for dealing with complaints against barristers? I suspect that there is probably a multiplier of 10 between the current and the future cost per case.
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- Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour
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- I am not sure that I can give the noble Lord that specific information now but, of course, I shall do so if I can. However, I stress the importance of considering the finances of the matter. I completely appreciate that that is an important part of it. We looked at the proposition that the OLC would become a postbox, as it were—that it would be the place where complaints were received but then were delegated back. I am discussing it in that context although I accept what the noble Lord says about what is proposed in the amendment. We discovered that the costs are about £12.3 million more than having a single complaints-handling body. I believe that paragraph 6.36 of the regulatory impact assessment that comes with the draft Bill goes through the costings in this context. It would not cost an additional £12.3 million if the OLC was able only to delegate complaints handling to, say, the Bar, but if it decided to delegate to other regulators—it would be completely consistent with the amendments to consider other regulators as well—we think that there would be greater inconsistency in approach and a greater cost. The more that you exempt regulatory bodies from this, the closer we come to the situation that we have at present. So there are cost implications. The noble Lord reasonably says that much pro bono work goes on at present. I completely accept that. But we need to make sure that we develop a system for dealing with complaints that goes across the professions. We recognise that there is a variation in quality—I have never suggested otherwise—but not to the extent that everybody can say that they are perfect. We have to consider how we develop the greatest confidence in the new system. We need to build on what has gone before to some degree but recognise that we are trying to set up something brand new. The regulatory impact assessment has cost elements. I am very happy to talk to the noble Lord further about additional information that I do not have with me now. The issue of principle is that we are creating an Office for Legal Complaints which will handle all the complaints. It will be able to buy in best-quality expertise from those who have experience of dealing with complaints. It will do so in a way that does not involve the delegation of its decision-making. It will accept responsibility for that decision-making. We believe that that is the right way to go forward. I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.
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- Baroness Butler-SlossCrossbench
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- What is the difference in principle between buying in the expertise and delegating it? Why is it necessary to have a one-size-fits-all approach? The difference between delegation and buying in is cost, and very little else.
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- Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour
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- That is not how I see it from my perspective, if I may say so to the noble and learned Baroness. It is also about the service that you are providing to the consumer—we spent some time discussing the definition of “consumer”—in terms of the credibility of the organisation and of what we have sought to do. If all we do is say, “Actually, what we are really doing is regulating the Law Society”, and we are dealing with complaints regarding the Law Society—in what noble Lords have indicated this evening is a system that might be considered to have been less than successful or possibly a failure, depending on where one sits on this—we have not done what we set out to do. We set out to think about complaints across the legal professions. There is no suggestion in what we are doing of saying, “Everyone is a failure; therefore we need to do this in this way”. If you are going to have legal complaints dealt with by the Office for Legal Complaints, it needs to deal with all of them. From the consumer or client perspective, that is very important. Noble Lords may have been in discussion with members of the Bar who disagree with that, and I, too, have had the pleasure of conversations with members of the Bar who disagree with it. But from the Government’s perspective, it is very clear. If you want to have a system that builds confidence, you have a system that deals with complaints across the legal professions. Within that, we have made it clear that the expertise and experience can be bought in; but the decision-maker is the OLC. The difficulty that we would have relates to the delegation of the decision-making. I take on what noble Lords have said about the way in which the amendments have been framed, but as far as we are concerned it is important to have it crystal clear that the Office for Legal Complaints makes the decision.
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- Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour
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- The noble Lord is correct; we are not making a distinction, because the Bill makes no distinction between service and conduct complaints handling. Complainants will be able, in a sense, to have a one-stop shop for their complaints. Often, if you are complaining about service, regardless of what that service is, you have a complaint about how things were handled, about the way you were treated, or whatever, and you may not, as a consumer, as an ordinary member of the public, necessarily know whether that is about the conduct of the individual or whether it is just a matter of poor service. Frankly, why should you? You write or make contact to say that you have a problem that needs to be addressed. The distinction, as the noble Lord says, is who provides redress and who can deal with disciplinary matters. I do not think that there is a huge difficulty between the wits of the organisations concerned to deal with consumers effectively in relation those two issues. So I am less worried about that—the Financial Services Ombudsman operates in the same way and it seems to work well. We do not have a difficulty here.
