Is it appropriate for a regulatory overseer to be an evangelist for that which it would oversee, particularly when the consequences of ‘regulatory capture’ in the financial services industry are so painfully uppermost in the public mind?

As Rachel Rothwell blogs this week, the question arises upon reading the Legal Services Board’s draft business plan.

The document is shot through with doctrinaire paeans to a free market in legal services that are not supported by anything so compelling as evidence.

This is the language of politics, not regulation.

Examples are legion, notably: ‘increased levels of supply from new entrants, alongside greater innovation in the way services are packaged and delivered, will create competitive forces that lower prices’.

Well, possibly. Many energy consumers, and travellers on our punitively expensive trains (and those priced off them) are not so starry-eyed about a deregulated free for all.

‘Greater competition will raise standards,’ it adds. Just as it has in NHS hospital catering?

More worryingly, the LSB seems to believe that alternative business structures (ABS) are going to mitigate the impact of legal aid cuts, How so? It doesn’t really say.

ABS could bring some of the benefits the LSB claims. But the board should concentrate on the job in hand and ditch the panglossian rhetoric. That’s best left to ministers