The Lord Chancellor’s plans to overhaul the legal profession will end its independence, a committee of MPs and peers has said.

In a strongly worded report on the Government’s Legal Services Bill, the joint committee examining the Bill gives warning of a state-controlled legal profession and criticises the new powers the Lord Chancellor has given himself in the Bill. “This is all about the Government wanting to control the legal profession, and we have pointed out the great dangers in allowing it to do that,” Lord Hunt of Wirral, the committee chairman, said.

The Bill will provide a new over-arching regulatory and independent complaints system and allow lawyers to set up in mixed partnerships with other professionals. It will also allow businesses to own or part-own law firms, a proposal that has become known as “Tesco law”.

The committee says that the proposals go much further than the recommendations of Sir David Clementi, on whose report the Bill is based. “The legal system must not only be independent, it must be perceived as being independent,” Lord Hunt said.

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