New Petitions

Following a survey carried out by our consumer magazine Which?, the Consumers Association believes that Scottish consumers are poorly served by the complaints system currently operated by solicitors. We have heard about complaints to do with unprofessional behaviour among solicitors, negligence, mistakes made, excessive delays and dishonesty—yet more than 40 per cent of the people who told us that they had received poor service did not complain. They said that there would have been no point or that it would have been too stressful an experience. Three quarters of those who complained to their solicitors said that their complaint was not resolved, and many people told us about their confusion, frustration and distrust, and about the lengthy misery that their experiences had caused them. Several gave up simply because the process made them ill.The majority of people have cause to use the services of a solicitor at some point in their life—usually when buying or selling a house, for a divorce, or after a bereavement. Those are stressful experiences in their own right, and people have the right not just to high standards of legal care but to a decent, independent complaints process if things go wrong. The Consumers Association does not believe that that is happening in Scotland at the moment.Last year, the Law Society received more than 2,000 letters of complaint, which it then investigated. It also received 923 letters that it termed "miscellaneous" and did not investigate. From the legal services ombudsman's own research, the Law Society took an average of 78 weeks to investigate complaints. The ombudsman found that a fifth—21 per cent—of the complaints that she looked into had taken the Law Society more than two years to investigate.In her annual report this year, the ombudsman says that complaints to her rose by 61 per cent over the past year. She found that the Law Society had failed to investigate adequately 42 per cent of the cases that she had examined. Too many people are not having their complaints adequately heard at the moment. That is an obvious injustice.After its inquiry into the regulation of legal services in November 2002, the Justice 1 Committee made a series of recommendations to the Executive. We believe that the implementation of those recommendations would greatly improve fairness for consumers who use legal services. They include a single gateway for all complaints against the legal profession and increased powers for the ombudsman to investigate decisions, prescribe timescales to cut down on delays and increase compensation to a decent and meaningful level. The maximum award of £1,000 has not been increased since 1990.We are concerned that, although the Government is currently reviewing the legal profession in England and Wales, Scotland risks failing to move forward with a fairer and more modern legal services complaints procedure that is easily understood by people, independent, transparent and effective. The current system is mired in the past, is not user-friendly or transparent and needs urgent updating. We therefore seek the Public Petitions Committee's support for the implementation of the Justice 1 Committee's findings.

We had more than 700 responses from throughout the United Kingdom; half of those people came back and completed questionnaires, and 12 per cent of those were from Scotland. We had around 36 or 37 responses from Scotland.

Yes. I am sorry; I did not make that clear.

There has indeed. We welcome what the Law Society of Scotland has been doing. It has put lay people on some of its committees, which is a help in speeding up the process of dealing with complaints. It has also advised solicitors to send a letter of estimate, so that people know what they are in for when they hire a solicitor. That is a great help, but it goes nowhere near resolving all the issues—the complaints that are not properly dealt with by the Law Society of Scotland—that either fall by the wayside or pitch up at the ombudsman's office. There is a great deal to be done to make the service properly available to consumers.

I was not aware of the memorandum of understanding. While it is welcome, the primary problems are that there is no single gateway, the system is not independent and the Law Society of Scotland is investigating complaints about its own members, when its primary function is to represent those members. It is difficult for it to do both. It tries to, but the system does not work.

Many of the improvements have existed for some time in England, but I have been involved in the current Clementi review of the regulation of legal services, which has not produced significant improvements. The problem of poor handling of consumers' complaints about lawyers has existed for upwards of six to 10 years. A lot of changes have been implemented to improve the way in which complaints are handled and to speed up the complaints process, but unfortunately they have not yielded results. We need a more radical overhaul of the system.

I was not aware of that. Again, that is welcome, but apart from anything else there is still the problem that complaints are not properly heard. They are falling by the wayside, through the gap whereby the Law Society of Scotland chooses not to investigate complaints. Many complaints that, in the ombudsman's opinion, should have been investigated—42 per cent of those that she examined—turn up at her door, which is a great concern. No doubt there are many complaints that do not turn up at the ombudsman's door—people just go away without justice.

