Clause 1
Legal Services Bill [Lords]
11:45 am
Simon Hughes (Party President, Cross-Portfolio and Non-Portfolio Responsibilities; North Southwark and Bermondsey, Liberal Democrat)
I am grateful for the Minister’s sympathetic reply. I understand the double difficulty of the inherited tradition of those who do the drafting and the fact that the Bill has been the product of pre-legislative and Lords scrutiny. However, it is never too late—better to change it now than end up with a Bill in the wrong order.
May I respond to the Minister’s point, which I understand? If she were troubled about starting the Bill with the Legal Services Board, there would be another way of doing things: to start with the proposition that, from the date of the Bill’s implementation, all the agencies that it refers to would be governed by regulatory principles and objectives. That way, we could come at things generally. Legal services would be governed by regulatory objectives, which would apply to all the bodies and come from the state. There is not just one way.
In the context of what the Minister and the hon. Member for Huntingdon said about subsequent parts of the Bill, may I ask that we make sure that all the necessary repeals and consolidation are included by the time the Bill is enacted? In that way, if somebody came to look at the law governing the legal professions and legal practice, that would all be in the Act, and we would not still have to shoot across to six other bits of legislation. We have a big Bill, so we might as well make it one that does everything, rather than one that refers to four other Acts that people will still have to dig out.