JAC: more delays

Meanwhile, who’s in charge?

There has been a further delay in the justice secretary’s search for someone to chair the Judicial Appointments Commission as it faces the most demanding year in its history. What David Lammy called “this exciting, vital and challenging role” has now been vacant for a month because ministers failed to find anyone last year who could take it on.

On 19 December, Lammy told the Commons justice committee he hoped to launch a recruitment campaign in January. “We plan to hold the sift in February,” he said, “with interviews in March.”

The post was indeed advertised on the last working day of January. But the sift has slipped from February to mid-March and interviews have slipped from March to mid-April. Even that’s not guaranteed: these dates are “only an estimate”, the government said on Friday, “and can change”.

Lammy told MPs in December that he had decided to engage recruitment consultants. Confusingly, it was announced last week that the appointment process would be led by the Ministry of Justice public appointments team. A recruitment firm called Russell Reynolds Associates said it had been retained by the Judicial Appointments Commission to advise on the appointment. However, the government said that Russell Reynolds Associates would be working for ministers by assisting the advisory assessment panel.

Vice-chair

Lammy said in December that

until a new chair is appointed, the Rt Hon Lord Justice Warby — the vice-chair — will undertake the chair’s duties, save that the lay commissioners will carry out those duties that it would not be appropriate for the vice-chair, as a judicial commissioner, to undertake.

But Warby’s three-year term of office comes to an end on 31 May. If interviews for the chair are not going to be held until mid-April, it is unlikely that the new chair will have much of a handover period with the vice-chair. That’s because the chair cannot be appointed until the preferred candidate has satisfied “baseline personnel security standard checks in line with the civil service guidelines” and has appeared before the Commons justice committee.

Even a short handover period depends on two further assumptions.

The first is that the new chair can rapidly clear three days a week from the busy diary that anyone worth appointing is likely to have. It seems to me that whoever takes over is unlikely to start until later in the summer.

The second assumption is that Warby does not step down early. No doubt Lammy would want him to stay in post beyond May. Why, then, would the vice-chair leave before his term is over?

Warby’s immediate predecessor was appointed vice-chair in August 2020. Instead of serving for three full years, she stepped down in January 2023 to apply for promotion. In June of that year, it was announced that Dame Sue Carr was to become lady chief justice.

Another of Warby’s predecessors was appointed vice-chair in 2015. His name also disappeared from the list of commissioners before his term was due to end. In July 2017 it was announced that Sir Ian Burnett was to become lord chief justice.

As it happens, chief justice is one of the few senior jobs that is not falling vacant this year. But others are. I have not asked Warby if he has any plans to seek promotion and I would not expect him to tell me if he had. He might not have made his mind up yet, given the vacancies that will arise when other posts are filled.

But it would be rash of Lammy to assume that Warby will not be throwing his wig into the ring at some point. It’s not the judges’ fault that ministers have failed to fill a vacancy that they have known about for more than a year.