Parliament should set up single legal regulator

Legal Services Board chair David Edmonds has called on parliament to set up a single regulator for the legal services sector that would absorb all eight current frontline regulators.

“There would be enormous resistance to wind in the existing primary regulators into a single organisation”, Edmonds (pictured) told the Justice Committee yesterday, but “it would be clearer for consumers, clearer for lawyers”.

Several committee members remarked that the legal regulatory landscape, with its layers of regulators, representative and complaints bodies, was confusing for consumers and the general public, challenging the very purpose and benefit of the Legal Services Board.

Responding to a comment by Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley and Broughton, that the system described by the LSB chair was of one “red tape upon red tape”, Edmonds said it was “an interesting question whether going forward we need a Legal Services Board, a Bar Standards Board, a Law Society and the six other regulators sitting alongside”.

“It’s a question for parliament to decide if we need all these supra and primary regulators”, he continued, rejecting once again suggestions that the LSB had been micro-managing the frontline regulators.

“I have one year to go, so I’m thinking about how the system parliament has created might be improved,” he said. “We have something that could be simplified, quite easily. I don’t see why in two-three years’ time it wouldn’t be possible to create a regulator that applied itself across the whole landscape.”

Edmonds quipped: “That’s where I would be headed if left to my own devices, but I am not, and that’s for you to decide.”

Dartford MP Gareth Johnson, a non-practising solicitor, similarly remarked that the legal landscape was “getting crowded, with all these regulators and umbrella groups”.

“The point you make about the number of regulators sitting there is a fundamental point,” Edmonds replied.

“Parliament decided on the framework of supra-regulator and eight frontline regulators. All this was based on the Clementi recommendations in 2001. Whether we have a framework that holds good for next five years I have some serious doubts in my own mind about.

“What we’ve got is something we’re trying to make work. We’ve made it work as well as anyone would have expected, but whether you want this in five years’ time is a question for parliament, not for me.”

Earlier in the proceedings, Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North, asked what benefits the LSB and the Legal Service Act had delivered for small businesses.

LSB chief executive Chris Kenny, who appeared alongside David Edmonds, said the board was analysing the results of a recent baseline survey canvassing 9,000 small businesses.

“Access to legal advice is just as important as access to funding,” he said before revealing that only 12.6 per cent of the businesses surveyed said law firms were ‘an effective way of accessing legal advice’.

Kenny added that ABSs would allow more suppliers to move into this sector and offer subscription services that would address business owners’ fears over billing and the high cost of legal advice.