Legal Services Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 14: 14: Schedule 1, page 121, line 15, at end insert— ““(4) An order made under sub-paragraph (3) is subject to affirmative resolution of both Houses of Parliament.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, the amendment is to paragraph 1(3) of Schedule 1 to the Bill, which states: "““The Lord Chancellor may by order amend sub-paragraph (1) by substituting for the limit on the maximum number of persons for the time being specified in paragraph (c) of that sub-paragraph a different limit””." In Committee, I suggested that this was a quite extraordinary provision because it allowed the Secretary of State, now the Lord Chancellor, to expand or contract the size of the Legal Services Board and that the scope for manipulating the sizeof the board to produce the decisions that the Government wanted was therefore very wide. The Minister explained in response that no such cynical motive lay behind the Government’s provision but that on the contrary the reason why it was important that the Lord Chancellor had this power was if, for example, the Legal Services Board took on two or three new areas of regulation that required expertise on the board that was not present. She went on to say: "““The issue that the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, raises is that the Lord Chancellor may be able to sneak something under the wire by negative procedure. One way in which to address his concerns would be for me to take the matter away to allow us to make it an affirmative rather than negative resolution. That would mean that, if the numbers were to be expanded, it would have to come through a debate in this Chamber and another place, so nothing could be done that would suggest that the Secretary of State was trying to increase the numbers for other reasons””.—[Official Report, 9/1/07; col. 163.]" At Report, not only did we not find an amendment to that effect tabled by the Government but the Minister gave us a number of reasons why an affirmative resolution was not the correct approach. Of those reasons, two were predominant. We were told, first, that an affirmative resolution would take up too much parliamentary time and, secondly, that it was decreasingly the Government’s habit to take this approach. As the Minister is aware, I took issue with both those suggestions. On the first point, the amount of parliamentary time devoted to affirmative resolutions in your Lordships' House is not very demanding. Secondly, far from the practice of delegated measures of this nature falling out of fashion, Governments—and I do not exclude the previous Conservative Government from this criticism—have increasingly relied on the skeleton Bill as an instrument of legislation. So I was not only unconvinced by the Minister’s reasons but in any case felt that they were wholly beside the point. Here we are faced with exactly the situation that we were faced with onthe first amendment tabled this afternoon. The Government had given a commitment to your Lordships' House and, in my submission, they should respect the convention and put the undertaking about an affirmative resolution in the Bill. I beg to move.