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Pensions Bill [HL]

My Lords, I have wondered whether to speak on this amendment. First, perhaps, I should apologise to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, and to the Committee for arriving late. I had not appreciated that Amendment 55 was up on the monitor, but I came in as soon as I could. I must declare an interest, not only as a former senior judge but also as someone whose father was a High Court judge, so I have spent my entire legal life in the shadow of the judiciary. I strongly support not only the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, but particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, who made points that are really worth taking into account. It is not so much the senior judiciary—there are probably not more than 110 to 120 of them—as the middle-ranking judiciary who ought to be considered. They labour in the fields, with not particularly generous salaries, as the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, said. I would add to her Queen’s Bench masters the judges of the various tribunals, who are crucial to the administration of justice in the tribunals; the district judges in the magistrates’ courts; and the district judges across the country trying civil and family work. They are a very important part of the judiciary. Many of them accepted a reduction of income. It is not only the top incomes that senior QCs can make that are reduced, as the people taking these middle-ranking posts also earn reasonable incomes. Almost every person who becomes a judge takes a cut in income. People generally become judges because they feel that they ought to be paying back to society what they have gained by being barristers and solicitors. It is an important part of the judiciary that they are there to serve the public. They are a special group of people in the country. They are significantly independent and they have to remain independent to be able to challenge the Government in the courts. The Administrative Court is a thorn in the flesh of every Government, of whichever political persuasion. I believe that there is a book called ““Looking Over Your Shoulder at the Administrative Court””, which trains new civil servants to cope with the slings and arrows of not so much outrageous fortune as the decisions of the Administrative Court. I think that the public and perhaps noble Lords ought to remember that our judiciary is not only significantly independent but significantly incorruptible. Since I have left being a judge, I have been on parliamentary visits to various countries. In one of the eastern European countries that had been under the control of communism, I was told by one of the Ministers that the corruption of their judges was the most worrying part about their efforts to improve their country to meet the requirements of the European Community. My husband was a judge in Kenya at one time, under the ODA system, and I was told by my friends who were in the law in Kenya about the judges whom they knew to be corrupt. Eighteen were sacked at one time and my particular friend said that that was not all who should have been sacked. Very recently I was at one of the IPU meetings here in this building. I was talking about human rights and two Kenyan lawyers got up and said, ““What do we do about the corruption of our judiciary?””. Forgive me for saying this as a former judge—since I no longer sit, I think that I can say it safely—but we are lucky in our judiciary. What the Government are proposing is in effect to break the contracts of the existing judiciary by substituting something else by statute. I am well aware that everyone in the pensions system is going to suffer and I well understand people asking why the judiciary should be immune from the suffering of the public. So far as the future is concerned, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, said, I express no view. It may well be entirely appropriate that the judiciary of the future should be asked to make the contributions that it has not been asked to make in the past; if I may say so, the Government ought just to think of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, has made about that. However, breaking the existing contracts of existing judges who have given up their practices as barristers and solicitors to serve the community under a certain arrangement, where you take on that job without making a contribution, is something that the Government ought to think about long and hard. I very much support the amendment.