My Lord Mayor, My Lord High Chancellor, My Lords, Master of the Rolls, Aldermen, Mr Recorder, Sheriffs, Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you My Lord Mayor for your kind remarks and for your toast to the judiciary. It is a great pleasure to be dining among friends and friends who have drunk on our health with such enthusiasm. This has not been a universal experience over the last few months.
For the past 18 years this has been my favourite social event of the year, as it is I suspect for most of my fellow judges here. It is the harbinger of the long vacation, so we are in a mood to rejoice.
We are regaled with delicious food, sumptuous wines flow in abundance, and then mellow and relaxed, we sit back to listen to the elegance of the Lord Mayor’s speech and, in days gone by, the hope of a bit of a spat between the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor.
My Lord Mayor, this year I have viewed the approach of this dinner with rather more mixed feelings, conscious not only of the need to prepare something to say but of the desirability of an unaccustomed restraint before the blandishments of your cellar, in order to attempt to retain a degree of coherence at this stage of the evening. Such have been the temptations that I am not sure that I have succeeded.
There will this evening be no spat between the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor. It is just over three years ago that the government announced that the Lord Chancellor was to be abolished.
It is our good fortune that the office proved less easy to abolish than had been anticipated and our particular good fortune that Lord Falconer, who was put in to bat as a night watchman, has remained at the crease during the three years that followed. On April 3rd the Lord Chancellor ceased to be the head of the judiciary of England and Wales and that honour, together with a host of statutory duties that went with it, passed to me. The Constitutional Reform Act, which brought about these changes, provided nonetheless that the Act did not adversely affect the Lord Chancellor’s existing constitutional role in relation to the principle of the rule of law and gave to him express responsibility to uphold the independence of the judiciary.
It has always been the role of the Lord Chancellor to stand up for the rule of law and for the independence of the judges.
There have been a number of occasions, both before and after the 3rd April, when Lord Falconer has responded to attacks on or threats to the position of the judges in a manner and with a vigour that has been in the best tradition of his office. I can perhaps mention two such occasions – the recent unjustified and in some cases personal and intemperate media attacks on members of the judiciary in respect of the level of sentences imposed and the period when changes in the pension regime, designed simply to simplify the law, seemed likely to have unintended and adverse consequences for sectors of the judiciary. The Treasury did not seem anxious to rectify this wrong but you, Lord Chancellor, undertook to do so.
Only those close to you at the time will be aware of how much of a challenge this proved to be and of the extent of your endeavours to protect the judges from prejudice, endeavours which were successful. We have all cause to be grateful to you and I am happy that this occasion enables me to say ‘thank-you’ publicly.
Making this speech is not the only new experience that this office has brought me.
For the previous eight years, three conducting the BSE Inquiry and five as Master of the Rolls, I had been out of contact with developments in the field of criminal law. Shortly after finishing the BSE Inquiry I was invited out to dinner and found myself sitting next to a delightful young woman. She was a farmer’s daughter and thus had a particular interest in the BSE saga. She then asked me “and what are you doing now?”
I said “I have gone back to judging”. She looked at me blankly for a moment and then said “Oh, you mean cattle at County Shows”.
The demands of my current position did mean that I had to catch up with developments in criminal law over the past eight years, and that proved quite a task.
I enrolled on the Judicial Studies Board Criminal Law Continuation Course - for me it was very much an induction course – and last week I attended their Serious Sexual Offences Continuation Seminar. I would like to pay tribute to the dedication of the judges who run these courses – and particularly to Sir Peter Crane, who recently stepped down from chairing with such energy and distinction the Criminal Committee of the JSB.
I would also like to recognise the diligence and enthusiasm of those attending the courses, Recorders and judges at all levels. They involve a lot of homework and there were no shirkers.
I was astonished and concerned at the complexity of the sentencing exercise that a judge is required to perform. There has been a deluge of legislation over recent years affecting sentencing.
This, together with the guidance of the Sentencing Guidelines Council, restricts the scope of the discretion that a judge previously enjoyed when deciding on the appropriate sentence.
It takes a lot of study to master the intricacies of sentencing today, which can result in criticisms of sentences by those who have not conducted such study being wide of the mark.
I have asked Lord Justice Keene, who chairs the Judicial Studies Board, whether he can lay on a sentencing induction course for Home Secretaries. He is considering this, but has warned me that the frequency of such courses would have resource implications.
The media have recently been painting a picture of Ministers and the judiciary being at war. I have to say that that is a false picture.
