Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Justice) Link to this
I move, That the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time. The majority of submissions supported the objective underpinning this bill, which is to ensure that members of employer organisations and unions continue to be supported by cost-effective, quality in-house services from their employer organisations and unions. I would like to thank the Justice and Electoral Committee for its careful consideration of the bill within a short time frame.
The Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 is due to come into force on 1 August 2008. This Act significantly reforms the way in which legal services are provided. As enacted, the Act will prevent unions and employer organisations from continuing their practice of using in-house lawyers to provide legal services to their members. This is because the Act makes the provision of legal services to the public by in-house lawyers—that is lawyers employed by non-lawyers—an act of professional misconduct. However, employment organisations and unions have a long-standing practice of providing cost-effective, accessible legal services to their members through their in-house lawyers. This practice has enabled integrated prevention and advice services, including legal services.
Section 9 of the Act contains a list of exemptions to this general rule. This bill amends Section 9 by adding to the exemptions listed in Section 9 the services that unions and employer organisations provide to their members. Alongside this, the bill also protects consumer interests by providing that lawyers providing legal services, as employees of employer organisations and unions, will be guilty of misconduct if they provide legal services to any person other than to the organisation, the union, or its members. This will ensure that the employer organisations and unions continue to provide a timely, practical, financially viable, and relevant service to their members while maintaining the principle objective of protecting consumer interests.
The select committee has recommended that health professional organisations, as defined under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003, be included within this list of exempted organisations, and I support this recommendation. In their submissions to the committee a number of health professional organisations raised concerns that the current prohibition in the Act would prevent them from providing legal services to their members, similar to employer organisations and unions. They noted that a withdrawal of this specialised and cost-effective service could lead to a potential shortage in the number of health professionals, particularly independent midwives, given the high indemnity cover and legal expenses that health professionals would have to bear on an individual basis. The committee has recommended the inclusion of health professional organisations within the list of exempted organisations after careful consideration of these submissions.
Once again, I would like to thank the select committee members for the work they have done on this bill. It is important legislation that will ensure members continue to benefit from the long-standing, integrated prevention, and advice services provided by employer organisations, unions, and health professional organisations.
My colleague Charles Chauvel, who in a former life worked as a lawyer within the union movement, has had considerable experience of just how it works and how it ought to continue to work in the future. This bill will enable that to happen not just for unions, as I said, but for employer organisations, and also for health professional organisations. I commend the bill to the House.
Dr RICHARD WORTH (National) Link to this
The Lawyers and Conveyancers Act is quite complex legislation, and parts of it are drafted in quite a tortuous manner not particularly explicable to lawyers and—presumably—even more arcane for those who are not legally qualified. But this Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2) gives rise to a host of problems—problems that clearly will need to be addressed in the Committee stage of the bill.
I think in essence there are probably three points. The first is that the public have been grossly misled by the scope of this amendment bill—a point I will develop in a moment. The second is that it has been suggested that this change, which we are asked to make in the context of this bill, is a technical change that was, somehow, omitted. It is, in effect, a “slip bill” correcting something that should have been corrected at the time when the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act—the substantive legislation—was in the course of passage. The third point is that this change is clearly contrary to the interest of consumers of legal services because of the breadth—possibly the unintended breadth—of the wording.
I now come back to the first point, which is all about the explanatory note when the bill was introduced. To some extent—and I accept this—that has been overtaken by the commentary on the bill as it has been reported from the Justice and Electoral Committee. But that is not the way that the judges tasked to interpret this legislation would necessarily see it. I refer to the third sentence of the explanatory note, which states: “This amendment is designed to ensure that unions and employer associations can continue a long-standing practice of providing legal services to members of their organisations as part of the delivery of an integrated prevention and advice service”—and then, the key words, which I underscore and emphasise—“connected with employment matters.”
The status of an explanatory note is the subject of some academic writing. It need not be academic, because it is actually incredibly straightforward and robust. It is not more complicated than Standing Order 258, which makes it absolutely clear that every bill, when it is introduced, must contain a memorandum—known as an explanatory note—stating the policy that the bill seeks to achieve. The explanatory note usually does explain the individual provisions of the bill. It is an attempt, as it were, in non-legal or less formal terms, to set out the purport of the bill that has been presented to the House and, as a matter of law, it is regarded as a very important indicator of the meaning of the language used in the bill, and also, sometimes, in the subsequent Act.
