Compensation Bill [HL]

The response from the Claims Standards Council on 31 January will clearly be important. It is a matter of speculation what it will claim. It may attempt to claim some form of professional status or to put in place some programme of work which it thinks would enable its members to claim professional status. Apart from the firms, it is about the individuals within the firms; there are qualified solicitors working for claims management firms. My only thought is that in all of this digging into the detail I hope that we will proceed pretty cautiously, which I think is what the Minister has been saying, to make sure that we flush out all the different permutations. If you are in the claims management ““profession””—in inverted commas because I do not accept that there is a separate profession; the claim for that has not been made at all strongly in the evidence that we have heard—you would rate your chances of being able to make a claim for professional status against the department rather highly, because that is what you do every day: put forward claims. There is potential here for quite a lot of clever people to put forward the best case they can and muddle up any system that is being worked out. A really detailed look is absolutely the right way to go.