Clause 6
Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill
9:45 am
Vera Baird (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs; Redcar, Labour)
As the hon. Gentleman said, the point of the clause is to supplement the judges of new tribunals with judges from the courts. Most tribunal judges will be transferred from existing tribunals—the EAT, the AIT or the JAC—to one of the new offices. We expect that judges from the courts will be deployed in small numbers from time to time to bring in skill and expertise that is not readily available, or just to help out. The list of the people who can be used in that way comprises almost all the salaried judicial offices in the mainstream core. None of them has a right to sit in the tribunal; they can sit only if the senior president invites them and the relevant chief justice agrees. We have made the pool as large as possible, because the necessary expertise might reside in all sorts of unexpected places, and
“a District Judge (Magistrates’ Courts)”
should not be excluded from that consideration. They are not only experts in crime; they often have to evaluate technical evidence, and they have a great deal of day-to-day, real life experience in the lower courts. Some sit on family matters, too, and undertake such work as licensing appeals, so they have a diversity of experience.
The users of tribunals are entitled to expect the best arrangements that we can manage, but that objective will not be met if we exclude suitable judges from hearing a case because of unnecessary restrictions on their deployment. I hope that that explanation is sufficient to persuade the hon. Gentleman not to press his amendment to the vote.