The explanatory note of a Government bill, such as the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2), is prepared by the Parliamentary Counsel Office and the department principally responsible for promoting the legislation. It is absolutely clear that in all cases an explanatory note must be drafted in factual and not argumentative terms. It is also very clear that if the Minister in charge of the bill does become aware of a factual error in the explanatory note, the House should be informed, and a correction tabled. That should have been done in this case, because the Minister was on notice that what was in the explanatory note of the bill—that the bill was restricted in the way I have described—was not carried forward into the drafting itself. That is most unsatisfactory. It is highly misleading. That is the first point I wanted to make.
The second point is that I am not at the moment a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee, but by chance I was there when the chairman, Lynne Pillay, proffered to those listening members of that select committee an explanation of what the bill was all about. She said: “Oh, it’s just technical, really, and it’s just to correct an oversight in the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act.” That was completely wrong. In fact, when the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act was being looked at, the issue that the Minister spoke about was very critically looked at by the Justice and Electoral Committee, which came to the view that this change should not be made.
The select committee was right in focus, because a number of entities, including the Law Society, had made comments about the way the legislation was worded. A very clear submission from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions was also made on this very issue. In the introduction provision the council’s submission deals with one aspect of the bill relating to areas of reserved work that only a lawyer or a conveyancing practitioner may do. The submission stated: “Our concerns lie with the effect of provisions that capture and prohibit activities that are central to the purpose of unions in the protection and enforcement of members’ entitlements.”
The situation that the bill sets out to address is not new. It was not created by the passage of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act. Under the Law Practitioners Act 1982 it was simply not lawful for non-lawyers to provide legal services to the public or to non-lawyer members, which is the issue directly here, by employing lawyers to provide that service. So there are, legitimately, real concerns about this amendment bill to be resolved in the Committee stage. The first is an issue of principle, and the second is the width of the provisions proposed in the bill as at present drafted.
How appropriate is it that these union organisations and employer organisations have a freedom to offer a substantial range of legal services? Viewed from a consumer perspective, I say it is wholly wrong. It should not be the case that these entities can give advice on drink-driving charges. They should not be involved in drafting family trusts. They should not be involved in tax advice on business structures. They should not be involved in advice on leasing proposals for personal investment.
It was made very clear in the National Party’s minority report on the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act that the party was concerned about the drafting of these provisions in the substantive bill. In fact, under a heading of “Reserved Areas of Work” it stated that National would seek rewriting of the provisions to make their intent more clear and to permit, for example, taxation lawyers to practise in accounting firms. I hope that an opportunity will be taken in the Committee stage to rework these provisions to make it quite clear what the scope of the activity of employer associations and union organisations should be. They should be starkly limited, and they are not.
I guess, also, there is a very significant issue around the role of in-house lawyers that has an ethical base. If an in-house lawyer, as part of his or her duties to his or her employer, provides legal services to anyone other than the employer, the contract for the provision of those services is between the employer, a non-lawyer, which in this case is the employers’ association or the union, and the client, which in this case is the member—rather than between the lawyer and the client. The provision of legal services by non-lawyer organisations is forbidden under both the Law Practitioners Act and the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act.
I have said enough at this point to identify the key concerns. My hope is that with some amendments, which I trust will be forthcoming from parties in this House, we can fix up this mess.
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) Link to this
Mr Speaker—[ Interruption] I want to make just a couple of brief comments in reply, once the familial dispute across the House between Mrs King and Mr Finlayson has finished. I was interested to hear the speech made by Mr Worth, and I want to address two major points that he sought to make.
The first was the issue of scope and the explanatory note of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2). Mr Worth seemed to suggest that the explanatory note, which referred to the provision of services being connected to, or arising out of, employment-related services, would somehow cause some difficulty in the construction of the legislation. But, of course, that is not the case. An explanatory note, as all first-year law students come to learn, is only ever prayed in aid in litigation when there is any doubt as to the meaning of the substantive provisions of the legislation. And, of course, that is not an issue here. It is quite clear that the legislation applies, in principle, to all legal services. So the bodies covered by the legislation will, in principle, be entitled to have lawyers employed by them to provide all of those services. The words of the explanatory note, as far as they might have limited the principal Act, simply do not apply.
