This is a negative instrument, about which members received an e-mail from the Law Society of Scotland. We have also received advice from the committee's legal advisers. Are there any comments?
I should declare that I was a member of the Law Society of England and Wales, in case that is deemed to have any bearing on the matter.
It has been suggested that there are no problems with this instrument. However, given the views of the Law Society and of the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, we might want to ask the Executive whether it feels that there is a vires question about whether it has dealt properly with regulations 16.1 and 16.6.
There is no harm in asking the Executive to respond when significant concerns have been raised.
Regulation 21 was also mentioned, but they might have misread that. Do members agree that we should alert the Executive to the concerns of those bodies and ask it to respond before we consider the matter again next week?