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Chamber

Plenary, 14 Dec 2006

14 Dec 2006 · S2 · Plenary

Item of business

Legal Profession and Legal Aid (Scotland) Bill: Stage 3

Swinney, John SNP North Tayside Watch on SPTV

One of the matters discussed at length during consideration of the bill at stages 1 and 2 was whether complaints about services and conduct should be handled by the same body or different bodies. The Government proposes that service complaints should be handled by the Scottish legal services commission and that conduct complaints should be handled by the relevant professional organisations.

I moved a series of amendments at stage 2 to try to ensure that all complaints, whether they were about service or conduct, were handled by the Scottish legal complaints commission because I believed that that would fulfil the Government's commitment to an open and transparent process that would build public confidence. Those amendments were not successful at stage 2.

I have proposed in amendments 5 and 7 that the effectiveness, workability and performance of the separation of service and conduct complaints be reviewed after two years and subject to a report by the commission to ministers. There are two elements to the argument for doing that. The first is that however hard ministers try to make the distinction between service and conduct complaints, it is not quite as neat as everybody thinks. I was struck by some of the evidence that we heard in committee that members of the public invariably find that their complaints start off as service complaints and end up as conduct complaints. If that is the pattern, we would find that different bodies would be looking at different elements of one complaint. That would disrupt the comprehensive assessment of complaints that members of the public want.

Also in evidence to the committee, the former Scottish legal services ombudsman, Mrs Costelloe Baker, said that in her opinion—based on her experience of dealing with such cases—the split between service and conduct complaints confused members of the public. Therefore, it would be beneficial to look at complaints in their totality to achieve an integrated approach.

The second element of the argument is about the performance of the professional organisations in dealing with complaints. Only recently, the Law Society of Scotland had to wipe clean the disciplinary records of about 250 solicitors whom it had reprimanded because the Law Society's actions were deemed to be illegal. The charge that was levelled at over 250 solicitors was one of unsatisfactory conduct. The Law Society has been down the route of trying to exercise disciplinary action and has got itself into a fix. On 13 November, the new Scottish legal services ombudsman, Jane Irvine, published official notices about cases in which the Law Society of Scotland refused to comply with her recommendations on the handling of complaints. I cite those two examples to demonstrate that the professional organisations do not always handle conduct complaints in the most effective fashion.

Instead of going back to the proposals that I made in my stage 2 amendments, which were not supported by the committee, I now seek to insert into the bill a provision similar to the one that Parliament agreed just the other week in the Bankruptcy and Diligence etc (Scotland) Bill. Gordon Jackson's amendment, which was accepted by ministers, proposed a two-year review period to look at the performance of particular elements of that bill. The provisions that I propose in amendments 5 and 7 would require the commission to report to ministers two years after the date on which the act will come into force to assess whether the separation between conduct and service complaints has worked effectively or whether the arrangement needs to be revisited.

The arrangement is worthy of further examination. Based on the Executive's past practice, I look forward to a warm response to my proposals.

I move amendment 5.