The second important point to make is that this legislation makes litigation much less likely, as opposed to much more likely. So the prospect of any litigation over argued or contended uncertainty, raised by Mr Worth, is again a shibboleth here. We have a situation that has been a practice over many years—20 to 30 years—where, notwithstanding what is said about the provisions of the earlier legislation, which the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act will replace, the fact is that unions and employers’ associations have employed lawyers directly to provide legal services to their members for many, many years. Those legal services have been conducted responsibly and within the ambit of the particular rules of the union or the employers’ association. No evidence was heard by the Justice and Electoral Committee that that practice has been abused, that there has been any irresponsible provision of legal services, or that the members of the unions or the employers’ associations have, in any way, been unhappy with the services that they have received.
In fact, to seek to permit the principal Act to pass in its current form would result in a great unfairness, because it would irregularise the position of those lawyers currently employed by employers’ associations, unions, and others, who are providing a very valuable service at the moment with no complaint, and with no evidence that the service is being provided in any sort of inappropriate way. Passing this amendment, in order to clarify the existing position and to permit it to continue to occur, will minimise the risk of litigation rather than maximise it. It will prevent the Law Society from going to the High Court and seeking a declaration that unions and employers’ associations should not, under the principal Act, be allowed to employ lawyers, or make it clear that they can. The argument about the creation of uncertainty in reference to the explanatory note is quite moot, and, indeed, I suspect it is quite mischievous.
The other point that was made by Mr Worth is that somehow this legislation is thought to be inimical to the interests of consumers. I want to dispose of that very quickly. I was—as the Minister in charge of the bill, Annette King, said—employed by a union for a number of years. It was, in fact, my first substantive legal job. I was acting for union members in a blue-collar union, the Service and Food Workers Union, during the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act, which was a difficult time for those members. I can tell the House quite clearly, on the basis of my own experience, that it is not an easy job to do. It is not necessarily a glamorous job, but it is an important job. One can help out people who need a hand and cannot afford expensive lawyers in big firms, QCs, or barristers-at-law but who, none the less, need decent advocacy if something goes wrong in their workplace. The same applies for small businesses that rely on employers’ associations around the country to provide them with legal services when they get in a jam in the workplace. They cannot afford expensive lawyers; they need the services that this legislation will allow them to continue to provide. Frankly, the same goes for the health professionals’ organisations, which the committee also decided to include in the legislation.
I do not intend to say anymore. If the National Party is somehow now opposed to this legislation, I look forward to National members saying so, but, more important, I look forward to hearing them tell Business New Zealand, to whom they have given assurances as to their support, that that is the case. I certainly hope it is not.
DAIL JONES (NZ First) Link to this
That was a very interesting speech. Mr Chauvel limited himself to incidents in the workplace. New Zealand First ultimately, after discussing this matter, has no difficulty in limiting this bill to matters that take place in the workplace. For that reason New Zealand First will propose an amendment to section 9, in clause 6, by adding the following paragraph to subsection (1A)(a): “(iii) legal services to a member of the organisation that do not relate to employment issues relevant to the member.” If we read subsection (1A) in clause 6 in the bill, we see what that does in the overall context. It states: “Despite subsection (1), a lawyer is guilty of misconduct if, in the course of his or her employment … (b) by a union, he or she provides—(i) legal services to a person other than the union or a member of the union;”.
So they can give advice on employment issues; that is fine. But when they give advice on matters that are not employment issues, that is not appropriate. That proposed change is exactly what Mr Chauvel just said he wanted, and that is what New Zealand First proposes. He wanted that, so I expect that Mr Chauvel, when it comes to the Committee stage, will vote for the issue he wants to see in the bill. I am sure that Mr Chauvel does not want to see these people appearing in drunken driving cases. I am sure he does not want to see these people giving advice on trustee law. I am sure he does not want to see them giving advice on leases. But New Zealand First supports the ability of the trade union movement and Business New Zealand to give advice on employment-related matters. We will support that, and I hope that Labour will, as well.
