 Do fáb. Fe lagiwio a chyffwyr i gaeliwyr 19 ymlaen o 2023 ymyddio ym d Mirror, i gyflaen sy'n cyflaen wedi eu cyfr型 sy'n cyfrin oedd gair, ac yn defnyddio ymlaen yn y Cwcab Stewart o ddod pan'r symgell Cymru yn gaeliwyr i gaeloedd eu hubyn gyda'i gaeliwyr miliwyr. Argymell fel cysylltu'r cyflaen o'r ddod, mae'r symgr i gaeliwyr Cwcab Stewart i'w cyflaen. Perdwyd cymhraen i gynyddiwyr Carina Adam ac Megan Gallagher also attending the meeting virtually today our first item on the agenda is to invite Kevin Stewart to declare any relevant interests i have no relevant interests convener thank you thank you very much for that Kevin our second agenda item today for consideration is an affirmative instrument and this is for the draft legal aid and advice and assistance, miscellaneous amendment Scotland number four regulations 2023. For this, I welcome to the meeting Shavone Brown, Minister for Victims and Community Safety, and her officials, Shona Irkut, legal aid policy lead, and Martin Brown, solicitor legal directorate from the Scottish Government. You are all very welcome. Thank you for joining us this morning. I refer members to paper one for this item, and I invite the minister to say a few words about this instrument. Good morning, convener, and good morning, committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee about the legal aid and advice and assistance miscellaneous amendment Scotland number four regulations 2023. This instrument has been brought forward to deliver changes to existing legal aid regulations, primarily to ensure continuing access to justice in Scotland. This instrument makes provision to ensure that legal advice and assistance will be available to persons arrested under section 27 of the national security act 2023, known as the 2023 act section 27, and the schedule six of the 2023 act will, if commenced, create a procedural framework for the arrest of a person who is reasonably suspected to be involved in foreign power threat activity. Current provision for legal advice and assistance does not cover all the circumstances of detention in relation to such activity, and those regulations will make further provision to ensure that an appropriate regime is in place to ensure that advice and assistance and assistance by way of representation can be provided to persons arrested under these provisions in the 2023 act. Without additional provision, there is a risk that persons are arrested under the 2023 act and are unable to access legal advice, assistance or representation. Similar provision is already in place for those detained under the anti-terrorism legislation. This instrument will also make provision for any carer support payment to be disregarded by the Scottish legal aid board when assessing a person's financial eligibility for children's legal assistance and for such payments to be excluded from the recovery where a person has a liability to the Scottish legal aid fund in relation to the civil legal aid proceedings. Carer support payment is intended to improve outcomes for unpaid carers by providing financial assistance to those providing regular and substantial care to someone in receipt of the qualifying disability benefit. Finally, the instrument makes minor amendments and corrections to regulations relating to council fees in respect of the civil and criminal legal aid. That is just a brief overview of the regulations and their context, and I am happy to answer questions. Thank you very much for that minister. Colleagues, do you have any questions or comments? I have one from me. For the carer support payment, the instrument makes provision for those payments to be disregarded. Is it your expectation that they will always be disregarded by the legal aid board? My understanding is that that would be expected. That is a policy question, but I expect that that will be done. The way that we have disregarded those mirrors and the way that other payments have been disregarded will ensure that they are not counted for your eligibility. There would be communication and clear information available to people about that, so that they would know. I think that that will be a question for the legal aid board. It would be expected that the people who qualify for the payment would always be eligible for legal aid. It means that, from an administration side of things for the Scottish legal aid board, they can simply disregard it or do not have to include it, but people who are receiving the payment would qualify anyway. Thank you, Shana. That is helpful. Any other questions or comments from anyone? No. Fulton MacGregor has joined us online. He was unable to get here because of train issues, but he is online at the moment. If there are no other questions, I thank the minister very much for that. Can we move straight to item 3, which is the formal business in relation to these instruments? I ask the minister to move the motion. Can we move the motion? Any other final comments or questions from any member? If not, are we all agreed? We are all agreed. Thank you everyone for that. I invite the committee to delegate to me the publication of a short factual report on our deliberations this morning on the affirmative SSI that we have just considered. Are we happy with that? Are we all agreed? That completes consideration of the affirmative instrument. I thank the minister and her officials for joining us this morning, and there will be a short pause while we change other witnesses. We can now move on to our next item on our agenda today, which is to begin taking evidence on the regulation of legal services Scotland Bill. I welcome our second panel this morning. We have Vicky Crichton, the secretariat from the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, a consumer panel. Sharon Horvitz, legal director from competition and markets authority. Tracy Riley, head of consumer markets, Consumer Scotland, and Dr Marcia Scott, chief executive officer from Scottish Women's Aid. You're all very welcome. Thank you for joining us this morning. I refer members to papers 2 and 3 in your packs. I'm going to invite the witnesses each to make a short opening statement, and I will start Vicky with you, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning, everyone. I'm Vicky Crichton. I'm the director of public policy at the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission, but today, in that role, I provide the secretariat to the independent consumer panel, and so today I'm here representing their views. The Scottish Legal Complaints Commission's consumer panel is an independent advisory panel, which was set up in 2015 to assist the SLCC in understanding and taking account of the interests of consumers. Its remit involves providing feedback to the SLCC from a consumer viewpoint, and that includes making recommendations on how the SLCC can improve its policies and procedures in relation to legal complaints, suggesting topics for research connected to legal consumers, and expressing a view on matters related to consumer complaints. The panel's members include representatives from Citizens Advice Scotland, the Competition and Markets Authority, Consumer Scotland, Scottish Women's Aid, Which, Young Scot and representatives from academia. As many of those organisations are represented in their own right on the panel today, the panel has asked me to present its collective and shared views. The panel wants to see a regulatory system that puts consumer interests at its heart, that seeks to promote consumer confidence and to protect consumers, particularly those who might be more vulnerable from risk or detriment. Its views on the regulation of legal services are in the aim of achieving those outcomes. Thank you very much, Vicki. Can I move now on to Sharon? Thank you, convener, and to the committee for the opportunity to allow me to come here today to set out the Competition and Markets Authority's views on the bill. The role of the CMA is to help people, businesses and the UK economy by promoting competitive markets and tackling unfair behaviour. The CMA has significant experience in working in the legal services sector, including various market studies and reviews across the UK as a whole. That work includes the research report that we published in 2020 on the Scottish legal services sector, which followed the independent review and was intended to support the Scottish Government as it considered how to implement the recommendations from that report. We have continued our work in this area, notionally responding to the Scottish Government's consultation prior to the bill's introduction, and the call for views that followed it. In summary, we would like to make three main points up to the Bill Committee today. First, we welcome and agree that regulatory form was required, and there are many aspects of the proposed bill that have the potential to deliver improvements for consumers in Scotland. However, we want to use this opportunity to reassert one of the main findings of our work, namely that the optimal regulatory model—a model where the regulator is truly independent of the representative bodies—is, in our view, the most effective way of achieving and maintaining the best outcome for consumers through the protection of consumer interests and the promotion of competition, as well as wider public interest issues. It is also consistent with better regulation principles, and it avoids the risk that regulatory decision making may be compromised by the potentially opposing interests of the profession. That is because there is a fundamental tension between the roles of the regulator and the professional body. We believe that the bill is a missed opportunity in that regard. Although we have concerns with the current model, we acknowledge that the Government has proposed some checks and balances aimed at ensuring or trying to ensure that the regulators exercise their regulatory functions appropriately. Those are included in sections 19 and 20, and they are the provisions that allow the CMA, Consumer Scotland and the Scottish Parliament, to refer regulatory failures to Scottish ministers. However, the CMA has questions about how that oversight role would operate in practice and how effective a safeguard it might provide. For the CMA's part, our remit is cross economy and our decisions about what markets to examine and when is discretionary informed by where we think we can deliver the best outcomes, and there is a risk of tension if the CMA is given a public role under legislation that requires ongoing monitoring. Thirdly, we consider that preserving the profession's independence from Government is an important aspect of independence. It is important for securing various public interest considerations, such as protecting the legal rights of individuals and ensuring access to justice. The CMA believes that, under the regulatory arrangement that is proposed in the bill, the Scottish Government has a more significant role than would be the case with an independent regulator. That is all that I wish to say, but I am very happy to explore those issues further with the committee. Consumer Scotland is a non-ministerial body that was set up a little over a year ago, and our role is to advocate for the interests of consumers. We think that the legal services market is a very important one for consumers, because gaining access to legal services can help them to obtain and address across a range of other markets. The way