Crime and Courts Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lloyd of Berwick and Baroness Prashar

Monday 25th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick]

The point is whether it arises in practice that it is impossible for whoever is making the appointment to choose between two equal candidates. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, says he often had that difficulty. If that is a real difficulty, it is very surprising that the Judicial Appointments Commission, which has made innumerable appointments, has never found that difficulty in practice, and it says that it does not anticipate, therefore, that the provisions of the Equality Act will ever be relevant in practice, either at its level or at any other level.

[Baroness Prashar]

Let me explain this by giving an analogy. When you make senior appointments, let us say to the High Court, you make a selection. It is like knowing that you want fruit: do you want apples, pears or whatever? That is the point at which you make a judgment. What the noble and learned Lord read from basically explains that you judge the candidate against those criteria. You will take all those considerations into account before making that selection. The distinction is that you will never get two equal candidates. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, said, let us say that the noble Baronesses, Lady Jay and Lady Neuberger, applied. It would be a question of equal merit but against the background of what was needed you would go for one particular noble Baroness because she would match the merit criteria. I think that the confusion is that they are not absolutely equal but they are of equal merit.

[Lord Lloyd of Berwick]

I regret to say that the difficulty of that is that when one talks about equal merit one is in danger of infringing the very first requirement that all appointments must be made solely on merit and the view that has been expressed over and over again that that is not a threshold. That view was rejected by the Constitution Commission, which said that it is wrong to regard merit as a threshold, which the noble Baroness appears to have done—and perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, too. It is not a threshold. You have to get the best person.