Schedule 1
Legal Services Bill [Lords]
5:45 pm
John Mann (PPS (Rt Hon Richard Caborn, Minister of State), Department for Culture, Media & Sport; Bassetlaw, Labour)
I have certainly no objection to having the odd lawyer on this Committee. The Nolan principles are clear as outlined in the House in May 2002 and I am sure that all hon. Members will be reading them tonight. The issue is about vested interests and advocating on behalf of those interests, not about whether people should be able to participate. The real issue is about the balance.
What would happen if the initial lay chair were unfortunately to drop dead during that person’s first year in office, perhaps due to the pressures of the job? Would that mean that the replacement would automatically be a lay chair during that initial period? The reason that I think that an independent chair is important has nothing to do with solicitors. The Law Society has shown robustness in the past 12 months in looking after its profession and recognising that the names of all solicitors were being sullied by the actions of a minority. Indeed, in my area—the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey will be surprised to know this—there has been a reduction in the number of practising solicitors. Those who have sought to battle publicly have gone out of business. That may or may not be because I called on the general public to boycott their services, but a major building—the largest, I believe, in my constituency—is now vacant and up for commercial letting to another profession, which might indicate some correlation. That does not necessarily benefit my constituents, because it presumes that the other people to whom they can go are competent.
What I want to say to the Minister, however, is that more than anything I do not want in post someone with wide knowledge, who is a retired ex-judge, who is well known to one of the appointees—or both, depending on how the Bill is enacted—and who will look after the vested interests of the profession that has served him well for 50 years. The general public do not need that, and I am more concerned about that than about whether the person in the post is a professional who is deemed to be professional without a vested interest.
There should be a safeguard, and in that regard I was interested in the comments of the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey. I disagree with him, but the Liberal Democrat position is at least consistent; if we are to have a twin-track appointment, it logically has to be the appointment of a lay person. That means that the Minister’s position is consistent too, but if she has any further deliberations with the other House it is critical that that consistency should remain.
The option always to have a lay person in charge would be a good safeguard; it would not just give a veneer of propriety but would send a message to the outside world that the legal profession has the confidence to deal with anyone in the profession who is behaving badly. That confidence is what needs to be reasserted; if the majority of good professionals have the confidence to deal with the minority of either bad or incompetent ones, that will boost the profession overall.