that legal services are regulated and delivered can affect how consumers experience that market. Having services that are designed in a more inclusive way can help to manage any risks that there are to consumers. We think that the bill addresses a range of important public and consumer interest considerations. We particularly welcome the regulatory objectives that are being set out in primary legislation, and in particular the consumer principles that are now set out on the face of the bill. We would like to see the new regulatory framework applied so that it delivers tangible improvements for consumers. In that regard, we think that it is important that the on-going impact of the reforms is monitored so that we can understand whether the market is actually meeting consumer needs, whether the regulatory framework is promoting opportunities for better outcomes and minimising any risks of consumer harm. We believe that there would be both significant public interest and consumer benefit in a system of independent regulation. That being said, we also believe that the bill represents a step forward from the status quo, and we think that co-regulation can be made to work. It is the case that co-regulation will result in a system that might be relatively complicated for consumers to navigate, and that in turn requires further checks and balances to be in place to secure consumer confidence. In that regard, we acknowledge that the proposed ministerial powers of intervention in the market are the subject of strong stakeholder views. However, we believe that some oversight provision is necessary because of the model chosen. In the event that an independent regulatory model had been chosen, we think that it is unlikely that those powers would have been required. In relation to other aspects of the bill, we support the move towards entity regulation and the provision for alternative business structures. We generally welcome all the proposed changes to the complaint system. I look forward to sharing further views on the detail of the bill as the session progresses. Good morning, everybody. I am really welcoming and marking from myself the milestone of this discussion, I suppose. I will just sketch out for you why. That is because Scottish Women's Aid, first of all, is a national domestic abuse organisation. If you are not familiar with us, we are an umbrella for 34 services from Shetland to Danone to the borders. We establish and learn from the feedback loops that we work, that we enable and nurture with consumers, service users and staff who work in grassroots organisations around Scotland. When I came into post eight years ago, I did a tour of the 34 services, which took me far longer than I thought it would, I have to say, in part because of the delightful geography of Scotland. My first question to the managers in those services was what are the two biggest issues that the women and children that you work with are dealing with and what are the barriers you have in supporting them? I do not think the first answer will come as any surprise, stable funding was of course the first problem for all of them and that is a different committee meeting. The second one and this was unanimous around the network was the problem with legal services for women and children. The multiple dysfunction in the system, the criminal and civil justice systems that meant that women rarely and children rarely had access to their human rights for access to justice. The Scottish government and the larger legal situation, the larger legal context very rarely enabled women to enjoy the rights that the government has and through the UK state committed to under international mechanisms. So it's been very clearly a long process for us to try and figure out how to change the system and the regulation of legal services is one small but very important part from our perspective and we engaged with the independent review of legal aid and also the independent review of the regulation of legal services, the Robertson review, Martin Evans work in our attempts to try and shake the foundations of some of the assumptions going into the way justice is not delivered in Scotland for women and children living with domestic abuse. One of the things that we have done as part of that is to test a new model for legal services which we had to have privately funded because it was so difficult to challenge the way services are provided in Scotland and the legal education foundation funded a series of projects for us one of which delivered services in a new model at Edinburgh women's aid which I'm delighted to say the Scottish government has now committed to extending for three years as we look at the new model and the features of the new model crossover with the the discussions at hand here in many ways but probably the most important feature I think is that we are looking at a model that works from a human rights perspective rather than a consumer model and while I really will probably agree with everything that my colleagues to the left say I think it's really a mistake to think about access to justice as a consumer product in fact the way legal aid is set up in Scotland women who are experiencing domestic abuse 90 plus percent of them who experience financial abuse are still subject to a means test for legal aid and when they do succeed at legal aid at getting legal aid it's only for a patchwork of some of the legal needs that they have so our model would look at our model does look at associating as Martin Evans suggested a family law specialist solicitor with an advice agency like women's aid and we and and one of the big barriers to setting up that model for us was the fact that the the regulation against advice agencies like women's aid and advocacy organizations being able to just directly address the problems in service by hiring solicitors and providing a one-stop shop so to speak of both support and services for women children so we really welcome really welcome the the proposal in this bill it to change that situation so that certain organizations like our own could in fact more directly support women by hiring solicitors as we have had to go through quite a lot of expensive hoops in order to manage just providing a service in Edinburgh women's aid there are some aspects of the bill around that issue that we would take issue with and happy to discuss that in more detail later but I do think that I would really welcome the committee's consideration of the fact that this is an area that has been heavily influenced by vested interests for many years in Scotland and this is a real opportunity from our perspective to begin to try and re or as the what's the new phrase pivot pivot Scotland in the direction of a justice system that actually delivers the human rights that women and children expect they should have and rarely do and part of the reason why this is so important in a civil setting is that um the way the system operates now has an enormously chilling effect on women's likelihood of calling the police of engaging with the criminal justice system because the civil justice system treats them so badly so I would really um welcome many aspects of the bill where you know we're concerned about the the decision of the government not to go with an independent regulator and happy to get into the details of all of that but I just wanted to to take this opportunity to say well the system is very much broken from our perspective but there are seeds of innovation that are that seem to be growing initially and that some of the innovations in this bill if not passed will be um we'll possibly make the the growth of a new system almost impossible so thanks thank you very much marcia thank you all for that we'll move to questions and and I'll come to my my colleagues in turn but just to kick things off um and maybe I'll stay with you marcia if that's okay you talked about some of the that that that chilling effect that the way the current system works um has could you just unpick that a little bit and say a little bit more about the specific issues that to women and children particular in particular have in accessing the legal system absolutely so the by far probably the biggest violation of human rights in the way our civil justice system works is the what happens with uh women who are involved in the criminal justice system who have children so um one of the critical aspects that we know of is that when women um consider whether to to seek help whether it's through calling the police or through talking to a social worker or through whatever mechanism um uh they are afraid for good reason that child protection processes will get involved that will mean that they may in fact wind up um uh being tasked with failure to protect their children rather than being offered the the resources of the system to help them uh protect their children by managing the dangerous behaviour of the of the perpetrator and the accused in this case um uh what that looks like in terms of legal services is that um women by the time women might actually go through a criminal justice process can't there there may well be in fact be a conviction and um uh in the criminal courts but by the time there's a child a consideration of child contact and custody and visitation questions in a civil setting um uh that that process can happen completely disconnected from the criminal process and so women are then placed in a situation where they are often not able to access legal services at any point in all of this and I'll just say that the the lack of access to any lawyer legal aid or otherwise um at the moment in vast swathes of scotland um is extraordinary and we've had accounts from Grampian from uh Shatland and Orkney from a variety of mostly rural but not entirely rural services um about staff trying making 50 calls to try and find a solicitor legal aid or otherwise so that the system is you know it is really a crisis at the moment but even um you know the even should a woman get some advice for some elements of what's happening to her and this is almost always civil legal advice finding a lawyer who can give her advice is difficult first of all but secondly by the time she gets that and it goes through the process if she does find one um uh she's often enmeshed in processes in court that she that had she had the advice at the beginning um she would never have gone near and that's what our new model test which is the minute a woman accesses support does she have legal issues does she have legal questions and and I'll quote our the the head solicitor at the in Edinburgh women's aid Gillian Baker who says you know she says her her biggest job is keeping women out of court you know and explaining to them when they don't don't need to and shouldn't engage with certain court processes um and uh but the the difficulty is that the the the advice that women get first of all it's difficult to find it secondly when they do find it it is very rarely domestic abuse competent or readily available and affordable for the solicitor to provide and certainly not affordable for the victims that we work with and so providing a free at the point of need service is the model that we that we think needs to be tested okay thanks very much sorry that was long no no that's it Kevin did you want to come in on that yes convener welcome to to the panel today and i'd like to follow up on some of the comments that dr scott has just made in