Clause 63
Legal Services Bill [Lords]
8:10 pm
Bridget Prentice (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Justice; Lewisham East, Labour)
I assure the hon. Gentlemen that I fully endorse the objectives behind the amendment, but the Bill already takes account of those principles; they are already included. We certainly do not intend that the board should compete with approved regulators.
The procedures and criteria in clauses 62 and 63 will enable and encourage the board and the Lord Chancellor to evaluate viable alternatives, offeredby existing approved regulators, when considering whether an order under clause 62 is appropriate. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey rightly raised the possibility of a new reserved activity—will writing is an obvious example of one that might be considered. Clause 63(2) makes clear the limited circumstances in which the order can be made: where a body has been de-authorised or there is a new reserved legal activity. I think that that makes it clear that the board can regulate directly only to prevent a regulatory vacuum. He is right to make a comparison with what we did in the Compensation Act.
Finally, I am confident that clauses 62 and 63, when taken with all of the other provisions in the Bill, will ensure that the board’s ability to act effectively as an approved regulator is constrained sufficiently, none of which can happen unless an order has been approved by both Houses. That militates against the board thinking that it can jump in and regulate new activities willy-nilly; it must look at what is available already. That makes good economic sense, as well, as the hon. Gentleman said. We have already a regulator up and running that has all of the attributes needed to carry out the regulation, so it is unnecessary to do anything other than that. On that basis, I ask him to consider withdrawing his amendment.