Lord Beecham – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Beecham on 2015-11-09.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what efforts they have made to promote diversity in the composition of the judiciary by reference to (1) socio-economic status, (2) ethnicity, (3) gender, and (4) age.

Lord Faulks

The Government fully supports a more diverse judiciary and has taken steps to improve representation, whilst still appointing the best people for the job.

In Courts and Tribunals the representation of women has risen to 32.3% of the judiciary, compared to 28.8% in 2012. Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) representation has risen to 7.4 % from 6.8% over the same period.

The Government works with its partners in the judiciary, the Judicial Appointments Commission and the legal professions through the Judicial Diversity Forum to take action to increase the diversity of the judiciary at all levels.

Recent initiatives include:

• Supporting the judiciary in the implementation of the ‘New Route to the High Court’ scheme. This offered high quality candidates support to apply for a Deputy High Court Judge selection exercise launched in July 2015. As this programme was aimed at encouraging diversity, places on this support scheme were limited to women, BAME candidates and those from low socio-economic backgrounds.
• Holding outreach events, targeted at under-represented groups, such as ‘Women in the Judiciary: Making it happen’.

This work builds on significant legislative changes which:

• Introduced the equal merit provision into the final stage of the judicial appointments process, which allows diversity, in terms of gender and ethnicity, to be taken into account when two applicants are of equal merit. This has already been applied in seven JAC recommendations between October 2014 and March 2015;
• Extended salaried part-time working to the High Court and above to increase flexibility and make it easier to balance home and work life; and
• Introduced a statutory duty for the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice to encourage judicial diversity.