I am looking forward to the comments from the National Party and other members of the House who are interested in protecting the workers’ movement and Business New Zealand jointly. It is a simple issue. That is what the explanatory note said, was it not, I say to Mr—I am sorry; the member’s name is just too complicated.
Thank you. That is what the explanatory note said and that is what the amendment from New Zealand First proposes to do.
I think it would be most dangerous if the trade union movement was suddenly known to be available to give advice to its members on all the extraneous matters. What will happen once the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2) becomes known to everyone is that the lawyers in the trade union movement will be contacted by members, who will say that they understand that lawyers can give them advice on matters. Those members will ask the lawyers to give them that advice, as the lawyers are being paid good money to do it. That is what it boils down to, and on all the other issues as well. I am glad that in the short space of barely half an hour we have come to the nuts and bolts of these issues, as lawyers, hopefully, are prone to do.
I think Mr Auchinvole, as a member of the Justice and Electoral Committee, grasps what I am saying. I had the privilege of being at the select committee. Although I am not a regular member of it, the Standing Orders allowed me to be there. I hope that Mr Chauvel is now confirming that the amendment I have in mind will work satisfactorily, and that on Tuesday we will have tidied up this issue. We will also be moving an amendment to give further effect to it—legal services and suchlike—and another amendment to clause 10, which was put forward by the Law Society.
It is great to be able to achieve this. I was very critical the other night. This bill has been before Parliament for only 4 working days—if as long as that. The select committee had its time for submissions curtailed—it was given virtually 1 day to hear submissions. The Minister said the majority of submissions supported the bill. Well, that was a bit of a long bow to draw; after all, submitters were given only 48 hours to make submissions, and one of them had 350,000 members. That is pretty hard to beat! So I would have to agree with the Minister, but in practice it was a bit of a long bow to draw. Everyone loves a trier, and the Minister of Justice is doing the best she can in the circumstances, but I do hope she takes the suggestion into account.
The law was very well stated by the New Zealand Law Society in its original submission to the select committee, and we had the opinion of Douglas White QC on the matter. We had no doubt as to what the law was as a result of hearing that submission. What was being done by Mr Chauvel and others in the union movement was, as he said, “the practice”. It was a nice way of saying that they were breaking the law but that that was the practice. We had a good look at it, as Dr Worth has said, and we turned it down. I must commend Dr Worth for his speech; he set out the matter very clearly. I believe I have suggested the solution, which is envisaged by the explanatory note. This is really just a technical matter, as Lynne Pillay said. We have identified the mischief and the technicality, we have now come up with solution, and I do commend it to the House. I will not take any further time, because I appreciate that the trade union movement and Business New Zealand want to get this matter on its way. I will be putting forward the amendment on behalf of New Zealand First, I believe, on Tuesday next week.
CHRIS AUCHINVOLE (National) Link to this
The purpose clause of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2) states: “The purpose of this Act is to enable lawyers who are employed by employer organisations or unions to provide legal services to persons who are members of their respective employers.” This bill is needed in order to amend the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006, which is due to come into force on 1 August, so some special speed is required.
The Minister Annette King, in introducing the bill during the first reading debate, asked for a very short time frame, and National members responded in their first reading speeches that they would support the legislation and the short time frame. The courtesy of early advice and request has been most encouraging. Speaking as a first-term MP, I say that it is nice to find that this level of cooperation is, on occasions, transacted by the present Government. I guess I can think of other legislation where it would have been nice had that level of communication occurred. One of the reasons for this time frame is to provide assistance to the affected parties that are caught up in this new legislation through no fault of their own.
I admit to having taken a moment or two when on the Justice and Electoral Committee to fully understand the ramifications of it all. My colleague Richard Worth said that the legislation being amended was highly technical, and I concur with that. A number of the submitters we heard from were asking for the status quo to continue—the practice that Mr Chauvel referred to. From my understanding that was not really what they wanted. It was not in their best interests, because the whole situation was about to change. They did not want the status quo to carry on; what they required was to be able to continue their previous practices. But under the new legislation they are expressly forbidden from doing that, and even then they probably should not have been doing it anyway. The legislation does this by distinguishing between legal services required by the organisation—particularly advocacy and representation services—and those required by the organisation’s members.
