Contribution
My Lords, this amends the Judicial Appointments Commission Regulations 2013, which govern the composition of and eligibility criteria for the board of commissioners of the Judicial Appointments Commission, to which I shall refer as the JAC for brevity.
As your Lordships will be aware, the JAC is the independent body established under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 to select candidates for judicial office in England and Wales, and for some tribunals with UK-wide powers. It is governed by an independent board of commissioners, appointed by His Majesty the King, on the recommendation of the Lord Chancellor.
One of the board of commissioners’ primary objectives is to ensure that the JAC fulfils its statutory responsibilities and obligations. These include ensuring that judicial appointments are made solely on merit through fair and open competition and having regard to diversity and good character. Commissioners oversee the selection processes, review recruitment strategies and make final selection recommendations to the appointing authority.
The current regulations set out the structure of the JAC’s board, specifying that there should be 15 commissioners, including a lay—i.e. non-judicial—chair. Of the other 14, seven must be judicial officeholder members, five must be lay members and two must be professional members—that is, people practising or employed as lawyers.
One of the purposes of these regulations is to expand the number of professional members from two to three, which will then expand the overall number of commissioners. Each of the professional commissioners must come from one of the three categories of legal professional; they must be either a barrister or a solicitor or a fellow of CILEX, which is the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives. At the moment, there is a barrister commissioner and a solicitor commissioner, but there is no CILEX commissioner. Apart from the three senior judicial members, the other 12 commissioners are recruited and appointed through open competition.
The regulations are being updated to strengthen the JAC’s capacity and ensure its continued effectiveness in judicial recruitment in two ways. First, the total number of JAC commissioners will be increased from 15 to 16, which is needed because of the anticipated increase in the volume of work. This will be done by increasing the number of professional commissioners from two to three. The requirement that they be from different professions will remain, so the effect will be that all three main legal professions—barrister, solicitor and CILEX fellow—are represented simultaneously on the board.
The reason this matters is that CILEX membership is generally more diverse than the other legal professions. Some 78% of CILEX fellows are women, and because CILEX provides a non-graduate route to become a lawyer, its members tend to be from more varied socioeconomic backgrounds. This amendment will support the JAC in its duty to promote diversity in judicial appointments by providing for a commissioner to lead on outreach in this field.
Secondly, there is, at present, an anomaly in the eligibility criteria for the senior tribunal commissioner role. These regulations will expand the eligibility criteria by including a wider range of senior salaried tribunal officers. Currently, only Upper Tribunal judges, chamber presidents of the First-tier Tribunal, chamber presidents of the Upper Tribunal and presidents of employment tribunals for England, Wales and Scotland are eligible.
The effect is that it is not open to all senior salaried members within the unified tribunal structure. In order to remedy this, the amendment expands eligibility to include all salaried members of the Upper Tribunal, certain judges of the Employment Appeal Tribunal, deputy chamber presidents of the First-tier Tribunal and deputy chamber presidents of the Upper Tribunal. This ensures equality of opportunity for those holding broadly equivalent roles, and it is a change that has been requested by the Senior President of Tribunals.
The extent of this instrument is UK-wide, and the territorial application of this instrument is UK-wide. The Lady Chief Justice and the JAC chair on behalf of the board, the Bar Council, the Law Society, CILEX, the Legal Services Board, the Senior President of Tribunals, the Lady Chief Justice of Northern Ireland and the Lord President of Scotland have all been consulted and are all supportive of these changes.
As far as public consultation is concerned, although there was a public consultation exercise for the 2013 regulations, it has not been considered necessary to conduct a further such exercise for these amendments given their limited effect. The amendments are necessary to strengthen the JAC’s capacity, provide greater equality of opportunity for those applying to be commissioners and support the JAC’s commitment to encouraging judicial diversity. I beg to move.