‘Same old people’ are judges

Without targets, diversity among judiciary will be slow The judiciary would be more diverse if the old secret soundings system operated, barrister and MP David Lammy has said.

Lammy made the remarks while giving evidence this week to the Justice Committee on progress made following his 2017 review into the treatment of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) people in the criminal justice system.

Expressing frustration at the lack of progress on judicial diversity, Lammy said: ‘Had we stuck with the old tap on the shoulder we would have more diversity today.

‘We all want [appointments on merit] but we also want to ensure that it’s not the same old people for the same old jobs that went to the same old schools.’ He said his review found that at every stage of the judicial appointments process there was ‘a significant drop off of ethnic minority candidates, and that also applies to women’.

The old system, where the Lord Chancellor selected judges on the basis of anonymous consultations with judges and senior lawyers, was swept away by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Instead, an independent Judicial Appointments Commission was launched to run a fair and transparent selection process.

Lammy’s independent review, commissioned by former Prime Minister David Cameron, recommended diversity targets for the judiciary, but this was not taken up by the government. He told MPs that, without targets, progress will be ‘slow, if at all, and progress has been snail-like’.

He suggested that judges may need more training to recognise unconscious bias, citing ‘significant sentencing disparities’, for example, that an accused person is 240% more likely to be convicted of a drug offence if they are black than if they are white.