With the Commons set to trade blows with peers over the Legal Services Bill, John Ludlow considers whether such battles are as much about political posturing as effective politics


The Legal Services Bill has now completed its Lords stages and will transfer to the Commons in the first week after the Whitsun recess.



There have been a great many changes to the Bill since its introduction last November, and it now more broadly mirrors the recommendations of the joint parliamentary committee that scrutinised the draft Bill. This is important. From being a well-meaning but flawed measure, this is now a Bill which most of us could happily live with - surely a credit to the expert scrutiny of the Lords.



But there are troubles on the horizon. Those changes that were effectively government concessions are obviously safe. But those amendments that were forced through by the opposition parties are vulnerable to being overturned in the Commons, where the government has a clear working majority. This is often the fate of Bills which begin in the Lords - witness what happened to the Mental Health Bill, which had a raft of far-reaching changes, each one measured and judicious, but swiftly overturned in Commons committee. It was not a pretty sight.



For this reason, the emphasis of lobbying efforts in the Commons is bound to be on consolidating the gains made so far, rather than in looking for further improvements. If the government has any sense, it will concede the changes. If it does not, and the Bill suffers a reversal of fortune, there will still be the possibility of restoring some of the gains in the frantic 'ping-pong' which characterises the final days of a Bill's passage. But let us hope that the former route is taken.



Of course, governments are always reluctant to give in to pressure from outside, even where the arguments are stacked up against them. A case in point is surely home information packs (HIPs). The concept of HIPs had barely any support even when first mooted, and has receded even further since then. Now even most of the exasperated consumer lobby has turned its back on the reforms.



And yet ministers still cling to the raft. Of course, there have been concessions. Last summer the secretary of state, Ruth Kelly, agreed to drop home condition reports from the packs and to delay their introduction, and only last week she announced a further delay and admitted that the requirement to have a pack would now only apply in the first instance to houses with four or more bedrooms.



The immediate cause of this latest watering-down was generally placed at the door of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which mounted a legal challenge to the proposals. But the timing of the announcement - immediately before the Lords debate on the regulations bringing in the packs - suggests that ministers were worried about being drubbed by peers in the voting lobbies. There was a time when the Lords would not vote on statutory instruments, but times change and as last summer's debate on juries in fraud trials showed, peers will now vote against the government (or in that case, threaten to do so) where the issue is important enough. True, this particular vote in the Lords would not have been fatal, but clearly the government preferred not to have another black mark in the register.



It remains to be seen, however, where we go from here. The government maintains that HIPs are still alive and kicking, and yet most commentators, I suspect, would now anticipate further concessions and more watering-down. But whether ministers will finally throw in the towel and abandon the scheme in its entirety is anybody's guess. Logic suggests that they should, but u-turns can often have damaging political fall-out, which is surely why they are so rare.



Certainly past experience suggests that ministers are reluctant to pull down the final curtain until absolutely necessary, and in fact sometimes they go a little beyond that. It is intriguing, for instance, to hear that ministers are still talking about introducing two major pieces of legislation this session - the Terrorism Bill and the Criminal Justice Bill. While it is not that unusual for Bills announced in the Queen's Speech to fail to appear subsequently, there comes a time when ministers have to hold up their hands and admit that time has run out. And with only eight weeks to go before the summer recess, that time is probably now.



All I can think is that these Bills will be introduced just for some publicity purposes before the summer recess, and then be quietly dropped. They could then be reintroduced in next session. This is, in fact, what happened with the Mental Health Bill in the last session. Some might say that this is not a good use of parliamentary time, but this perhaps fails to understand that the production of Bills is just as much about political posturing and image-making than it is about effective law-making.



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John Ludlow is head of the Law Society's parliamentary unit