Fancy a change of courtrooms and countries? Looks like the UK may be on a recruitment drive in the
colonies. Best you check out their Ts and Cs first!!
Jonathan Ames, Legal Editor
Tuesday February 07 2023, 9.45pm GMT, The Times
Lord Burnett of Maldon revealed that low recruitment of judges led to a backlog of 63,000 cases by the end of last year.
Crown courts are losing more than 3,000 days every year on average owing to a lack of judges, the country’s most senior judge has revealed.
Lord Burnett of Maldon, the lord chief justice, said that a crisis in judicial recruitment was exacerbating the backlog of cases in the higher criminal courts of England and Wales.
He said at his annual meeting with reporters that the last round of recruitment for circuit judges had resulted in a shortfall of 16 for the crown courts.
Burnett said that crown court judges sit on average 200 days each. That translates to 3,200 court days a year when criminal cases could be heard but are not.
The backlog in the crown courts rose significantly during the coronavirus pandemic because of social distancing restrictions imposed during a succession of lockdowns.
Before the health crisis, the backlog stood at about 40,000 — but it shot up to about 63,000 by the end of last year, with some of that rise also attributed to a strike by criminal defence barristers over legal aid rates.
That strike was settled in September when ministers agreed to a 15 per cent pay rise. Burnett said that the senior judiciary and the Ministry of Justice were attempting to boost judicial recruitment.
Officials have encouraged lawyers who are part-time judges — known as recorders — to increase their availability. They have also authorised several recently retired crown court judges to sit in retirement.
Burnett said that for the first time, officials were taking advantage of a statutory provision that allows district judges from the magistrates’ court to try cases in the senior criminal courts.
Burnett acknowledged that a deterioration in working conditions had significantly deterred lawyers from applying to join the bench. Reports of crumbling court buildings have for some time been cited as a cause for low morale among the judiciary and the reluctance of barristers and solicitors to apply for judicial posts.
“Although not every lawyer’s office is palatial by any means,” the lord chief justice said, “generally speaking when things go wrong they get mended. There are not buckets catching water, when carpets become frayed and fall apart they do not just put duct tape on them, and so forth. So it is one of the factors which we consider is inhibiting some people from becoming salaried judges.”
The lord chief justice said that another recruitment drive was continuing. “It is obviously not possible for me to predict precisely how that will turn out, but I hope that it will do better than last year,” he said.