Compensation Bill [HL]

This has been a valuable debate and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, for his support. Perhaps the greatest difficulty that the Grand Committee faces is that we do not have any idea who the regulator will be. At our last Sitting, I stated that my preference was for an FSA-model regulator. Many of the points that I am now making and will no doubt make in subsequent amendments would be met by having a body such as the Financial Services Authority as the regulator. We are finding it difficult to come to terms with what it is necessary to have on the face of the Bill because of the overall uncertainty about whether we are dealing with a regulator of a small size, perhaps emerging from the previous representational body, or a regulator of some significance—whether the FSA, the Government themselves through the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, the Law Society, or eventually the Legal Services Commission. All those bodies would immediately have a sense of the policy agenda and the whole concept of wider social responsibility.