The intention of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 included protecting confidence in the provision of legal services and conveyancing services, and protecting consumers of those services. It could be said, and has been said by submitters, that the reason for this bill was that there was an unintended consequence of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006, which will be corrected by this amendment bill. The bill includes employer organisations and trade unions in the list of employers of in-house lawyers who are able to provide the regulated services.
The nub of the matter is that the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 has a general principle that lawyers must be employed by lawyer organisations if they are to provide legal services to the public. Members of unions and employer organisations are members of the public, so a situation occurs where members of these organisations—such as the 42,000 members of the Nurses Organisation—are suddenly deprived of the services they have enjoyed.
Similarly, Business New Zealand welcomed and supported this amendment bill, which addresses a current anomaly preventing lawyers with practising certificates who are employed by employers’ organisations and unions from providing legal services to members of their organisations. The only way they can do so is to work without practising certificates and not refer to themselves as lawyers. That, I would imagine, would not be a particularly easy thing for a professional lawyer to swallow, but I do not have an opinion on that.
But should this bill not proceed, the options would be for unions and employment organisations to use legal personnel without practising certificates, or to provide current legal services through a separate firm set up for the purpose. To a non-lawyer like myself, when one has the representatives from Business New Zealand, the New Zealand Educational Institute, and the New Zealand Nurses Organisation, and letters from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, all at the same table making harmonious submissions together, it really is head-scratching stuff.
Legal practice, of course, has intrinsic and intricate relationships, protocols, and a very long history of using precedents, and when one starts to regulate a control in a particular direction, it often cuts into a practice that has been exercised through convention, not regulation. So by introducing regulation, the strength of the convention is then open to question and doubt. This was my impression from listening to the New Zealand Law Society’s submission, which related to the practice of lawyers being employed by non-lawyers to provide legal services to their employers but not to other employees. Their list of reasons for this includes the need to ensure that legal services are provided to members of the public by lawyers qualified to practise on their own account or under the direct supervision of a lawyer who is qualified, the need for independent advice, the protection of the Law Society’s rules of professional conduct and other regulations, and the liabilities involved.
To me, the Law Society’s submission demonstrated that the position and practice that had previously occurred as a convention was condoned, rather than having any formal recognition, but now that the matter was under consideration, then the old ways could no longer be adhered to—hence the problem. The Law Society’s submission was true to its profession in looking at everything every which way, and it is indeed the task of that organisation to do that. As a non-lawyer, though, I was taken on a journey of labyrinthine proportions through the reasons, concerns, wise saws, and instances of the sorts of problems that will be associated with introducing this amendment bill, and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the society’s advice and argument. The solution offered was in line with the comments of the other organisations in relation to surrendering practising certificates and setting up separate legal firms or entities, although the others had seen that as being disadvantageous and unwieldy. The Law Society saw the danger of precedence in any move to allow exceptions—as will occur with this amendment—and considered that it could lead to demand for exceptions for other categories of lawyers employed by non-lawyers, such as those in major firms of accountants.
One point made in all the submissions resonated particularly with me, and that is to be seen when looking at the purpose of the bill. An earlier version of the bill stated that it was to enable lawyers who were employed by employer organisations and unions to provide legal services to persons who were members of their respective employers. I see now, in this latest published edition, that it allows them to “provide”; it does not say “enable” them. But the key word to me is that word “enable”. It does not compel, and it opens an opportunity.
If I were a lawyer, I wonder how I would feel about having an obligation or a compulsion to provide whatever services employees wanted. I am not sure that I would want that. Then I found there were some 35 lawyers, I think, in this particular category. Those who spoke to the committee indicated that their pressure of work was such that they had scant opportunity to accept engagements of a personal nature from other employees. I myself would have thought that they would probably have a natural reluctance to make themselves too available, anyway. I wonder whether the whole matter could be addressed by the simple addition of a phrase in the purpose of the bill, specifying that such legal services apply to matters of employment only. That, I would hope, would overcome all the raised and perceived concerns expressed during the submission process. Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) Link to this
I will take a brief call, because I think everyone acknowledges there is a problem here that needs to be addressed, but, as so often happens, the devil is in the detail, and it behoves us to try to get right the formula of words. That is a point I have made on a number of occasions in debates in this House, and of course the Government has ignored it every time, most recently in relation to the passage of the Electoral Finance Bill, when I said to several people on the Labour side that, even accepting that their prime aim with the legislation was to do in the National Party, there were numerous provisions in the bill where the words are not right. It was not that I was giving them advice on how to do us in, but I was saying there were issues of a general nature where the i’s were not dotted and the t’s not crossed, and they were ignored. Of course—
Hon Darren HughesCHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON Link to this
—that legislation is coming home to haunt them, and I am so delighted because it will hasten the demise of the MP for Otaki.
But let us go to the preliminary provisions of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill (No 2). I think Dr Worth described the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act as tortuous legislation. It is not particularly good legislation. It was in gestation for many years, it passed into law a couple of years ago, and it is all coming to a head because the Act itself comes into force on 1 August, in relation both to lawyers and to conveyancers. So it has had a fairly long transitional period, and this issue has emerged at the 11th hour, which is why the National Party supported the bill going to the Justice and Electoral Committee, and cooperated in the select committee.
As I said, there was an issue that needed to be looked at. The primary purpose of the legislation is to maintain public confidence in the provision of legal services and conveyancing services. We are not so worried about conveyancing services in the context of this bill. But we come immediately to section 9 as it was originally enacted. Subsection (1) states: “A lawyer is guilty of misconduct who, being an employee, provides regulated services to the public other than in the course of his or her employment—(a) by a lawyer;”, and then subsection (1) sets out the various categories: for example, the Legal Services Agency, the Public Trust, the Māori Trustee, and trustee companies.
It did appear that there was a gap, because over a period of time there had at least developed a practice—whether or not it was legal—where certain persons who were qualified lawyers within unions and organisations like Business New Zealand and the Nurses Organisation would, in the course of their work, provide advice to members. My understanding is that the advice offered was in the nature of advice relating to employment. It would be highly unlikely and very, very dangerous for, for example, the lawyer in the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union—whose name is Mr Wilton, I believe—to be giving advice on matters relating to mergers and takeovers, or the law relating to family protection, and so on. The most a person, in that instance, would do is refer the inquirer on to another lawyer who was qualified to give that advice.
So, recognising that this practice has grown up, recognising the constraints of section 9, and recognising that there was a problem in this legislation—which is soon to come into force—the National Party supported the bill going to the select committee. We listened very carefully to the submissions that were made on behalf of those organisations, and on behalf of the Nurses Organisation. But we made a comment in the report that although we supported the passage of the legislation, we may want to introduce a Supplementary Order Paper at the Committee of the whole House stage if, after careful consideration of matters raised in oral submissions to the committee, we considered there were further matters to be addressed.
So I am very interested to hear that Mr Jones of New Zealand First is proposing a Supplementary Order Paper to deal with certain definitional issues. I will have a good look at that over the next few days. The Leader of the House said in the House this afternoon that this bill will go through its remaining stages next week, and I hope that all parties will in good faith take a look at the Supplementary Order Paper that Mr Jones proffers, to see whether it will address the concern on the one hand of the Law Society, while recognising the very legitimate concerns of those who made submissions to the select committee in favour of the bill.
I do not think the various parties are too far apart. It is a question of words, so I think it behoves us when it comes to the Committee stage of the bill to see whether it can be improved. I think that is everyone’s intention. I listened very carefully to what Dr Worth said about the history of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act 2006 and its passage into law. I can understand why we need to give urgent attention to this matter, and I will be very interested to look at the amendments that are being proffered by Mr Jones, to see whether there can be a meeting of the minds, because this is a very important issue.
I come back to the purpose provisions set out in section 3 of the Act, the most important of which is to maintain public confidence in the provision of legal services. We have to make sure that if an opportunity is afforded to the lawyer employees of employer organisations or unions, they are able to carry out what they have traditionally done, but not range into areas that may be well beyond their areas of competence. I do not think they would intend to move beyond what has been the practice over many years, and that is why we need to pay careful attention to the words—to avoid the prospect of litigation once the Lawyers and Conveyancers Act comes into force. So I very much look forward to the Committee stage, and to the members of the Committee working together to see whether we can solve what appears to be a terminological problem.