I understand that the ombudsman's caseload in Scotland has trebled over the past three years. That shows two things: first, consumers are more willing to complain and are more aware of their right to complain to the ombudsman; and, secondly, there is dissatisfaction with the way in which lawyers at the grass roots handle their clients and fail to resolve complaints in-house.

You have to be extremely highly motivated to respond. We put adverts in the Scottish and UK press, but to respond in detail over an event that perhaps has been extremely stressful and upsetting takes a great deal of focus and determination. People are required to fill in a lengthy questionnaire about their experience—they have to be quite committed to follow up the situation.

Yes.

The Consumers Association opened a Scottish office just after that time, so we were not here bodily to take part, which of course is a matter for regret.

No, not at the time. As I said, we did not have a Scottish office in operation at that point.

That is a fair point. It would be better if we could travel back in time and make the appropriate representations at that point. However, we are trying our best to address the situation as it stands and to help Scottish consumers. We are doing a piece of work that really needs done.

The single gateway approach is still not clear to consumers, so we recommend that that be clarified. Further, the ombudsman could be given extra powers to investigate cases and carry out audits. There are failings in the system and they need to be addressed in a fairly radical way. It is good that incremental change is happening, but it will not be enough to address the problem.

There should be an independent single gateway.

We would like there to be a clearer separation between the representative roles of the professional bodies, particularly those of the Law Society of Scotland and the Faculty of Advocates, and their regulatory powers. Therein lies the key problem of the way in which complaints are handled, which leads to perceptions of bias by consumers who see a closed shop looking after its members. That does nothing to promote consumers' confidence in the profession. On specific measures that we would recommend, a single gateway is important. I am not sure whether that is already on the agenda, but I will illustrate why it is important. A consumer does not know whether they are dealing with a solicitor or a barrister; they think that they are simply dealing with a lawyer. Often, they are purchasing a service that is carried out by non-lawyers. For example, a personal injury claim will be managed by a claims management company. Whether the element of the service that a consumer is purchasing is regulated depends on the status and qualification of the person who delivers that service. For instance, if a claims management company sells you a poor insurance policy, you may well have a complaint against that company but there is no regulatory back-up for that, whereas if a solicitor has made a mistake or has done something wrong, you have recourse to the Law Society. Such anomalies need to be dealt with. While having a single gateway will not resolve all of them, it will give consumers confidence that they are taking their complaints to the right place and will not be bounced between various regulators or have to face the complexities of a difficult regulatory system.

The issue is also to do with timescales. Some 21 per cent of the complaints that go to the legal services ombudsman take more than two years to be investigated by the Law Society. That is a long time for people to have to be dragged through the process and to have the matter hanging over them. People have described to me how the complaints process has taken over their lives and has ruined their health and relationships. The process is difficult for ordinary people to go through. We would like the ombudsman to have powers to call for problems to be dealt with within a certain timescale so that people would know when matters would be properly investigated to the ombudsman's satisfaction and they would have an outcome. At the moment, investigations can drag on and on and people are often put off from embarking on the process because they know what can happen to them.

As far as we are aware, the Justice 1 Committee is still monitoring the situation.

Yes. As you will see, one of the recommendations is that members of the Public Petitions Committee may wish to refer the petition to the Justice 1 Committee as part of its continuing monitoring of the report.

Some of them will require primary legislation—that is the difficulty. I understand that, but a lot of people are suffering under the system at the moment. It has been nearly two years, and we are concerned that the matter will stay on the shelf. It really needs to come off the shelf and the recommendations need to be implemented, and that is what we seek.

If it were brought up to date?

I am not sure that we have; the figure is beginning to be lost in the mists of time. We have not worked how much it would be, but no doubt that could be done easily.

Exactly.

Thank you.