Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 3: 3: Clause 83, page 48, line 35, at end insert— ““( ) appropriate provision requiring the licensing authority to consider the likely impact of a proposed application on access to justice when determining the application,”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, those of your Lordships who have followed the Bill closely—and I am delighted to see that many are still here after the passage of so much time—will know that we have been engaged in a debate with the Government about access to justice in relation to the licensing provisions under Part 5 of the Bill. Our initial amendment in Committee was softened on Report but we still failed to ensnare the noble Baroness. Despite the period of reflection between Report and Third Reading, we have seen no movement from the Government and so we have retabled our Report amendment. As your Lordships are well aware, the concernsto which the amendment seeks to respond have preoccupied all your Lordships who have taken an interest in Part 5. Indeed, even the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, at one memorable moment, indicated his support. Part 5 indisputably takes us into new territory. We simply do not know what the impact of alternative business structures will be on access to justice, andthe amendment seeks to ensure that a proper investigation is conducted into the likely impact. The noble Baroness does not like that because, she asserts, it would give too much weight in the decision-making process to one of the eight objectives to which all the regulators must have regard. My response to that is twofold. First, all the amendment obliges the licensing authority to do is to conduct a thorough investigation into the access to justice implications of the proposal. The obligationis for the licensor to put itself in the picture as thoroughly as possible before testing the proposal against all eight objectives. Within the scope of the amendment, the licensor is perfectly entitled to investigate in as much detail as it thinks appropriate any of the other seven objectives. Secondly, even ifI am wrong about my understanding of my own amendment, there is, in my submission, nothing wrong or unprecedented in Governments requiring decision-makers to give particular or significant weight to a relevant consideration, and, in this case, there is a powerful a priori reason for doing so. I beg to move.