Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Given that the noble and learned Lord kindly mentioned my intervention, he will agree that it specifically related to another aspect of inequality of access, whereby 75% of judges—and the percentage is higher, the higher up you go—as compared with 7% of the population, were educated at public schools. Although his point about women is a good one, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, said that my point on public schools was a bad one on the grounds that there is no way in which you can manipulate appointment on merit to deal with something that happened 50 years ago, such as where you went to school. I simply ask the noble and learned Lord, if I concede that you cannot do anything in terms of social engineering at this level, whether he will agree that the judiciary should take on board that it is highly damaging if nothing is seen to be done at the junior barrister level regarding access to chambers. Mummy and daddy can afford to take you through that period, but working-class people cannot have that access. Will the noble and learned Lord take that point in any way at all, because he did not do so at Second Reading?

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for intervening again. I had interpreted his question at Second Reading as referring to diversity as a whole, and not limited to the number of judges who had been to public school. The Government’s case is based on the need to appoint more women judges, rather than more men, from people who have not been to public school. I am afraid that I do not have the comparative figures from 1998 and today on those who have been to public school, but I could perhaps find them and let the noble Lord know in due course.

The lesson that I draw from the figures that I have given is surely clear enough. If you want more diversity at the top, in the sense that Government and all of us want diversity, you must start at the bottom and work up, as we have already done and as the figures show. Women with family commitments are already being appointed in large numbers as part-time judges to the circuit Bench and below. In due course, the best of those women—and I can tell the Committee that from my experience the best are very good indeed—will, like the best men, reach the top via the High Court and the Court of Appeal. Yes, we all accept that it is a slow process, but there is no short cut to the top—a short cut implied in the proposal to allow women to sit part time in the Supreme Court—nor should there be such a short cut without infringing the overriding principle that the appointments must be solely on merit.

I have one last point. Introducing part-time judges into the Supreme Court would, on any view, be a major change. The court has been in existence only since 2010. It is surely too soon to effect such an important change without much more thought and further consultation. This is a point that I suspect will be developed by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart. The answers given to question 13 in the recent consultative exercise would have been all but useless in relation to the Supreme Court, even if the basis on which that question was asked had been comprehensible, which it was not—to me at any rate. In contrast, the composition of the Supreme Court was given much thought by the Select Committee in 2004. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, was a member of that committee as Lord Chancellor and he played a full part. He will remember that there was much discussion about whether the Supreme Court should consist of 15 judges, as some thought, or nine, as others thought, so that it could sit en banc. However, it was never once suggested by the noble and learned Lord or anyone else that we ought to have part-time judges in the Supreme Court. Yet the diversity problem at that time was even greater than it is today.