Solicitors (Independent Complaints Procedure) (Hansard, 12 February 1985)

§ Mr. Alfred Dubs (Battersea)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to reform the system of investigating complaints against solicitors by establishing a General Legal Council independent of the Law Society; and for connected purposes. The purpose of the Bill is to establish a new procedure for investigating complaints against solicitors. We do not know how many such complaints there would be if the public had confidence in the present system. According to the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux, it has received about 10,000 queries a year relating to the quality of solicitors' work. In its annual report, the Law Society says that it received 9,000 inquiries and complaints, although 2,000 of these came from members of the profession.

The main thrust of my Bill concerns the existing functions of the Law Society and how to replace them by a different system. The Law Society has three functions. It looks after the interests of the profession, it administers the legal aid system and it investigates the complaints by members of the public against solicitors. I contend that what I am seeking to do could not be called something that is against lawyers or the Law Society. I maintain that the Law Society has a major conflict of interest in trying to look after the interests of the profession on the one hand and investigating complaints made against members of the profession on the other. This conflict of interest has been recognised as existing by other professions who arrange their affairs differently—for example, the medical and architectural professions.

The Law Society itself is aware of this conflict of interests. In 1984, its professional purposes committee wrote: The Society is accused of putting the interests of the profession and of individual solicitors before the interests of the public when dealing with complaints. At worse the accusation is that the Society is 'whitewashing' members of the profession; at best there is unease on the part of the responsible critics that justice is not seen to be done because the Society is judge and jury in the profession's own cause. In the previous year, 1983, there was a joint submission by the the Police Federation and the Law Society about the proposed police complaints and discipline system. This said: The public does not believe that the present system is impartial. The public does not believe that complaints against the police are fairly investigated and adjudicated. The police investigate and then judge complaints against them within the police service. It seems to me that what the Law Society has said about complaints against the police applies equally to complaints against solicitors. Furthermore, in the code of professional conduct produced by the Law Society, there is a paragraph that talks about the conflict of interest when a solicitor may represent more than one party. I should have thought that, by analogy, all these points reflect adversely upon the Law Society's conflict of interest. That is understood.

The public may lay several types of complaint against a solicitor. They may concern his conduct, his negligence or what the Administration of Justice Bill refers to as inadequate professional services. By their very nature, these are hard to define or classify. Individual complaints may go from one of these headings to another.

190 The present system for investigating complaints has at its core the Law Society. I have looked with some interest at the pamphlet produced by the Law Society entitled "Complaints About Solicitors". About half of the pamphlet says what the Law Society cannot do and talks about consulting another solicitor in such circumstances. However, there are a number of detailed questions that the individual should answer for himself before deciding whether there is a basis for an approach to the professional purposes committee of the Law Society. I should have thought that, for the average person in the street, this represents a formidable hurdle, and explains why many people are reluctant to take their complaints to the Law Society in this way.

There are other features of the present system, to which I shall refer only in passing because time does not permit a more detailed analysis. There is the solicitors disciplinary tribunal, to which the public can refer complaints if they are willing to pay costs, but to which, in the normal course of events, there are only references from the Law Society. There is a negligence panel run by the Law Society to help individual complainants find solicitors when they wish to pursue actions for negligence. There are the courts to which the individual has the right of recourse in the case of negligence, and there is the lay observer, whose responsiblity is to look into the way in which the Law Society is investigating complaints where there is dissatisfaction about how this is being done.

Apart from conflict of interest, there is much dissatisfaction with the way that the Law Society handles complaints. Since I became interested in this subject some time ago, and particularly over the past week or two, I have had virtually an avalanche of complaints about the way that the Law Society handles complaints. Letters and telephone calls keep coming to me, and not one has done anything other than support my stand.

There was the famous Glanville Davies case, and I do not want to say too much about that. However, the Ely report which looked into the matter on behalf of the Law Society said: The whole episode is a disgrace to the Law Society. We can find few aspects of the complaints that were handled properly." There is concern that the Law Society will not look into complaints about its solicitors presented by a third party. There is concern about the large number of refusals to investigate other types of complaints by the Law Society. Many constituents and other people have come to me with complaints about fees in immigration cases and so on, and there has been either unhappiness at what the Law Society has done or an unwillingness even to contemplate going to the Law Society.

The purpose of my Bill is to establish a new body called the general legal council. This would consist of solicitors and representatives of consumer organisations such as the National Consumer Protection Council, the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux, the Consumers Association and the Legal Action Group. To allay the concern of the profession, the Bill will make provision for a bare majority of solicitors on the council. All the members of the body will not be appointed by the Lord Chancellor. They will have a qualified staff to help them.

The functions of the general legal council will be to have an independent method of investigating complaints against solicitors, to be the sole focus of complaints. That means that one would have only one place to go to for the 191 complaint to be dealt with, even if subsequently it were decided that the solicitors' complaints tribunal might be the appropriate body to deal with a case of misconduct.

Because of the complexity of complaints, the general legal council would have a responsibility to advise and help individual complaintants as to how to proceed further with their complaints. Taking a leaf out of the Administration of Justice Bill, which is going through the other place at the moment, I believe that it is right that the new body I propose should be able to remit part of or the whole of the fees that have been collected by a solcitor if that body feels that there is substance in the complaint.

The general legal council would be able to deal with matters of negligence. The council would have an arbitration panel which would seek to resolve questions of negligence within a £2,000 limit. If arbitration did not work, or if the sum of money was clearly larger than £2,000, there would still have to be recourse to the courts.

I submit that my proposals are popular among many people who feel that they are not getting justice when they complain about their solicitors. The Bill is popular because it is supported by a wide variety of bodies — for example, the National Consumer Protection Council and the Legal Action Group. I believe that it makes sense that the solicitors' profession, for which I have enormous respect, should handle its affairs differently so that the Law Society's responsibilities are distinct from complaints against solicitors. I commend the Bill to the House.