Legal Services Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness. She rejected our amendment on the basis that it would rank the objectives in Clause 1. In my submission, that is not so. All the amendment requires the licensor to do is make a proper investigation of the access to justice implications. Once that investigation is complete, it is then appropriate for the licensor to measure whatever conclusions he has preliminarily reached against all eight objectives, including access to justice, not giving special weight to any one. The obligation in our amendment is to investigate, not to distort, the weighting system. Even if I am wrong about that, there are, as I said in my opening remarks, many examples of legislation and government guidance where weights are recorded by public authorities. There is no general principle, like equality under the law, that each ingredient fed into a final policy decision should have equal weight. On the contrary, the rule for Governments is discretion. For both those reasons, I am sad to have to tell the noble Baroness that I do not accept the Government’s position. The noble Baroness talked about Part 5 leading the way in the international community, but it is clear that, in so far as Germany is part of the international community, the Government’s approach has not resonated there. That comes out very clearly fromDr Dombek’s reply to the noble Lord, Lord Neillof Bladen. The German Parliament rejected the equivalent of Part 5 in Germany because, asDr Dombek said, it regarded it as, "““a threat to the independence of the lawyer””." We have not taken that position in our debate here, but I heard with great interest the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, who, if he did not say so in terms, certainly implied that that wouldbe one of the dangers of implementing Part 5 immediately, without looking at it very carefully beforehand. The noble Baroness is well aware that I do not accept the reasons why the Government oppose my amendment; therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House. On Question, Whether the said amendment (No. 3) shall be agreed to? Their Lordships divided: Contents, 213; Not-Contents, 145. Clause 106 [Power to modify application of licensing rules etc to special bodies]: