“At the moment, unregulated individuals are charged with distributing considerable sums of money. It is becoming more difficult to assist consumers to identify reputable service providers.”
Furthermore, new recommendations, if implemented, will: “…require regulators to develop proportionate and targeted approaches to supervising providers by identifying and targeting risks and taking swift enforcement action if things go wrong.”
The subject of those two statements, by Law Society president Lucy Scott-Moncrieff and the Legal Services Board respectively, is not the European processed food industry – although it could well be – but the recommendation by the LSB to recommend to the Lord Chancellor that the writing of wills should become a ‘reserved activity’. The recommendations follow a two-year investigation by the LSB and, if accepted by the Lord Chancellor, will not come into force until 2015. Speed, apparently, was not of the essence.
The news will shock many lay people: not because of the recommendation that the activity be reserved, but because it isn’t already. Aside from a few do-it-yourself activists, I am sure a great many people do not and would not trust their Last Will and Testament to anyone who doesn’t have a legal qualification of some sort.
Now, as for a recommendation for more stringent regulation of the processed food industry…
• The Jackson reforms to the Civil Procedure Rules are on their way! A statutory instrument was laid before Parliament on 13 February, setting out in detail what the changes will be.
According the Law Society Gazette’s David Hyde: “There are few surprises in the amended rules, and as expected, changes to conditional fee agreements do not apply to insolvency-related proceedings, publication and privacy proceedings or a mesothelioma claim.”
Not everyone agrees on how straightforward things are, however. Francesca Kaye, president of the London Solicitors Litigation Association, pointed out that the profession is still awaiting new practice directions, with most of the changes coming into force on 1 April.
“It’s been a complete shambles,” she said. “There is a limit to how much lawyers can prepare for change without seeing the detailed practice directions.”
So in this case, it seems, speed IS of the essence.
• This month’s prize for bare-faced cheek goes to Aviva insurance, who have suggested those injured in road accidents should go to the wronged parties’ insurers for redress, rather than engaging lawyers and experts. It would save the industry £1.5bn per year, said the insurer.
Predictably, the proposal was pooh-poohed by the entire legal profession, as well as anyone with a smidgeon of common sense.
Lucy Scott-Moncrieff responded thus: “Who do you trust to give you a fair deal – a lawyer working for you, or an insurer working for a person or company in the wrong, whose main interest is minimising what they pay you? Would you seriously trust the other side's insurer to give you a fair deal?”
A commentator on the Gazette site saw the prospects for taking the idea even further and saving even more money.
“Taking doctors out of healthcare would stop people being diagnosed and needing those expensive operations and medicines,” he suggested. “We could save millions. Taking away policemen would stop all those people being arrested and costing us millions in legal aid and housing them in prison.”
Now, about the European processed food industry.
Chris Stokes