Orders of the Day — Constitutional Reform Bill [Lords]

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:18 pm on 17 January 2005.

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Photo of Vera Baird Vera Baird Labour, Redcar 7:18, 17 January 2005

There is certainly a qualitative difference between some of the people appointed to the Crown court bench and the usually very good people who are appointed to the High Court. None the less, when we talk about the calibre of appointees, we tend to mean intellectual capacity. Of course that is hugely important, but so, too, is being considerate to the public and having the understanding necessary to explain at the highest levels of our court system in plain English what one is discussing and, when addressing someone's counsel, trying to speak not in code, legalese or Latin, but in a way that the people who are paying for it and are entitled to it can understand. Having an understanding of that aspect of the judiciary job is not as universally available as good intellectual calibre, yet it is certainly a key skill. There have been some notable failures of that kind, while some potentially good appointments have stalled through the prejudice implicit in the current appointments system.

The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal says that nothing in the Bill is urgent. I ask him to reconsider. Senior appointments—High Court and above—tend to come from QCs. I want to tell the right hon. Gentleman some of the things that Sir Colin Campbell and his commissioners unearthed in the process for appointing QCs. There are what we call secret soundings that are now not so secret; Sir Colin Campbell can get hold of them. Indeed, people who have been refused appointment to silk—a necessary gateway to achieving higher judicial appointment—can ask for feedback on what has been said about them.

What about the woman who found that a factor sufficient to merit inclusion in the feedback she was given was that one of the higher judiciary had referred to her having poor dress sense? Is that a qualification for becoming a QC? Another woman was told that she had done something lamentable in court. In the feedback interview, she said that she had not done it and that the claim was not true. The response was, "Well, gossip creeps in sometimes." That is not very satisfactory.

A woman was told that an affair that she had had 10 years before was still talked about by the judiciary and that she would not be welcome. They should not have been talking about the affair in the first place, but to talk about it 10 years later and to hold it against her as a reason for not appointing her was utterly absurd. Indeed, it is invidious. In the secret soundings, someone's marital status was said to be a problem— Sir Colin Campbell is discreet about exactly what that was. Someone else was described by a judge as not a leader of the profession, so they should not be appointed. What on earth does that mean? What we think of as a leader may not be what someone else thinks. If one does not obtain silk, one cannot get on to the High Court bench. Even if one manages to get through the gateway of discrimination once, one has to face it again from the same people next time around.