Legal Services Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate, Conservative)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Cook. What better way for me to spend my birthday than to serve on such a Committee? Indeed, it is becoming something of an annual event, having served on the Joint Committee on the Draft Legal Services Bill at a similar time last year. However, I do not want to be looking at and scrutinising the problems caused by this particular piece of legislation annually.
I concur with my hon. Friend’s concerns about the timing. I wish to draw the Committee’s attention to the conclusions of the Joint Committee and particularly to the comments in paragraph 73 of its report, which was concerned about the limited time for pre-legislative scrutiny. It stated:
“Given the significant impact of the Bill’s provisions—it is the first attempt to draw the entire legal services market within one regulatory framework—and the complexity of some of the issues involved, we believe that the priority should have been to ensure that the Committee had sufficient time to scrutinise the draft Bill effectively.”
Obviously, given the passage of time, there has been a lot of scrutiny in the other place. However, the report goes on to state:
“It is in the interests of both the executive and the legislature that the provisions of the Bill are right.”
Given the short time since the Bill was discussed on Second Reading, the timetable to scrutinise the unsurprising number of amendments is a matter of concern. After all, the Bill proposes a significant change to the profession and involves the concerns of consumers and the wider public interest. We need proper time to get the Bill right to ensure that we are not returning in a year’s time to deal with problems arising from the legislation.