A recent wheeze from the MoJ's Department of Bright Ideas was a corker, even by their standards. Magistrates' appointments were to be limited to ten years in an effort to improve diversity on the bench. After ten years we were to be eased into some worthy but useless positions in the 'community', whatever that is.
It is a great strength of the magistracy that benches of three usually cover a range of experience, with a seasoned chairman and wingers who may just prefer not to chair, or who are new to the job (and thus more up-to-date in their training). If you took away all of the old sweats the quality of benches would be irreparably damaged.
The grapevine now tells me that the idea has been quietly shelved as too difficult. Unfortunately there will be similar stuff to come, as the MoJ seeks to reinforce its micro-managing control obsession.
Musings and Snippets from a recently retired JP. I served for 31 years, mostly in west London. I was Chairman of my Bench for some years, and a member of the National Bench Chairmen's Forum All cases are based on real ones, but anonymised and composited. All opinions are those of one or more individuals. JPs swear to enforce the law of the land, whether or not they approve of it. Nothing on here constitutes legal advice.
Wasn't the MoJ, apparently. A Bench with a declining workload thought this the solution. How they arrived at this conclusion, is unclear..
ReplyDeleteQuietly shelved. Really? When I was at court today one of my colleagues was saying that what is patently an absurd idea looked to be gaining ground and we were urged to write to our MP's to explain just how ridiculous it is.
ReplyDeleteA good job we don't guess like this in Court. It was Policy Exchange who came up with the idea and we have persistently been rubbishing the idea ever since. They will still consult on it, but the legs it might have had have run out of puff. Londonjp clearly got the wrong end of the stick again.
ReplyDeleteLook for the word "apparently" - always means someone in a pub told you and always means it's wrong.
@ Anonymous - thanks for making assumptions that aren't correct. My bench chairman told me (in writing) that's where it had come from. I, like my others in my bench, contributed to a response to the proposal and our response was so negative that the chair felt as it they had to respond to us. My use of 'apparently' was because this is what I was officially told. So I didn't get the wrong end of the stick (again?) just relayed what had been officially communicated to me again by our very decent and informed chair
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