particular that statement that points your folks on the ground are phoning up 40 50 solicitors um so obviously there is going to be some advantage to charities to be able to directly employ legal professionals um do you think dr scott that um there may be difficulties in some regards from certain quarters if charities are using the same solicitors again and again and how do we get over that in terms of building up um trust between those solicitors that are employed by charities and the women in your case that you're representing i'm not really sure what what you're concerned about here i mean i think first of all the fact that there's a solicitor associated with a particular service i would think would build trust rather than challenge it um is it other elements of the system that you're worried about in terms of the i'm playing devil's advocate here and i'm actually thinking of a particular case that i was involved in many many many many years ago um where an individual thought that a solicitor was being thrust upon them um if you like and if there is somebody associated with a particular charity how are you going to deal with the situations where some folk some women may not actually want to use that solicitor how do you get around that does that go back to the the 50 calls or or or what can we do to build up that trust well i mean i having spent a lot of time in women's aid services i find the scenario that you've just painted quite hard to associate with how i know services are provided sure first of all no woman or child in our services has has services thrust upon them our problem is finding the services they need more likely if a woman access to service in this model um uh and wanted legal representation and for whatever reason was not happy with the solicitor or solicitors who were available available through women's aid of course she would be supported to access legal aid or you know whatever the system offers her under those circumstances um and i'm sure given our experience in edinburgh where one full time solicitor wasn't even close to enough um uh it would be a relief to the system if a woman had another solicitor and could access her i told you i was playing devil's advocate dr scott as you know from previous encounters i always do that scenario that you paint of one solicitor not being enough for women's aid here in edinburgh is there the opportunity between the 34 organisations that you represent to have a pool of folk so that there is choice there for women who may not want to go to one particular solicitor for whatever reason um i think that we're really unclear yet what we would be able to offer i think that's absolutely a possibility we're actually meeting with the legal education foundation this afternoon as we've made it through a second tier application to pull together staff and survivors in some of the more rural areas to talk about what a model would look like for them because unlike in edinburgh i don't think one full time solicitor would necessarily be needed in all of you know we have very small services however um the geographical challenges we don't know what the best model would be there so we're trying to pull together a piece of work that would be found funded there but the other thing that we've suggested to the access to justice officials given this problem with just finding any solicitor um is uh an additional solicitor funded through the program in edinburgh women's aid in order to at least provide telephone advice um the other thing is that the scottish league laid board has is working with us to do us a brief um intervention to try and under to help services access where there might be an available solicitor but also to take to get really good data about where the worst problems are and um so we'll have more information as we develop the model i'm not convinced that a central belt model is appropriate in other areas of scotland but sorry that was a long-winded answer to say what you suggest would certainly be a possibility not a long-winded answer at all i would say um i think you're right to highlight that for what might you work in um some of the larger cities may not work elsewhere um i'm very interested in terms of what you've had to say there around about uh telephone advice access um again you know having experienced cases where um some people that i've been dealing with have found it very very difficult um to access um a solicitor at all um i think that telephone line is a last resort is probably a good one um have you um had any examples from anywhere in the country where solicitors have provided that telephone services for some of your clients in the past as a last resort well colvin you know that's pretty much you know by telephone by zoom by teams by you know services were almost exclusively provided that way it's quite a difficult problem really because um and this is one of the things we need to find out working directly with survivors and staff i feel like there's a trade-off between face-to-face and ready access to services for our more rural areas and i'm not sure how to solve that frankly um and we all need to find out from um uh from survivors how to prioritize you know i think telephone service or or video service uh can be delivered as we all know now you know from anywhere quickly um well assuming their signal which is another issue in some of our areas and um but uh i'm not sure i under i i can yet accept that the people living in rural um an island community should have to accept the fact that they're not going to get the same kind of service in terms of a face-to-face um uh service uh that you could get in the central belt of Scotland so very briefly final question obviously what you're describing there is an approach that has to be person centered to meet the needs of particular individuals um is that what we would aim for uh no matter what whether you be in a city a village or a remote rural island setting i think our point is that that would be what would would distinguish this approach from the existing approach in Scotland services which are uh not designed to provide access to justice they're designed to tick a box thank you doctor scott thank you can be there thanks thanks thanks for that i suppose following on that point about the access point tracey if i could if i could come to you um what are the what are the some of the issues that that you've come across in terms of access to to services and within way services are available quality cost um those those kinds of questions if i can come to you and then i'll i'll come to other witnesses first answer wouldn't disagree with what marcia says about there being a broader issue of how people access services it's not just a question of consumer rights it is a question of broadly how people access legal services and that may come in a variety of shapes whether it's from advice bodies or from private practice solicitors there's actually a really limited scottish data or research set around the consumer experience of accessing legal services and that's something that was picked up right to the time of roberton and hasn't really to my mind been resolved since that we are currently conducting some survey work on this we hope to be able to share results of that with the committee during the progress of the bill but i think that probably won't be available until around the turn of the year um it is a really complex landscape for consumers and i think the roberton review described it as being complex confused clustered and hard for both those within and outside the system to understand it's probably difficult to to take issue with that description the studies that we do have such as those by the cba have found significant barriers for consumers in choosing legal services and finding information on cost and engaging the quality and value for money of the service they receive the cma also i think has found that there's been unmet need for legal services and low engagement by consumers in terms of being able to question whether the providers they're looking at are able to meet their needs i know that there's been new press transparency guidance introduced by the law society in 2021 but i don't haven't yet seen any publicly available analysis of how that has impacted on the market for consumers like marcia we have a particular concern around consumers who are in vulnerable circumstances that might be that they've got low financial resilience they've had really difficult life events they've got issues around their capacity to understand people often seek legal advice when they're really stressed or when they need to spend a really significant amount of money whether that be making bequest under a will or buying a house or no criminal proceedings for example they're really stressful situations if you combine that with a situation where legal professionals often have greater technical knowledge and can use very complex language i think it's quite difficult for consumers to navigate this market in a really confident way you know if you combine that with other vulnerabilities like escaping from abuse or caring or a range of other factors that's why we think it's so important that the regulation has really has the ability to set very strong and appropriate standards and that complaints based against whether a provider has met those standards can be dealt with as quickly and as easily as possible happy to give any more detail thanks very much Tracy that that's helpful in in your view that the way the bill is currently drafted do you do you think that we do have that capacity to set those strong regulatory standards that that you you are saying are so vital i think the regulatory objectives are far more directly set out on the face of the bill and i think that having the consumer principles there is helpful because it gives you something that you can hold things up against in terms of those consumer principles deal with issues like access like choice access to my mind but also include affordability so there is something there what's important for us i guess as well is that that is monitored and there is no evidence base at the moment regarding whether those principles are being met currently and we think that it's important that our research that is ongoing at the moment will hopefully set some kind of baseline but it's important that there is ongoing research in this market to see whether that's actually happening and whether the the objectives of the reform are being met okay thank you at your point about the lack of data and the lack of a coherent story is as well made shine if i can come to you with a similar question around the barriers around around some of the challenges that people currently face and your view on how how you think the bill will or won't address those challenges so i trace obviously referred to some of the findings from the cma and i certainly echo what tracy said about the lack of access to information lack of which which is something that we picked up on as you said robertin as well so we come up with this from a competition and consumer protection perspective and what i'm going to say is largely based on what we found in 2020 when we did our research so i think the first key point and it's one that we've really made that there are important characteristics of legal services that affect the way in which consumers engage and are relevant for competition assessment and that's that consumers