Government: Leadership Training

Lord Judge Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judge (CB)]

My Lords, it is not merely because the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, recommended me for appointment to the High Court Bench in 1988 that I say that it is a privilege to be following him—noble Lords will discover why in a moment. It is also a privilege to be following the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, whose chairmanship of the Constitution Committee when I was on it was absolutely marvellous.

We all know that we do not know it all. Look at us: very modest, very humble, and we recognise our own limitations. But there is a very strange thing about humanity: we must recognise also a tendency, when people suggest that we do not quite know everything—particularly on something we think we do know about—to slightly resent it. If a group of us is being asked to examine whether we know it all, we think, “Well, who are these people questioning whether we know very much?” We do not like criticism, and I say that because it was the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, who was such a stalwart supporter of training for judges.

You may not believe this, but when I was a junior judge and went into court to sit as a judge—I had had quite a lot of years of experience prosecuting, defending, and seeing other judges, some good, some not so good—I just sat as a judge, trying two policemen on corruption judges. It was very small corruption: just taking bribes to stop people being prosecuted for speeding. But I had not had a day’s training. More importantly, very significantly impressive people with wonderful brains who worked in the commercial world were sent out on circuit to try murder and rape trials who had never spent a day in a criminal court.

When it was suggested—I was a very strong supporter of this, rather ahead of my time, I regret to say—that there should be judicial training, the judges largely—we are talking about the 1970s—thought that this was a bit of an insult. They thought it was not appropriate. I remember them saying to me, “This is an interference with judicial independence; the Government’s trying to tell us what to do.” This is where I particularly draw attention to the privilege of following the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, because he gave the most astonishing support to the idea that we had got to go through a judicial training process. I think, as all his career has shown, that he put principle ahead of any fleeting unpopularity.

Listen to my own experiences when I was running part of it. There was the day a black civil servant came to tell us, when we were setting up a body to look into and train us in diversity and prejudice, that he had been stopped 38 times driving a good middle-class car in 37 years. He then asked us, “And how many of you have been stopped by the police driving your car?” There were about 40 of us there, and not one of us had been.

The other remarkable moment was with that extraordinarily brave young woman who was the victim in the “vicarage rape case”, which all noble Lords will remember. I asked her, and she agreed, to come and talk to judges about how she had steeled herself to give evidence that would not give the perpetrator a moment’s satisfaction that she was still upset by what he had done to her—which led the judge to say that there was no sign of great trauma. We learned from all sorts of people. It is not possible for a judge now to sit on the Bench and to try sex cases, family cases—any sorts of cases—without having been trained.

Junior Ministers are rather like I was in my first trial. You are a Minister, you follow more senior Ministers, you move up the ladder, you are picking up all the habits that your Ministers have—some good, hopefully, and some not so good, inevitably. By the time you are a Secretary of State, you are ultimately, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, pointed out, responsible for the legislation. If I were in charge of training—and I did do it for some time for judges—I would train Ministers in constitutionality. It is a funny word, that, but it embodies everything that the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, were talking about.

Since 2005 we have not had a proper Lord Chancellor. The old Lord Chancellor would be sitting at the Cabinet table, occupying a different function from the other Members of the Cabinet, there to tell them, “This won’t do, this is not the rule of law”—or whatever it might be. Now Mr Raab has become the Lord Chancellor, and everybody regards it as a demotion. As for the Minister for the constitution—this is not at all a personal criticism of Chloe Smith—she is not in the Cabinet. The Minister for the constitution is not a member of the Cabinet. This is why I suggest constitutionality.

I would have a day’s course with the chairs of our three committees—the Constitution Committee, delegated legislation committee and the secondary legislation committee—going down to talk to Ministers. No doubt they would take them copies of their reports. Perhaps they could be reinforced by the opportunity of having their legal advisers there, too—not the whole lot of them, just those three people. If the Government of the day said, “Ah, well, they’re not in our party,” then have the previous one. That way we would alert Ministers to the reality of what is going on; they are not paying sufficient attention to our constitution.

I will just add this. This is not a particular party I am arguing against. They all do it. Power does tend to corrupt.