Compensation Bill [HL]

Amendment No. 43 in this group is in my name. Its purpose is to remove from the Bill one of the specific obligations imposed on the regulator by Clause 3(2)(c). It removes specifically the duty to encourage competition. Surely it is no part of the duties of the regulator to encourage competition. His duty is to ensure that a business that applies for authorisation is competent to provide the authorised services and that it will act properly in providing those services. There are of course laws against price-fixing. A claims management service which agreed to fix prices would therefore be acting unlawfully and would be subject to discipline by the regulator. But, in disciplining a claims management service that was part of a price-fixing cartel, the regulator would be ensuring that an authorised business complied with the law; he would not directly be doing that in order to encourage competition. I do not believe that it can be the function of a regulator, for example, to encourage people to set up claims management service businesses in order to increase the level of competition. It certainly cannot be the function of the regulator to impose lower tests for service providers in order to get more of them into the business. There is an entirely different organisation—the Office of Fair Trading—whose responsibility is to ensure competition. Surely the Office of Fair Trading would be just as competent to deal with competition among claims management services as it is to deal with competition issues among solicitors and barristers, which of course it has been doing effectively for a good many years. So it seems to me that here we are mixing up the duties of the regulator with the duties that are properly assigned to the Office of Fair Trading. I do not think that this specific obligation on the regulator belongs with him and so I think it should be removed.