purchase legal services infrequently and under time pressure and often in distressing circumstances divorce following a bereavement and and various other scenarios we've been talking about so reliance on clear timely information about price and quality is paramount but what we found was that price transparency is lacking we found we we we did this research um with providers and found at the time only six percent of providers publish price prices on the website of which um and 72 percent had no plans to do so and only 18 percent actually had a website um and only 16 percent of those who had a website referred to third party ratings so we identified these barriers to consumers shopping around effectively uh and also limiting incentives on providers to compete vigorously um and the lack of transparency combined with the characteristics of legal services that i've just talked about do make it very difficult for consumers to shop around to assess quality and that softens competition so we found that competition wasn't working well and i think one good way to illustrate that is we looked at the um we found very large differences in price persisting over time when we compared prices for specific scenarios on a like like basis so for example the price for standard will may vary from about 100 pounds to 200 pounds obviously it's based on 2020 work the price for an undefended divorce may vary from 300 pounds to 925 pounds um so providers and the combination of that with providers using different types of pricing sometimes hourly fees sometimes not makes it very difficult for consumers to compare and shop around um and that analysis suggests that consumers could make significant savings if they were provided with sufficient information so they could shop around effectively so we identified various things various measures aimed at facilitating competition that would empower consumers by improving the availability of the information and those recommendations were aimed at increasing transparency of price service and quality quality being obviously very difficult for consumers to judge to enable them to get shop around get a much better deal and secure good outcomes but it's not just about price and quality it's about improving information to enable consumers to identify their legal needs navigate a sector that many find complex and then also giving greater access to regulatory and provide information across the sector which will help consumers make more informed choices but also will offer opportunities for third parties to use this information to develop new and innovative tools for consumers such as press and comparison websites so we made recommendations and the law society um had as we've noted published um price transparency guidance our main recommendation of law society was to evaluate how whether that guidance was having an impact on driving change um and our advice was to consider turning that into a rule change and I don't think that's happened um so we talked a little bit about the difficulty evaluating whether or not there has been a real change in the provision of more transparent information and if so if that's had an impact on competition um but we also made recommendations to the Scottish Government to to build on existing work um so for example in response to the legal aid review recommendations I think there was work at the time on developing an information hub uh there was work on mygovs.scot um so which was all about giving information to enable consumers to um to navigate the market um and also measures to um make regulatory data more available and then we also recommended that consumer Scotland which wasn't yet established to take on an active role in driving to delivering and monitoring information initiatives and ensuring that they are inclusive to all consumers so that was the competition aspect of what we found um we also looked at regulation and we recognised the importance that any regulation um and regulation is important here to protect consumer interests but it's also important that it be proportionate to avoid unnecessary costs being passed on to consumers and to minimise any adverse impact on competition so what sometimes regulation can have the impact of uh inhibiting competition to the detriment of consumers and we identified some concerns about the impact of regulation uh and the fact that it hadn't sufficiently kept praise praise with the needs of Scottish legal services sector so we recommended to focus on removal of unnecessary regulatory restrictions on how Scottish legal services provides operate um where we felt that they might have had an adverse effect on growth innovation and and the provider's ability to compete on equal footing so we most of our recommendations focused on implementing the ABS regime uh but there are a number of other recommendations around a level playing field in professions reducing barriers for example faced by commercial attorneys also some recommendations about solicit advocates so that's what we did in 2020 in in terms of the bill i think there are aspects of the bills we've talked about the objectives being set out clearly which are positive there are there are aspects of defining legal services um and um the definition of reserved activities all of which are important but from our perspective i think the thing that's important is flexibility and the ability to adapt regulation so that it isn't disproportionate that it doesn't add unnecessary costs um so so so i think whilst putting things in legislation can be good if it does so at the expense of the ability to adapt and change to changing needs uh there are risks um from up from from the effect of birth competition and consumer protection that thanks very much that that's that's really helpful and i know some of the other members will want to dig into some of those details those issues in a little bit more detail particularly perhaps around abs and some of the reserved issues but vicki if i can come to you from from your perspective and the consumer panel around complaints what are the what are the what are the barriers or issues that that come up most often around access given the system as it currently is and what what are the the likely benefits then of of the bill coming in so one of the things that that Sharon just mentioned was around access in terms of price transparency for example and actually one of the things that one of our panel members since advice Scotland provided in their briefing to the committee was simply looking at the impact of people's consumers perceptions of of the cost of legal services on on access and what they found was suggestion that in some cases consumers would be reticent about about seeking legal advice if they were concerned about what the cost of that might be either that they couldn't afford it or that that it might escalate as a case continued and i think that something the panel would have a real concern about if there are consumers who would benefit from legal advice who have a problem that they think might have that aspect to it but are not seeking that because they're not confident of what the charge for that might be that links into regulation in the sense that the consumer panel's view is that regulation should be should be consumer focus it should be about supporting consumers to to have to have access to to to good quality legal services and the the importance of regulation the willingness for for regulation to to seek consumer input to to undertake consumer research and understand consumer views and to act on that where that might be in conflict with the profession's interest is really important and that's a core part of why the panel have said that the independent regulation that's regulation that's independent from from government but also from the profession and that regulates would help to protect the consumer interest because it would help to to ensure that that's a core part of how the how the regulator discharges its duties okay okay thanks for that Kevin I saw your hand but I'm going to bring Annie in first and then I'll then I'll come to you I'm here for it thank you convener good morning panel some of my questions have been answered so thank you very much for that it saves my voice but the thing and vicky had touched on it there it's like how would the independent regulator help consumers and do you what would the role of the Lord President be if there was an independent regulator and I think that's one of the things that I want to try and get right in my head where the two sort of a sit and do you think it is preferable to the current system do you think the new bill would preferable to the current system as well and I'll go to vicky first on this because you'd sort of started to touch on it true and so I think I guess first of all the the panel hasn't doesn't have a kind of clear view on the role of of the Lord president specifically but I think the the that role of the regulator being independent as I say both of government and of the the profession it regulates is part of creating kind of public and consumer confidence in the regulator and that it's it's taking that independent view and that that's kind of a really important a really important part of why the panel has why the panel supported the recommendations for the single independent regulator and that that would help I think that that regulator looking across the the entire legal services market would would be the best way to to ensure that that that was discharged as I think Tracy said earlier the bill brings in a number of those independent aspects into into the model that government is proposing it makes for a more complex landscape and complexity often can you know will make it more difficult for your average member of the public your average consumer to to understand that can lead to to to mistrust or or misunderstanding about how the regulator acts so you know a clearer model would be would be preferable but certainly the independent aspects that that the bill brings forwards would be would be welcome thank you a little friend one else is getting anything they want to Tracy and then Sharon thank you one of the most challenging issues around a co-regulatory system is I think the consumer confidence angle I know the SLCC has previously done polling on that and I think the figures indicated that only 19 percent of the public thought it was acceptable for an organisation to both represent lawyers and regulate them and only 21 percent were confident that body with both functions would deal with complaints fairly that's quite a challenging position to start from and setting out a co-regulatory regime I think a co-regulatory system can deliver benefits if it is well designed if it is sufficiently resourced and if it's robustly structured but if you don't have an independent regulator and you don't have an oversight regulator that system does need to have some extra checks and balances and which are some of the more controversial aspects of the bill the bill does contain a number of measures which attempt to reduce risks around transparency and address concerns about accountability regulators having to publish reports regulators having to be subject to FOI there are improvements on the status quo in there we just at the end of the day think that independent regulation would be a cleaner system with fewer bodies the co-regulatory system has lots of kind of multiple touch points particularly