HC Deb 14 November 2000 vol 356 cc793-4
30. Mr. James Plaskitt (Warwick and Leamington)

What progress is being made to improve the services of the Office of Supervision of Solicitors. [136350]

The Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor's Department (Mr. David Lock)

The number of complaints has come down from 17,074 to 7,728 and the OSS may be on target to hit the numerical figure of 6,000 by December this year. However, the Government continue to have very serious concerns about the quality of the complaints process. The only way to improve complaints handling is to resolve clients' problems at source, by instilling an ethos of client care throughout the legal profession.

Mr. Plaskitt

My hon. Friend will know that the OSS is based in my constituency, and I hope that he will agree that many of its staff are making valiant efforts to reach the targets that are set, but is he considering other reforms that may help to make further progress—for example, restructuring the funding and possibly using a polluter pays principle in relation to the fees paid by solicitors?

Mr. Lock

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his suggestion. He has been diligent in supporting the staff who work at the OSS, which, as he says, is in his constituency. It is right to say that the OSS and its predecessor were underfunded in the past and that clients suffered from a second-rate service as a result. I agree that there is a strong case for looking at the funding and the resources needed to operate the complaints and regulation arm of the Law Society. Perhaps those matters should be fixed by the OSS itself, then levied on the professions, rather than those who are regulated setting the resources available to the regulator, as is the current position.

Mr. John M. Taylor (Solihull)

Will the Minister consider the case of a solicitor in private practice who has intervened in good faith in another failing practice to try to rescue the situation? In such a case, would his advice to the OSS be that it should continue to support that solicitor in trying to rescue the firm in difficulty?

Mr. Lock

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that issue. Where a solicitor's practice has to be intervened upon, by definition the public have been let down by the legal profession and the duty that the legal profession as a whole has to the clients who have been let down does not stop when the new solicitor is brought in. I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that the new solicitor has a duty to do his best for the clients he inherits, but the profession as a whole, through the OSS, must take all reasonable steps to support that solicitor and to provide him with the assistance necessary to make up for the damage that has been done previously.