WIREDGOV

The government is asking for views as to who the new bodies responsible for regulation and complaints in the legal profession should be able to share information with.

The Legal Services Board is the new oversight regulator of legal services, while the Office for Legal Complaints will replace the numerous bodies that currently handle complaints about different legal professionals. The Legal Services Board became operational on 1 January and the Office for Legal Complaints will assume its functions later in 2010.

Both bodies will be restricted to disclosing personal information for defined purposes. This includes where the effectiveness and efficiency of the wider regulatory framework will be improved by the sharing of certain information with other regulatory bodies. A consultation published on the Ministry of Justice website today suggests who those other bodies might be and seeks views on those suggestions.

Justice Minister Bridget Prentice said:

‘I want people’s confidential information to stay confidential. To achieve this, the new complaints and regulatory system has a presumption of non-disclosure of information.

‘I also want the Legal Services Board and the Office for Legal Complaints to communicate with other regulators who already process personal data as a matter of course. This is important to maintain regulatory performance across the piece and to avoid duplicated investigations, or to avoid one body spending taxpayers’ money on the services of a professional about which another body has a severe concern.

‘This consultation aims to find the exact tipping point where common sense says the presumption against disclosure should be outweighed by the benefits of sharing the right information with other regulators. People need to trust that tipping point is set in the right place. Finding it through an open and transparent consultation will help to build that trust.’

The consultation document is available on the Ministry of Justice website. The document explains in detail the legal criteria under which the Office for Legal Complaints and Legal Services Board can disclose information. It also explains how the Legal Services Act 2007, which established the bodies, stipulated that the specific details should be set up through the secondary legislation that this consultation will lead to.

The consultation suggests which bodies the government proposes that the Legal Services Board should share certain information with:

• Insolvency Service
• Financial Services Council

It also suggests which bodies the Office for Legal Complaints should share certain information with. As they will handle a wide range of complaints across legal professions, the suggested list is longer:

• Office of Fair Trading
• Financial Services Authority
• Legal Services Commission
• Judicial Appointments Commission
• Claims Management Regulator
• Law Society of Scotland
• Scottish Legal Complaints Commission
• Law Society of Northern Ireland
• Financial Reporting Council
• Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner
• Information Commissioner.

The consultation closes on 21 April 2010.

Notes to editors

The Legal Services Board began work on 1 January 2010 as the oversight regulator of the legal profession.

The Office for Legal Complaints will become the new central complaints handler for the legal profession in late 2010, after which the current complaints handlers will wind down their operations.

For more information, please contact Ministry of Justice press office on 020 3334 3536.