if you're a consumer you have two organisations investing in complaints if you've got both service and conduct aspects you have two reports it's difficult for consumers to navigate that and understand that that easily so I guess those are the challenges from our perspective it's not impossible to make co-regulation work but it has to be structured in a way that allows for those checks and balances thanks jacey shardin yes so I suppose I want to start by saying why do we say independent regulation is important and I touch on this at the outset I mean we think that it's the best way to ensure that regulation can protect consumer interests including by promoting competition among providers we think that will need to improve choice and innovation and and also support wider public interest issues and I mentioned that it's consistent with better regulation principles the the need for clear objectives and accountability that under underpin best practice regulation and where you've got the same entity that represents and regulates there can be a lack of transparency about the nature of activities we also think that there's a risk that regulatory decision making is is compromised because there are these opposing interests of the profession and there is just a fundamental tension between the aims of the role of the regulator and the professional body because a reps into body principally seeks to promote the the profession's interests whereas the regulator is looking to protect the interests of consumer and the wider public so to give you an example a professional body regulating a sector is less likely to be open to business models that may increase competition from outside the profession it may also focus on on regulating quality by setting too high a barm and that may deter competition in a way that is unhelpful for consumers and may rank cost that get passed on to consumers so we just think there is this fundamental tension and that and that leads to suboptim regulatory outcomes and I don't think any model can remove that tension beyond a model that delivers independence so in terms of the model that's being proposed with the regulatory committees we don't think it will be effective because it's not substantially different from the current arrangement yes there are elements that will improve matters and we've talked a bit about transparency and accountability freedom of information at those provisions they're all helpful but it doesn't move the fundamental tension and we gave examples when we did our research report of what of things that have happened in practice and problems with the regimes as the regulatory models that currently exist so examples where the conflict of interest may have led to the law society or the fact of advocates prioritising the interests of members over consumers and setting regulation more generally the fact that the regulatory subject to competing objectives an independent regulator can set objectives in a way clear and more focused the effect on regulators regulatory incentives that may as I've talked about prevent or limit change that could benefit consumers that means there's a lack of a strong voice empowered incentivised to drive change and then the public trust you know we talked about the SRC research that showed that consumers don't have trust in the model and that's very important as well so I think that we think there are lots of reasons why the independent world will deliver benefits we also considered the arguments against because the arguments were put to us as to why this model was better but we didn't accept those arguments so there were arguments about a loss of professional insight and expertise which we don't think is right we think an independent regulator would all withdraw on expertise the would clearly have to draw on expertise of the representative bodies and would have expected to point professional expertise there were arguments about costs being increased with an independent regulator model but we don't think that's necessarily true you can't look at cost and isolation you need to do a net cost benefit impact you need to weigh out the increase in cost the administrative cost against the potential for significant gains for consumers from independent regulation and we also think you know we various models were put forward to us some of this the model in visiting the bill as an example of another model but we just think that in order to overcome the the challenges created by that tension and you have to put in place checks and balances that create complexity and you end up much in the the sort of second of the options that was considered with an oversight regulator and I think most of us agreed that that created a more complex system than was warranted and was disproportionate in the in the market in the sector and the size of the sector in Scotland and created complexity so from our perspective the independent regulation model is the only way to provide that to overcome those problems but in a way that is less complicated and less costly thanks uh masha do you need to come in this one can i just add to all of that which is far more expert than than and i know i won't use the right language so i apologize for that but i also think you know we we are well aware of the fact that we're what we're trying to shift as a system that is based on centuries of um uh discrimination and disproportionate access to just you know lack of access to justice um and i think that setting up uh an independent regular if if we think about the the the need for instance of independent inspection of policing i mean what what essentially delivers is if is some kind of um opportunity for us to try and level the playing field between the people who have very much less power and those who have a lot of power like the lord president um and uh and well i i i hear all of the arguments about not creating new you know expensive institutions i'm minded i'm thinking about the social security institution in Scotland and um because of our work on women's poverty and children's poverty we're really well aware of the enormous differences between the way the social security um uh administration in Scotland operates and that's because they had a to a degree a blank sheet of paper and they were able to begin to develop processes that were that were person-centered human rights based um and which were was it's not the tradition the tradition of the provision of social security in the UK more widely i think this is an opportunity to do something similar which is as i was saying we're going to pivot the system if we can pivot the system away from um the maintaining those imbalances of power and that privilege that has been so inimical to human rights for women and children experiencing domestic abuse and create a a you know a regulatory body that's based on all the principles that these folks can cite i'm sure in their sleep um but that also is committed to the outcomes of improving the human rights and access to justice and i frankly think that using a system that for centuries has denied those to try and create with the best intentions in the world um a regulatory system of itself is is just um i suppose it's the cynic in me but it's unlikely to deliver much different and improved experiences for for women and children on the ground thanks thank you panel thanks Kevin a brief supplementary please before i bring Megan in i've got two very brief things and i want to go back to miss Horowitz and her shopping around effectively comments and you know i think that we've all had experiences of finding it difficult to find a tariff for certain things but there's also a situation where monopolies exist because of specialism from a consumer point of view what does that monopoly situation do to to folks who are seeking advice in particularly specialist areas do you think when you say monopolies what what do you have in mind well i'll give you an example again going back a number of years so that we don't identify identify anyone but forced disposition of land for example which is something that doesn't happen very regularly but folks are pushed to to certain specialists who basically can charge what they like because they are the specialists so those kind of monopoly situations do you think that they could be ironed out to a degree with this new legislation well i think i think i go back to what i have said before or about about the need to drive competition there need to be choice for the consumers to understand what the options are when they have a particular legal problem so it's there's a that so i'm not sure the bill necessarily can address that but but mechanisms that will encourage the development of well the so there's the shopping around aspects so that consumers and the navigating the market so there's a need for information for consumers to know when they have a legal need what they need what sort of service they need to resolve it now if there are only a limited number of providers and it's an obscure service there's not much that we can do to overcome that other than to ensure that regulation is set up in a way to facilitate innovation the provision of legal services by alternative providers one of the key aspects of our our research is to enable consumers to make judgments about the use of alternative riders sometimes unauthorised providers depending on the nature of the service who may be able to deliver a service that is adequate quality but for less from less at a lower cost so it's about having these options and about consumers understanding what is available that will drive competition so not wanting to put words in your mouth but you talked about the flexibility of using regulation rather than primary legislation earlier on do you think that in these kind of cases that flexibility in terms of using regulation would be helpful in terms of making adjustments where necessary to try and drive out these situations yes so i mean that would be where the role of independent regulator could be quite important because because the ability to identify these areas and put in place appropriate regulation that facilitates innovation new business models new provides of service and regulates a minimum so that there's a minimum level of quality without imposing you know if you love if you set standards at a very high level that makes it very difficult to encourage entry and results in regulation set at a level that's not necessary necessary for the risk so having targeted risk based regulation and that flexibility to adapt to recognise and to to permit the entry of new business models is all part of that again coming back to a point that miss Horowitz made but a question for miss Crichton is that miss Horowitz quoted earlier Scottish legal complaints commission data on certain aspects of this in terms of gathering the data that you did did you ask vote the question around about trust in the Scottish legal complaints commission and if so what were the findings of that question particular question in that piece of research the slcc was asking about i don't think there was a particular question on on trust in in the organisation or in or in other particular organisations it was about trust in the the complaints process and independent complaints processes i think there's a missed opportunity i think it's great to ask about the complaints process itself but i think that often there's a feeling of distrust about certain organisations