Solicitors (Complaints) (PE1479)
Item 5 is on petition PE1479, which was referred to us recently by the Public Petitions Committee. It is a petition by Andrew Muir calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to amend the Legal Profession and Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 2007 by removing any references to complaints being made “timeously”.
There is obviously something behind the petition that is not clear from the papers that we have. Most complaints have to be made within a certain time period—that is quite normal, whether it is a complaint to an ombudsman or to anyone else. I would have thought that having the ability to make a complaint later if there are exceptional circumstances, as outlined in the SLCC rules, already addressed the problem that was raised by the petitioner. However, obviously there are some issues with the 2007 act, which have been referred to by the SLCC. Perhaps we need to get a bit more detail from the individual about what experience caused him to raise the petition.
In the paper from the clerk, paragraph 11 on page 2 refers to the SLCC consulting “stakeholders”. I wondered who the stakeholders were and how you would establish stakeholders.
I have some difficulties because I saw the SLCC submission only this morning, convener. Up until then, I was quite happy for the petition to remain open so that we could get the further information that we wanted and consider the petition further. I think that I will stick to that view because I am not sure that we have had enough time to absorb all the submission.
We have options here. We could write to the SLCC in relation to the Legal Profession and Legal Aid (Scotland) Act 2007 and ask for more details on the recent consultation on the SLCC’s time bar. We could also write to the petitioner to ask whether he has any evidence that others have had similar difficulties with the SLCC’s time bar.
Thank you. We now move into private session.