Clause 31
Legal Services Bill [Lords]
5:00 pm
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley, Liberal Democrat)
I am sure that my party unanimously took the same view in the House of Lords. Light touch is not necessarily the best way of describing the measure. It is, rather, a rational approach to the attitude that if improving one regulatory objective has a worsening effect on another, intervention is required. I like to take practical examples. Let us consider the balance between improving access to justice, which must be a priority in terms of the rule of law, and increasing public understanding of the citizen’s legal rights and duties. Both of those are regulatory objectives under clause 1. My example concerns a firm of solicitors that is particularly good at ensuring that people have access to justice. It gets information out of the clients, takes it to the courts and litigates effectively in, say, a hearing damage case, so that compensation is paid. However, it does not explain every step of what it is doing. Because of that, it is deemed to be contravening clause 1(1)(g) on increasing public understanding.
The initial regulator might say, “Well, it is all right that it has acted in a mechanical manner, because it is improving access to justice, and people who would not otherwise have got justice have done so.” However, the LSB would say, “Ah, but we are losing out on clause 1(1)(g), so we need to intervene, even though we are benefiting on subsection (1)(c).” The point about taking the objectives as a whole is that we can take into account whether we are winning on one and losing on another. Clearly, if we are losing out on one objective, and it is not making any difference to any of the others, we are losing out as a whole. The issue is not necessarily to do with lightness of touch, it is moreto do with proportionality. This is just a rational approach to the fact that LSB intervention should be based on a net loss, not on a situation in which there is a loss on one regulatory objective and a gain on another.