as well and it would be interesting convener to see if there is any data on that particular subject that we could access thank you very much folks thank you convener i'll move on to megan thank you very much convener and welcome to all panel members this morning there's been a lot of talk about the performance of regulators this morning and if you look at the bill and it's in its current form and it would see new powers for the Scottish Government to review the performance of regulators and some have argued that this is under this could undermine the independence of the legal profession from the state so i'm just interested to hear from the panel do you think that there is a risk that the bill could jeopardise the independence of the legal profession and if i could start with sharon please yes so i think we very much you know we've talked a lot about independence between the regulator and the representative body but an important we equally we also recognise the importance of the independence as the regulator from government and we note obviously in this context that the committee received a letter last week from the minister for victims and community safety and i did say in my opening remarks that we do also have concerns about lack of independence from the government in our previous legal services work we've always recognised the importance of this independence from government and independent legal profession is important for securing various public interest considerations such as protecting the legal rights of individuals and ensuring access to justice so that individuals can participate equally in society but it's also important about upholding this principle that's known as the principle the rule of law so in principle the the judiciary it's important to assure that the legal sector can make decisions in the public interest free from actual perceived interference from government institutions so i think we're definitely in agreement about the importance of maintaining independence of legal decision making from government involvement i think one thing that we should say is that we don't think that maintaining independence from government requires regulation as some stake on suggested requires regulation to be overseen by the existing professional bodies or and it doesn't weaken the argument for separating regulatory and representative functions and there are many successful examples of organisations established as public bodies that effectively operate independently of government while remaining open to public scrutiny and accountability and to give an example i mean the CMA is an example of that it's perfectly possible to be subject to obligations laid on on bodies by government for the provision of to ensure transparency and accountability to have public appointments processes and various other mechanisms without undermining that independence so i think that we definitely think that that is an important aspect and we also think that if the underlying model that had been chosen was a model that involved independent regulation there would be less need for that involvement in government in the regulation of legal services sorry mecan could you could you just repeat that there's an issue with your sound of course i'm just wondering if any of the other panel members have any views on the the independence from the the legal profession to the state thanks and Tracy you want to come in on this very much agree with with Sharon's comments we we certainly see the force of the argument that the professional body should be independent of the government and be able to voice free in frank opinions and take cases which challenge the authority of government but we also see the need for a regulatory system that is capable of meeting the needs of consumers and if you went for an independent regulatory model i think our view is that these powers of intervention probably wouldn't be necessary because that model would simply ensure and the way it is designed that there was that degree of separation there i think as as one of the two bodies named in the proposed powers of intervention i think really i don't see this power being used unless it was the last resort or a backstop unless other approaches had been unsuccessful i think that the power would only be used after considering evidence and after due process and that due process would have to include seeking and considering the views of stakeholders including the professional bodies i think our main concern is if you've read our submission is that we're just not sure what the evidence base would be to allow us to use those powers in an appropriate way in the if we don't have the evidence at risk referrals to the Scottish ministers being made on a basis of a limited evidence base and that's clearly going to be open to challenge for quite right reasons there's also a risk that we fail to make a referral simply because we don't have the evidence base and that that's interpreted as everything is fine whereas in fact we don't necessarily think everything is fine but we don't have the evidence to to say otherwise so again it goes back to the point i was making earlier that we need to be clear about what evidence we need to underpin these powers who's responsible for producing it there are bits of evidence that could be used i know that an example other jurisdictions regulators have access to and can publish aggregate first tier complaints data so the data that actually the firms themselves are seeing if you combine that with the data from regulators you could get a much richer picture about what what areas are generating complaints what's problematic you could look at the type of tracker surveys that the legal services board runs which we've got one in the field at the moment and he'd also be looking at stakeholder views so in terms of what you'd need to exercise those powers yeah it might well be that the regulatory committees themselves are raising issues saying we don't think this is working but i've recognised that these powers are a very have attracted a very strong comment i guess my fear is if you take these powers out of the bill in their entirety what then do you do if in three years time in five years time in 10 years time you decide that the system isn't delivering on the regulatory objectives are you then stuck with only having primary legislation as the way to correct that which i think goes back to the point that mr stewart was making around you know is there sufficient flexibility within the regime to be able to adapt to to change in circumstances and challenges that we might not be able to see right now thanks tracy megan back to you and it's on the point that tracy sorry megan we having a couple of issues with each other and can you start start that again thank you sorry convener it was on the point that tracy mentioned there about the the from the bill it's not clear what evidence they would need to recommend to scottish government ministers so in terms of that do you think that could be an additional administrative burden that's been put on people in order to to come up with that evidence she said as well tracy that it's not clear cut exactly what evidence would be required and therefore it could be ineffective if you don't have the right evidence for for this to be taken further so i'm just wondering if you'd maybe be able to expand a little bit more on that sure i think first it's not clear who that responsibility of producing evidence would sit with and if it was to be consumer scotland then i think we'd want to be confident that resource was in place to deliver that we have got models that would provide a precedent for that we get for example dedicated funding across the markets of energy post and water that is levy generated that allows us to work here and a lot of detail and an on-going basis on those markets when it comes to our other work we work across a large variety of sectors that could be housing finance general consumer protection issues for us if we were required to work in the legal services market on an ongoing yearly absolutely regular basis to produce that evidence that would inevitably diminish the extent of resource that was available to work right across those other sectors as well so there is a risk that you know by having to concentrate our efforts in one area that would reduce our effectiveness potentially across other other areas okay thanks megan anything else from you no thank you okay thanks megan over to you thanks very much convener and good morning to the to the panel there's two areas i'd like to explore in the first is on this part of the bill which proposes to make it an offence to use the title of lawyer where there's an intent to deceive in connection with providing legal services i'm just one that i'm just really looking for comments on that as this is our first evidence session to see where people stand in that and i suppose by you know association if you could also talk about if you do think that there's any risks of regulating the title which might unduly restrict the work of other unregulated lawyers such as paralegals legal academics et cetera so just really looking for a broad view on where you stand in this particular provision just know quite happy to go in any order Sharon do you want to kick us off and then we'll so we do have views on title regulation and that's based on the legal services work that we've done over time so professional titles have the potential to affect consumer decision making and we've talked some about the inherent difficulties that consumers and legal services face in observing quality directly and consumers do sometimes rely on titles like solicitors when navigating the market and they use that as an indicator of quality and although that can be a useful and practical way to help consumers at least find an indication of minimum level quality we have concerns because it also has the potential to limit the scope for competition and that has a consequence in terms of affordability because it may result in consumers avoiding for example unauthorised providers completely regardless of the level of quality and consumer protection that these providers may offer and regardless of the value of money that could be obtained by the consumer by using these alternatives and so this may result in a barrier to entry for other providers so far as concerns the bill proposals to protect the terminal iron you know we we know that they are designed to address a legitimate concern that consumers may assume that the terminal iron means the provider is subject to regulation and might end up choosing an authorized provider unwillingly without understanding the consequences but we don't think that's necessarily the case and we've talked I've already talked about the unintended negative consequences on competition if it makes it harder for unauthorised providers to use these other these these alternatives even in situations when they might benefit from using them so in our view we whilst we understand some that there is a little concern we equally don't think we haven't or at least it hasn't been presented to us any compelling evidence of the detriment suffered by consumers because the terminal iron is not regulated or advocate for other titles because they're not currently protected and we go back to what we said before about the need for regulation to be proportionate and targeted to risk so we would advise that