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- Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour
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- I agree with the noble Lord that a complainant should not be prevented from making a claim on the Law Society’s compensation fund or, for that matter, the compensation fund of the Council for Licensed Conveyancers. Indeed, these compensation funds can make payments where the OLC would not be able to act. A clear example might be where a solicitor had improperly taken money from a client account and absconded. In such a case, a determination by the OLC would do little to ensure that a client who had suffered loss as a result received redress. The only recourse would be to make an application to the solicitors’ compensation fund, which is a “fund of last resort” administered by the Law Society. That is why the Bill specifically excludes compensation fund arrangements from the provisions in the Part 6 redress scheme. Clause 20, concerning regulatory arrangements, defines compensation arrangements in terms which clearly encompass compensation fund arrangements such as those of the Law Society and the Council for Licensed Conveyancers. Subsection (5)(b) of Clause 154, which is entitled “Approved regulators not to make provision for redress”, excludes compensation arrangements so that the bar on making provision for redress does not apply to such a compensation fund and payments from it. I hope I have reassured the noble Lord that the Bill already provides for what this amendment seeks to achieve and that, on reflection, he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
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Lord Neill of BladenCrossbench- Quote
- I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. He seems to base his proposition on the unstated assumption that all complaints brought to the complaints body will be brought by rational and fair-minded consumers with a strong case. I have had some experience in dealing with legal complaints as a head of chambers. I assure him that, if he believes that about complaining consumers, he is widely mistaken. Many complaints—and I do not wish to defame complaining consumers as a class—have no basis whatever in fact or in law. The complainants have simply lost a case. The nature of the legal profession is that one side tends to lose. It is a common experience that the losing side is embittered and looks around for a target. It is difficult to get at or criticise a judge or tribunal, but sitting before them is an easy target: the professional representative for their day or month in court. He missed point after point, he did not call the witness they wanted him to call; I could elaborate, but noble Lords’ imaginations will provide what I spare them from listening to. It is therefore extremely important that some of the objectives stated in Clause 1(1) should have their play, such as, “the constitutional principle of the rule of law”, and, in particular, “(g) promoting and maintaining adherence to the professional principles”. Those principles are in Clause 1(3). A few are, “(a) that authorised persons should act with independence and integrity, (b) that authorised persons should maintain proper standards of work, (c) that authorised persons should act in the best interests of their clients”. All those are entirely relevant considerations to be taken into account by the complaints body when it considers a complaint. I therefore disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, although I do not often do that on what I have heard of the Bill.
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- Lord BorrieLabour
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- Briefly, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, has said. The impression given by the amendment is that the complainant is always right. That cannot be so, as he suggested. In any case, I have read Clause 1, dealing with the variety of objectives and different regulatory bodies, as meaning that the relevant board must follow those objectives relevant to its function; I hope that that is the correct reading. The objectives are set out in extenso, and I see no need for an elaborate and undesirable limitation exercise such as the amendment.
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- Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour
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- I am grateful for all the contributions. The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, reasonably refers us back to day one in Committee when we had some interesting discussions about the regulatory objectives. I know that he is thinking about what he will bring forward for us to consider in future. We begin, of course, with Sir David Clementi’s report. He said that we need to set out the regulatory framework principles that all the bodies concerned will adhere to. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, takes a different view, but that is the founding principle from our perspective: the principles apply to all partners involved in the regulatory framework. That is critical. We have also said—and, again, we discussed this on day one of the Committee—that the regulatory objectives may not always apply in the same way to all regulatory partners. I envisage that, once the board is established, we shall further clarify the different way the objectives apply to each of the regulatory bodies. That is perhaps something the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, and I could discuss; it takes us to where his thinking was on day one—whether we need different objectives or the same objectives with different emphases, and so on. There is certainly room for discussion on that. I said on Clause 48 that the board can make policy statements. That may indeed be an appropriate medium where the board could define how the objectives might apply to each partner. Trying to set out separate objectives would be very difficult—in practical terms, impossible—because we want the cohesion and consistency that one set of objectives would give us. Like the noble Lord, Lord Neill, and my noble friend Lord Borrie, I would be concerned about limiting the OLC to a single objective as defined in the noble Lord’s amendment. Protecting and promoting the interests of consumers will be a fundamental principle for the OLC, but there will be times when other objectives need to be weighed against it. I shall give a different example: when the OLC is setting the charges payable by respondents under Clause 133, it will need to weigh up a broad range of considerations, not just the interests of consumers and the public. It will need to consider specifically the need to encourage an independent, strong, diverse and effective legal profession, the need to promote competition in the provision of services and the importance of access to justice. Each of those objectives could be undermined if the OLC were acting solely in the interests of consumers, even if in doing so it had regard to the wider public interest. The same conflict could arise in relation to the desirability of the OLC assisting approved regulators to carry out their regulatory functions through information-sharing, as spelt out in Clause 141. Those issues, and the issues raised today, start to unravel as we begin to think about how to implement the amendment in practice. My view remains what it was on day one of Committee stage: the OLC should share the same overall regulatory objectives as the LSB, albeit with the ability to attach different weights to different objectives depending on the circumstances. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will be able to withdraw the amendment.
- Time
- 21:45
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- Speaker
- Baroness Ashton of UphollandLabour
- Quote
- When the noble Lord is thinking about this matter before Report, will he consider the possibility that having one set of regulatory objectives, as Sir David Clementi recommended, with the capacity, through policy statements, to think about different applications and weights in different regulatory parts of the legislation and the different circumstances that will emerge, could be the way forward?
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- 21:45
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- Speaker
Lord GrocottLabour- Quote
- I beg to move that the House do now resume. Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to. House resumed. House adjourned at 10 pm
- Time
- 21:45
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