Clause 30
Legal Services Bill [Lords]
4:30 pm
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley, Liberal Democrat)
In a sense, we return to the trade union question by discussing the extent to which patent agents and the like provide regulated rather than non-regulated services.
I am nervous about the new clause. In some circumstances, one would want those who makes regulatory decisions to be unbiased, which is to say that they should not also have a representative role. However, that would not necessarily mean that the two sides should not have any involvement at any point; they might have the same receptionist or something like that. Even in smaller organisations, I would be nervous about a situation in which the body’s elected president took regulatory decisions. I am therefore not in favour of a statutory prevention—of rules that insist on some separation of personnel.
I accept that in a smaller organisation, if people need to be regulated, there are constraints, because people might have to work out of the same premises. The approach has to be proportionate, but there will be circumstances in which one would want to distinguish between the personnel, so that those who make the regulatory decisions are not democratically accountable to the people about whom they make those decisions.