Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 9 JULY 2008
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers and Sir Igor Judge
QC
Q1 Chairman: My
Lords, may I welcome the Lord Chief Justice and Sir Igor to the
Committee. Thank you very much for coming. May I congratulate
them both on your behalf on their future posts. We are not being
televised, but we are being recorded, so I would like, if I may,
to ask you to identify yourselves for the record, as if it were
necessary.
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: Thank
you. I am Nicholas Phillips, I am Lord Chief Justice.
Sir Igor Judge: I am Igor Judge, I am
President of the Queen's Bench Division.
Q2 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed. Perhaps I could start, Lord Chief
Justice, by asking about the Review of the Administration of Justice
in the Courts. In July 2007 you announced that the Judicial Executive
Board had agreed that you would lay an annual review before Parliament
in order to meet the needs of accountability to Parliament and
the public in the light of the 2005 reforms. The first such review
was published in March 2008. I think it would be of interest to
know who received copies of the review and how much it has been
downloaded from the website? Has any assessment been made of its
impact in increasing the "public understanding of the role
of judges"?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: Thank
you. We printed 500 hard copies. They were, of course, placed
in both the libraries of the House of Commons and the House of
Lords, a copy went to Her Majesty, and copies went to the media.
They have almost all gone. I think 80 of them were in Welsh.
Lord Rowlands: Hear, hear!
Q3 Lord Morris of Aberavon:
For me!
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: Quite
apart from that, we published the review on our website. We have
had about 3,000 hits.
Q4 Chairman:
Very, very good.
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: As
to whether it has enlightened the general public as to the role
of the judiciary, I find it rather difficult to comment on that.
One suspects, having regard to the limited number of hits, that
it has not had a direct impact on the general public but it is
there, it will come to the attention of the general public in
as much as the media make use of it over the year.
Q5 Chairman:
Have you a view as to whether it would be helpful for there to
be some formal follow-up to the review from either the Government
or Parliament, or both and, if so, what sort of form it might
take?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: I think
it would perhaps depend upon whether any serious issues were raised
by it. My own feeling is that appearing before the appropriate
parliamentary committees to answer questions on the review may
well suffice.
Chairman: Yes. Thank you.
Q6 Baroness O'Cathain:
Can I ask a supplementary on that point. You said about the 3,000
hits. When you launched the review, Lord Chief, did you actually
have a press conference where you had a teach-in for the media,
if you like, because you said it depends on the media? You have
to bring them along with you, as you well know, I am sure. I am
sure you could get them on-side to try and, if you like, disseminate
further the contents of your review, thereby making the judiciary
even more a real thing in people's minds.
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: Yes,
I did have a press conference. I do not think I could describe
it as a "teach-in". The press when they come to such
a conference are rather more interested in making copy out of
the matter you are discussing than being given a teach-in. Interestingly,
after my appearance before the Commons committee one member of
the press asked, "Would it be possible for us to have some
instruction in some of the matters that we write about?"
I think he was particularly interested in the conditions under
which bail have to be granted. I said that we would be delighted
to give the press instructions on anything they wanted us to talk
about, provided it was appropriate.
Q7 Baroness O'Cathain:
Do you not think you ought to set the initiative rather than getting
the initiative from the press?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: I think
there may be a good point there. How many would turn up if we
simply said we are going to give a bit of instruction is another
matter.
Q8 Lord Rowlands:
When we held our previous inquiry we got very preoccupied by the
budgetary issues, particularly the cost of the court administration,
budgets and so forth. I was, therefore, rather disappointed that
in the annual review there was very little on the whole issue
of budgets, except that there was a backlog of repairs, et cetera.
Why did it not spell out more for laymen to understand what exactly
the court administration costs are and net costs to the public,
as it were? Where would we find that information?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: That
is probably a good point. I think one of the problems with this
report was it was being drafted at the same time that there were
continuing negotiations going on in relation to the budget of
the Court Service and the role we judges would be playing in relation
to that. Maybe we took our eye off the ball so far as informing
the public was concerned.
Sir Igor Judge: If I may, I suspect that
you would get the information that you need directly from the
Ministry of Justice in the HMCS budget.
Q9 Lord Rowlands:
I tried that and did not get very far, to be honest.
Sir Igor Judge: Shall I try and make
inquiries, Lord Rowlands, and find out for you? Obviously the
information is there, it is a question of whether it was put into
the Lord Chief's annual report.
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: In
future there will be the negotiations that are made provision
for under the Framework Document and I would anticipate the result
of those negotiations will be an important feature in any future
review.
Q10 Lord Rowlands:
I do not want to anticipate a later question, but we have mentioned
the Framework Document. Again, in the context of the budget, are
you satisfied that the Framework Document on the budgetary issues
has resolved the tensions between yourselves and the ministers?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: I am
satisfied that it has done that. There is now, as you will have
seen, a very detailed process under which the Lord Chief Justice
is going to take part in discussions at all the vital stages.
