Clause 17

Part of Legal Services Bill [Lords] – in a Public Bill Committee at 12:00 pm on 19 June 2007.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of John Mann John Mann PPS (Rt Hon Richard Caborn, Minister of State), Department for Culture, Media & Sport 12:00, 19 June 2007

I am not sure whether the amendment does what it intends to do. It is a probing amendment. If someone claims to be entitled to carry on a reserved legal activity, they could be claiming something which, in some of the examples, they should not be able to claim at all. There are two angles on which I would be interested to hear the Minister’s comments. The first concerns a solicitor who pretends to be the authorised solicitor of a trade union but is not. In the case of AMS Law and the miners compensation scheme, AMS Law added a UDM claims handling unit logo to the solicitor’s headed paper. In other words, it falsely gave the impression that it was a trade union’s in-house claims handling unit. Is such an example covered by the   clause? If so, who should regulate against that kind of pretence, which misleads the consumer? AMS Law misled a lot of people in my area and elsewhere.

My second angle uses another example of the miners compensation scheme. My constituents believed that a number of people were solicitors when they were not. I cite the example of Mr. Stuart Bell of Stuart Bell Associates of Worksop. Mr. Bell was not a solicitor and never had been a solicitor. He was allowed to represent individual miners and present cases to the Department of Trade and Industry, because he was acting under a High Court ruling which stated that everyone had the legal right to the equivalent of their day in court. Who should be responsible for dealing with that abuse? People could not seek a remedy from the Law Society because Mr. Bell is not a solicitor—they had to go to the civil courts. I suggest that Mr. Stuart Bell of Worksop is not the only example of someone who has taken on a claim as if they were a solicitor. Certainly all my constituents assumed that Mr. Bell was a solicitor. Should the responsibility of investigating, both under present measures and under the Bill, go to the legal profession and its regulatory bodies? I think that that would be a good opportunity for the legal profession to defend itself against those who purport, by illusion if not explicitly, to be part of that profession and leave the consumer with the invidious proposition of having to go to a solicitor in order to take legal action against a non-solicitor whom they presumed was a solicitor.