there should be additional evidence of the detriment be gathered before introducing this additional requirement as in deals if any views on that or are they shared excellent okay thanks very much that was that was good the other area that I'd like to ask about is provisions in the bill around about alternative business structures and again I'm really just looking for a very broad discussion based kind of response to what your thoughts are on the bill's proposals to ABAs and what impact do you think this might have on consumer practice? Just a general point on that so I think Sharon just mentioned you know the need for regulation to help to improve access and choice for consumers so to make it possible for a consumer to find the legal advice or representation that they're looking for and in a number of different places where that's appropriate and so I think that from the panel's perspective in general terms anything that improves that choice and access is helpful the proposals on alternative business structures have been on the statute books for a long time now but are not available for consumers to be able to use currently so proposals too but they've been operating for example in England Wales for many years as far as we're aware without issues so being able to to make that that work now as part of this legislation would be welcome. And a follow-up question maybe for Marsha or for MD actually I know Marsha might want to come in on it the bill also removes the requirement you know that ABAs have to provide services for a fee gain and reward and do you think this could open up opportunities for law centres or charities such as yourself you know to become? ABAs is that something you think about a bit too early on to be thinking about that? Yeah I mean absolutely I mean at the beginning I spoke about how much in favour we are of removing the restrictions on organisations like ourselves that provide advocacy and advice per the recommendations that Martin Evans had in his independent review of Legal Aid in Scotland we're really welcome you know expanding the ability of law centres of you know other organisations to meet what is rather extraordinarily large unmet need so that that's very welcome I think that we would we would also like to just point out that there's some language around only allowing employment of those employed full time on a fixed salary and having a solicitor on a fixed salary is a real advantage in our setting it's it allows us to attract solicitors who will have us who are who are interested in providing sort of essentially public sector kinds of services and less interested in a high profit margin but also we also work in an environment where it's very likely to need to be family friendly for employees and that we you know our model in Edinburgh for instance is a combination of paralegals and part-time solicitors which accommodates the the the need for women's solicitors as well as expanding the the flexibility of provision so we would need to make sure that however the final wording of the of the law is that it accommodates that flexibility. By way of follow-up I would agree with what's been said we support the proposals because we think that the ABS proposals are likely to improve access ultimately for consumers especially in areas which may be less well served by private practice providers it should if you know the policy intent is carried through increase the choice of providers available it should enhance the range of services available and more generally just improve levels of competition and innovation I'm not sure that we see a strong case for the retention of a 10% ownership requirement by league professionals when it comes to ABS structures. Sharon may have comments on that in a moment I think just my final point on this would be that there are a number of proposals which will have an impact in the area of access to justice these proposals the legal aid proposals the human rights act proposals that Marsha referred to before which take a very advocacy based approach to accessing human rights there's probably just a need still for a little bit of joined up thinking about how that will work from the perspective of consumers or people who are accessing those services just to make sure that everything is joined up effectively I don't know whether Marsha would want to actually that I was trying to figure out how to shoehorn in a comment that that I have in my briefing so that was a great opportunity thank you which is we're we're quite concerned that there's there's a real lack of commitment to development consultation with service users and survivors in the development of you know new services or new regulatory bodies or you know any of the the mostly you know welcome in innovations that are that are proposed in the in the legislation and um for and that's one of the ways that you provide that joined up thinking because you know we were talking before about the patchwork of legal services civil legal services available for women and children experiencing domestic abuse and it can be everything from negotiating a divorce to a to a settlement on our house to you know child contact and custody arrangements to a whole variety of things and those reflect you know the real experiences of people who need services rather than the way the services are designed and delivered and it's that kind of input that helps us see the system as a whole and join it up as best we can um uh so uh I've now shoehorned that in but I do think it's relevant to to looking across the this to making sure that this action that the actions in this law um uh actually further some of the the positive arrangements that we're trying to make in other um changes in the in the system too. Thanks Pasha. We consider ABS's can have really positive impacts for consumers. We've talked to everyone else that's commented on their potential stimulate competition innovation. We've been making the point about the need to implement the ABS regime ever since we did our research report um and we're concerned that there haven't yet been ABS's you know there are some really significant benefits we think that can that can result from ABS's in terms of access to external capital, the ability to achieve efficiencies by exploiting economies of scale, the ability to retain high performing non-system employees or or track outside talent, the involvement of non-legally qualified professionals, practitioners in management that could facilitate entry of more business oriented firms, the ability to deal with exit entry and exit allowing partners in small firms who wish to retire opportunities to transfer ownership. So for all these reasons I think ABS is really important um and indeed in our research report we found evidence that the lack of ABS's had impeded entry, growth and innovation but it also affected the wider competitiveness of the Scottish legal services sector for example with the result that Scottish firms may have not been able to compete on a level playing field with English based firms. So for all those reasons we think it's really imperative that the ABS model does develop. In terms of the ownership threshold, yes we do have views, we very much raised concerns in our research report about the 51% ownership threshold and it's clearly an improvement that it's the proposal and the bill is to reduce it to 10%. We think that the ownership threshold is a barrier to participation in ABS schemes and that it might limit the introduction of ABS's. We think that it will create a competitive disadvantage for Scottish law firms relative to their counterparts in England and Wales where there's no minimum threshold, ownership threshold and we think that there aren't risks, we don't think that there are, we think the risks are extremely low associated with the relaxation and so for those reasons we would we query the value of there being any ownership threshold. Can I just interrupt it? Is that what you mean in the response around that entity regulation potentially going too far and kicking in even if people are practitioners but not owners? Is that what that bit of your written submission gets at? About entity regulation. I think you may be referring to the, we made a point about entity regulation which I think was a mistaken understanding of what the bill, so if from recollection we had some concerns, so this is a different concern. This is about the tempest having a requirement for limiting, having a requirement for legal ownership, which we don't think is necessary. Sorry for taking you off your flow there. We think that having this ownership requirement could limit the infrastructure and novel business models and it might end up limiting ABS's to simply having an additional non-sister partner added to a firm, so keeping very traditional firm structures and not getting these new models, so we think we would recommend removing the ownership threshold completely. As regards the proposed removal of fee gain or reward requirement, we welcome that. We think it's important to allow third sector organisations to directly employ legal professionals to undertake reserved activities, so we think that's a good thing and indeed when we did our search report we identified various difficulties that had been encountered because of the lack of ABS's, so for example people had found workarounds and we found evidence that law centres and other social enterprises were partnering with CNES listers in order to provide legal services and that created an additional risk that wouldn't arise if the list was part of the enterprise and had greater control over the work that it carried out. We also had concerns about law centres losing access to client files if they were relying on external legal advice and we also noted some SRCC findings that social enterprises, many of which are currently registered in England and Wales, were interested in operating in Scotland but through the difficulties of doing so hadn't entered, so for all those reasons we think that's a really good thing. The final point that we've made and we have made consistently is that we think that there would be benefits to Scottish consumers from removing restrictions on advocates performing partnerships, whether with other advocates or in ABS's with legal and or non-legal professionals and the ability to accept instructions directly from consumers should they choose to do so and we think that that would create efficiencies in streamlining processes and it's again one of the other aspects that we've previously recommended. I'm sorry for interrupting. Fulton, is that you? Thank you. There are just two areas I want to pick up on and my apologies for confusing the entity regulation with that ownership point. Could you just unpack that a little bit because in your written statement you say that section 39 could kick in even if solicitors are involved in legal business but aren't actually owners and therefore the entity regulation perhaps goes too far. Could you just unpack that a little bit for me? So let me deal with entity regulation and then I'll come on to that particular point. So I think our starting point is that legal service regulation imposes regulatory costs on providers and regulators and because those costs are ultimately passed to consumers it's important that when you impose regulatory framework it's on the basis of an impact assessment that balances the benefit of regulation against the costs. So we