Judicial independence requires judges to reach their decisions without fear or favour, affection or ill-will. Our task is to apply the law with objectivity to the best of our ability, and this is something that Ministers must understand and respect, and I believe that they do.
But we judges cannot perform our function without the necessary infrastructure - a court system, court staff, information technology- Many of the statutes that are enacted have significant resource implications for the judiciary. In the criminal field we are concerned that the wide range of sentencing options should be real options so that we can be confident that the sentences that we pass are those most likely to protect the public from criminal behaviour – not only in the short term but in the longer term.
All of this calls for cooperation between the judges who sit in the courts, the administration that provides those courts and the entire infrastructure of the administration of justice and, to a degree, the legislature.
That co-operation is taking place today to a far greater extent than it ever did before, and at all levels: between Resident Judge and Court Manager, between Presiding Judge and Regional Director. Judges and Magistrates sit on Probation Boards. The Home Office and the criminal justice agencies have direct or indirect input into the guidance given by the Sentencing Guidelines Council. Judges and those agencies sit together on the Criminal Procedure Rules Committee. Judges and the administration work closely together on the Civil Justice Council, and the Family Justice Council. The relationship of the Court Service and the judiciary is that of partnership.
Sir Igor Judge, Head of Criminal Justice sits on the National Criminal Justice Board. And at the highest level, there are frequent meetings between the Lord Chancellor, myself and the senior judiciary.
Sir Igor and I met regularly with the previous Home Secretary and meet regularly with his successor. We have maintained an excellent working relationship with each. None of this compromises judicial independence, it just makes us better able to fulfil our role and our duties.
In the course of the last year I have made a series of visits around the country, sometimes with the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal, sometimes on my own, meeting administrators, judges and magistrates. I have been highly impressed by the dedication of all of them. Judging is not a nine – to - five job. Papers have to be read at night and at week-ends.
There are, for the reasons that I have explained, increasing administrative burdens.
And magistrates, who make a major contribution to the administration of justice for no financial reward, have been having to cope with the increased complexity of the law that they apply. My Lord Mayor, you are the chief magistrate of the city and you know how much we owe them.
Judges care about the rule of law and the due administration of justice. I sometimes read “judges are out of touch with real life. They have no idea what it is like to live on a run-down council estate with neighbours from hell”. We do not live on run down council estates, but we do travel on buses and tubes – and bicycles. We go to foot-ball matches. Some of us even push a trolley around Tescos, though I do not think that this is the origin for the expression ‘Tesco law.’
We have children and grand-children, and neither we nor they are immune from the impact of crime. And day by day our work gives us an insight into what is happening in all sectors of society which is shared by very few.
No judge is infallible. Occasionally a summing up or a sentence has to be corrected by the Court of Appeal. My nemesis related to a summing up that I had delivered in Carmarthen after walking to the top of Snowdon before breakfast.
Recently some sectors of the media have chosen to select some judges for personal attacks that have been intemperate, offensive and unfair. A judge who is the subject of such an attack cannot answer back. All here will, I know, share my sympathy for the victims of this abuse, and not just for them. Some of us can grow thick skins, but it is deeply distressing for family members to see those that they love and respect pilloried in the press.
I would like to say a word about resources.
I have in mind not the economies that we are all being forced to make this year because of the demands of criminal legal aid, but a longer term problem. Over the past ten years, financial constraints have, year by year, meant that economies have been made by cutting back on the maintenance of court buildings. These have been false economies and chickens are coming home to roost.
A bucket to catch the drips is no alternative to repairing the roof. A Treasury grant of £30 million pounds has been agreed for each of the next two years for emergency building work. I must warn that I fear that this will not be enough.
What are the challenges for the future? Reigning in the cost of criminal legal aid, which has been unbalancing the whole of the DCA budget, and the implementation of Lord Carter’s proposals.
Reducing delays in both the Crown Court and the Magistrates Court. Sorting out sentencing, so that we have a simpler and more transparent regime; cutting the cost of civil litigation and finding new means of funding this, so that there really is access to justice; welding the family jurisdiction into a single, efficient, integrated court. Judges have a part to play in these endeavours, and you can be confident, my Lord Mayor, that we shall play it.
More confident, perhaps, than the litigant in person before Lord Justice Brooke who, when he reached for the White Book said “ere, I want a real judge, not one what ’as to look up the law”.
Meanwhile, my Lord Mayor, you and the Lady Mayoress have been advancing the interests of this country and the City at home and abroad. The delight that your company has brought to so many you have shared with us this evening. On behalf of all your guests may I thank-you for your generous hospitality.
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