First of all, before a bid is made in each expenditure round to
tell the Lord Chancellor how much the Court Service needs; when
the Ministry then receives its allowance there will be further
discussion as to how much of this is going to go to the Court
Service, and once that is decided there will be further discussion
as to what it is going to be spent on. Once the Court Service
has been allocated its budget it cannot have any taken away without
going through the whole process again, which I think is very important.
Q11 Lord Rowlands:
So you have achieved a kind of ring-fencing?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: I think
this is in reality a kind of ring-fencing.
Q12 Chairman:
Lord Chief Justice, there was a perceived commitment to publish
an annual review, but there is now a perception that such a commitment
is diluted. Would you like to comment on whether or not there
will be an annual review and whether or not it would be desirable
for there to be a statutory requirement for an annual review?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: I will
start with the latter. We are very firmly of the opinion that
it would not be desirable to have a statutory requirement for
an annual review. We do not consider that would really be compatible
with the independence of the judiciary as a separate arm of state.
We do think it is appropriate that we should volunteer a review
so that we are publicly accountable in that way, but it is important
that we should be doing so of our own volition. As to how often
it should be, I did not want to bind my successor is really the
answer. I was not intending to suggest that we would not be producing
it every year. Producing this particular review proved to be a
very arduous task and in future we would not expect to produce
anything nearly as detailed, this was really laying the foundations
for future reviews. Personally, I think it probably would be a
good idea that there should be a regular review each year but,
as I have said, it is going to be a matter for Sir Igor and not
for me.
Q13 Chairman:
I believe the Supreme Court will be producing an annual review.
Would your successor like to make a comment?
Sir Igor Judge: I am just troubled about
the automatic assumption that if there is a review it should be
annual. If we have something to report we should report annually.
If we do not have very much to report, I cannot myself see any
sense in reporting when we have nothing much to report. We will
have some things to report every year, there will be all the formalities
and all that information can be produced, but if we are producing
what I would hope we will produce, a carefully structured, useful
report with observation about what is going right and what is
going wrong, it may not be sensible to produce it every year.
Equally, if there is any area for concern, and there may be, then
we should have to address that quickly without having to produce
a complete review of everything. I am not committing myself, but
I can see the force of the point that we are dealing with a public
area and you must be able to ask us to account whenever you want
to.
Q14 Chairman:
But if there is not too much to report then it will not be too
arduous, will it?
Sir Igor Judge: No, but then there is
the paper.
Chairman: The accountability point remains.
Q15 Lord Peston:
I agree with you entirely, of course, there is nothing magical
about the period of time called "a year". Certainly
in our House I am just astonished by how many annual reports I
get which go straight into the wastepaper basket because they
are reporting nothing other than using, as you say, a lot of paper
and a lot of coloured ink and so on. Is there not a slight problem
that if you only report when there is something serious then in
a way you are alerting the public when you should not really be
over-alerting them? In other words, a report that says, "It
is serious but it is under control" might still get misinterpreted.
Sir Igor Judge: I am sorry. Your point
is well made. I do not for a moment suggest that we should not
have regular reports. If we do not have an automatic annual cycle
there must be a facility to enable us to report if something dramatic
arises. I am not anticipating the idea that a report should only
be prepared when something dramatic arises.
Q16 Baroness O'Cathain:
Still on the Review of the Administration of Justice in the Courts.
You noted that the media team of the Judicial Communications Office
"is in the process of organising a small panel of serving
judges who will be trained to undertake media interviews where
it is necessary to provide an informed judicial perspective on
issues of sentencing and process". I think this probably
arose with all the controversy around the Sweeney case.
Sir Igor Judge: Yes.
Q17 Baroness O'Cathain:
How far has the JCO got with this initiative? Has the panel been
set up? Have the judges been trained? How many interviews have
been given so far?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: We
have a team of five now, I think, who have been trained. So far
there have been four interviews, I think they were radio interviews,
dealing with sentencing, dealing with bail and dealing with housing
repossession.
Q18 Baroness O'Cathain:
How do you think they went? Do you think they went better than
they would have done by not giving the interviews?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: I think
they undoubtedly would have been probably better as a result of
the tuition. That is not an easy question to answer. I certainly
have not received any expressions of dissatisfaction about those
interviews.
Q19 Baroness O'Cathain:
Who decides when the panel actually speaks to the media, or one
of the judges who have been trained?
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: Sometimes
I would decide because I would consider that this is a situation
that calls for a spokesman to say something, but in these instances
in none of them was I directly consulted. What would normally
happen is that there would be either a request of our Communications
Office or our Communications Office would become aware of a situation
where they felt that it was desirable that there should be a judicial
spokesman dealing with a topic. They would then brief the appropriate
member of the team as to the topic, as to any other questions
that might be thrown at them once they expose themselves to the
media, and they would then give the appropriate interview.
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