welcome the model that involves entity regulation and individual regulation and it's important to strike the right balance so there's a general rule where you have individual based regulation that's often necessary when there are high risks that are identified that can only be addressed by ensuring the individual is competent by the service and should be person responsible and then there are when there are not such high risks then entity based regulation where entities can set the necessary obligations so employees can be more proportionate and so I think for us it we welcome the structure of entity regulation but we are concerned that the judgment about whether it should be entity regulation or individual regulation should be based on an assessment of market failure and where it's appropriate to use that. Now the point that I think you may be referring to is that we talked a little bit about I'm trying to sorry I find my response because we had some concerns if you bear with me that we highlighted that where there's a requirement that all licensed professionals should also be licensed through an entity that was the concern so we were concerned that that would restrict entities the entities with in which certain professional titles could be employed so that would mean that solicitors for example would be restricted in working in unlicensed providers even when they were carrying out unreservedly activities but I think we had a discussion of the Scottish Government and that isn't we were concerned that that's what the bill intended but we understand that isn't the case. Thank you for that clarification Kevin did you want to come in on this and then I've got one final question. It's a separate matter so if you want to continue I've just got the one thing okay okay okay just Vicky if I can come back to you um what obviously we want the complaint system to be robust and to be effective but we want things to be in place so we don't get there but but I suppose when we do get to the complaint system could you just say a little bit more about how the bill's proposals um I suppose specifically to extend SLCC's powers to investigate complaints how to unregulated legal services legal service providers how how the consumer panel views that or what the views on what rigor that will bring to the complaints process. Sure um so I think that the panel certainly um has has raised concerns around um the the existing complaints process in terms of its complexity in terms of um the the time it can take and and um and how clear it is to consumers um how to access and and how that process will um a complaints process will um will take place so it's certainly something that um that the panel's certainly welcomed the provisions in the bill to look at um making the complaints process more streamlined um as as far as those go in terms of the um extending the um the complaints process to unregulated legal services um that that certainly could help us we've touched on a number of other areas it could help to um encourage consumers to um to to have more um choice um across the market to use the most appropriate provider and to do that um with the um with the knowledge that there will be a basic level of consumer protection available um albeit that that would be that would be different to um to existing regulated providers um the panel has um said that it's concerned to ensure that that proposal doesn't limit access to that that free to particularly to free advice um and um and sort of place unnecessary additional burden on on providers again particularly not for profit providers um but certainly at um at the level of allowing a complaint to be brought where where someone has used a legal service that that is currently unregulated that would be that would be very welcome um I think the the other aspect that the um that that the panels particularly um concerned about is that as you say you know you hope you don't get to that point but you want the complaints process to to work when when you need it I think it's also the case that um when when people are raising a complaint they they're both looking for it to that issue to be resolved for themselves but they're often also saying that they they want the issue to be to be understood so it doesn't happen again in future um so so the panel is absolutely supportive of the um the proposals in the um in the bill for the whole regulatory system drawing on that learning from complaints to become much better at understanding where those risks exist and to to looking to um to build on those as part of continuous improvement to avoid the same issues arising in future so that that's a particularly welcome aspect of the bill. Thank you that that's really helpful Kevin. Thank you, convener and I'd like to go back to a point that Dr Scott made earlier around about maybe a lack of voices of lived experience in terms of some of the work that has been carried out thus far. I wonder if Dr Scott would like to comment around about what we should be doing, government should be doing in terms of gathering up the views of those voices of lived experience when it comes to setting regulations or in terms of the flexibility of going back and revisiting these regulations at a later point. How do you think we best access those voices of lived experience including many of the women who you have advocated for over many years? I think it needs to be an end model not an or model so how is it that we how do we improve our existing systems and and embed in any new systems co-design elements? We have a survivors reference group rape crisis Scotland as a survivors reference group and I was very struck by what was just said about people getting involved in complaints processes not because it's going to change the injustice of what happened to them but to improve the system for others and that is absolutely what we hear from survivors all the time and yet their expertise is so rarely embedded in the in the process of examining inspecting and changing and improving the system so one of the things that we would very much like to see and also this comes back to data you know just to the original point about data and you know I think there's a there's a lot of notion that somehow numbers are objective and and yet actually that is never the case no data is objective it's always collected with certain kinds of assumptions they just need to be trans they need to be explicit and transparent I think that the way to engage with those with lived experience which I have to say in Scotland is you know approximately one out of three to one out of four women and probably one out of five children have experience of domestic abuse so this is not a small task but it's also a readily available pool of information and so when we're talking about good data collection for instance one of the things we need to do is it needs to be a qualities informed it needs it needs to be looked at and and when you set up a system for data collection that is scrutinized by people with lived experience who will tell you what are the things you're not asking that you should be or you are asking that are that are couched in ways that will limit the robustness of what you're getting so that's all very vague but what it what it circles back to for me is looking at every system that we set up and and trying to identify best case scenario a co-design approach and if you can't do co-design then accountability mechanisms that absolutely engage with survivors of domestic abuse with you know consumers of all of the services design like social security scotland which made that a much better system absolutely thank you great thanks very much Kevin thank you all for for your contributions today and for the written evidence that you had provided in advance we've covered an awful lot of ground and if there are things that you think actually you know i could give more more evidence or more information on this please do do send us um further communication we will we'll be looking at at this bill for for the coming weeks when when we're not looking at the UNCRC incorporation as well so so that's going to be it's going to be an interesting and and mixed a few weeks for us but that concludes our formal business for today's meeting marsha was that uh i've got one one last thing to say yeah just one line i mean again shoe horning but um the the CRC reference was really helpful in the sense that the one thing that i just hadn't really um uh included was um uh the the invisibility of children and young people who have a statutory right to to legal services in scotland in certain many circumstances hardly ever do they have access to that right um uh hardly ever are they engaged in discussions about what it would look like if they did have access so i would say that um and clearly with CRC UNCRC we're looking at how we can improve scotland's provision of access to human rights for children and young people and those questions are really relevant for this bill so um as we go forward it would be really really important i think to to ring fence some activity with children and young people either in the the design and and consultation processes not either but also in those but also a very specific specialist look at how how these services do or don't affect children and young people cake tisda would be a great person at the university of edinburgh to bring in and to engage with us i think on that stuff okay thanks for that marsha sharon you had another point on two trees if you don't mind make one additional point so building on what you say about lived experience and data and that i completely agree with that and lack of data was something that we lack of research evidence and data was something we discovered in our report but i want to pick up on something that tracy said about in response to the question about the checks and balances that are envisaged um the role that's been given to the cma in the consumer scotland in the parliament uh because we talked about what the evidence base will be um but for me the concern is that the evidence base won't come from consumers and that's what consumer scotland i suspect is well set up for uh because the the sort when we're talking about the operation of the regulatory framework and that particularly the things that we're concerned about said the tension between the representative regulatory body that's not going to come from consumers we'll get evidence from consumers about lack of confidence in the system but but the sort of the ability to identify problems and we felt we discovered that i mean most of our examples came from the slc when we looked at the operation of the um we looked at the the the conflicts of interests and the problems that have risen in the current model so i think the point we want to make about the role that's been entrusted is that actually in order to be able to perform that role you really effectively have to be a regulator and have that sort of relationship with the bodies because we don't think that the evidence will be readily available from for example consumers thank you and that that's a helpful helpful point i'm going to ask tracy and for you if there's really any last points that you you want to make no okay right we will we will end there then thank you thank you all for for your comments that concludes our formal business for today and we will now move into private to consider our last couple of items on our agenda thank you