Clause 15
Legal Services Bill [Lords]
10:30 am
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley, Liberal Democrat)
In a sense, the interruption of the intervention was quite helpful because it allowed someone to explain to me the reasons why the trade unions might be concerned about regulation. The vast majority of trade union activity, such as advising people and so on, will not be affected by the Bill. However, if a trade union became an alternative business structure, the legal advice activities of a trade union would be regulated. We could end up with a situation in which a whole organisation has a problem because a part of it is regulated. Obviously, we are not looking for that. The logical solution is to have a subsidiary ABS of some form or other rather than have the whole organisation as an ABS.
We take an agnostic approach to the amendments. We accept the objective. We do not want a situation in which a trade union convenor who is offering advice to union members on employment law ends up being regulated to the same extent as someone who sets themselves up in business to offer legal services in the widest sense, who carries out regulated legal services and who, as part of that, does unregulated legal services, which are caught in the same process of regulation.
Whether the amendments are drafted in the best possible way is an interesting question. There is probably a better way to draft them. However, we are relatively agnostic on the amendments themselves.