This Report follows the Committee's recent visit to Edinburgh, where it held discussions with a number of interested parties on the Scottish experience of an independent judicial appointments board. The aim of the Report is to highlight the main issues which arose in the course of our discussions. At this stage, in advance of the Government's consultation paper on the establishment of an independent judicial appointments commission, we make no specific recommendations about how those issues should be addressed.
Our general impression was that the Judicial Appointments Board had settled down well, and was seen as successful even by those who had initial reservations about its creation or its structure.
The main issues which arose were as follows:
- The importance of independence, and the perception of independence, both in the Board itself and in the appointments it makes
- The need for a degree of accountability for the functioning of the system, and the balance to be struck between accountability and independence
- The perceived importance of setting the Commission on a statutory footing, and the matter of what guidance should be given to the Commission and what status that guidance should have
- How the Commission should be funded
- The importance of openness and transparency both in judicial appointments and appointments to the Commission itself
- The appropriate makeup of the Commission in terms of the balance between legal and lay representation, and the role to be played by the lay members
- The appropriate length of tenure of Commission members
- How long after leaving the Commission former members should themselves remain ineligible for judicial appointment
- The mechanism for appointment once the Commission has made a decision on the suitability of candidates
- Whether the most senior judicial appointments should be subject to the same procedures (at present in Scotland they are not)
- The tier of the judiciary at which appointments should begin to be made by the Commission, whether tribunal appointments will be included, and whether a series of regional commissions will be necessary
- The procedures for conducting the appointment process, for example:
- whether there should be an annual round of appointments at certain levels
- whether the Commission should be able to invite applications from those who might not otherwise apply
- if the Commission is not itself to be the appointing authority, how its recommendations should be presented to the Minister
- whether the full Commission, or most of its members, will themselves conduct the interviews of candidates at all levels of judicial appointments, as is the practice in Scotland
- the treatment of unsuccessful candidates nevertheless assessed as suitable for appointment in subsequent appointment rounds
- The extent to which the Board should be able to decide its own assessment procedures.
- The extent to which the new appointments system could achieve greater diversity in the gender and ethnic background of the judiciary, and the extent to which this was dependent on widening access to and career development in the legal profession generally.
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