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Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [HL]

If you are a recorder or assistant recorder, in either case you are not called ““judge”” as such, but in court you are referred to as ““judge””. Here we seem to have the opposite situation, with legal members in tribunals who will be designated as ““judges”” but not actually referred to as ““judges””, so the situation is exactly the reverse of the one to which the noble Lord refers. I have two reasons why designating legalmembers of tribunals as ““judges”” is inappropriate. The first is that, as the noble Baroness knows, under paragraph 1(2)(d) of Schedule 2, certain people can be designated as judges by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor who have no defined legal qualifications in the Bill. Moreover, it is not clear either from the Bill or from anything said so far, either in guidance or on the Floor of the House, what criteria he will apply in designating that class of person as a judge. Perhaps my most important concern is to do with the fact that the Government spent almost a year preparing and then making sure of the passage of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 through Parliament. The key principle behind that Act was the notion of separation of powers—that the process of judicial selection should be entirely free of the Executive. In pursuit of that objective, the Government established a Judicial Appointments Commission that has, asI understand it, the exclusive right to appoint individuals called judges. Yet in the Bill we find a member of the Executive—the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor—designating individuals as judges, in complete contravention of all the principles that underlay the Act. How can a member of the Executive appoint a judge when that plainly breaches the principle of the separation of powers to which the Government claim to be so attached? If tribunals are to play the kind of role that Lord Justice Leggatt rightly foresaw in his report, they ought to have a large degree of informality. Introducing a judicial notion into their work gives entirely the wrong impression to the users, and I hope that the Committee will support my amendment. I beg to move.