Judges are unhappy and we should be too

A report commissioned by the senior judiciary has starkly demonstrated that morale among judges is in decline across the country. The Judicial Institute at University College London conducted a survey of judges across all three UK jurisdictions, finding that 57% believe that government policy changes have brought the judiciary to breaking point, while 62% felt that judges are less respected by society than they were 10 years ago. The vast majority of judges also felt that the media does not value their role in society, while only 2% feel valued by the government.

The perceived lack of respect and constant – arguably callous – changes in government policy have combined with a real-terms decrease in pay to create a situation where the majority of judges would discourage lawyers from seeking to join the judiciary. In his analysis of the survey in The Guardian, Joshua Rozenberg argues that unless declining morale is arrested with – firstly – better pay, we face a future of poorer-quality judges resulting in an inferior justice system.

The president of the Supreme Court, Lord Neuberger, has played down the significance of the judiciary’s lack of appreciation from the government, rightly pointing out that it is not judges’ job to be friends with parliament: “If you told me that 98% of judges felt valued by the government I would be worried, because I don’t think the function of the judiciary is to make the government feel comfortable.” However, as Neuberger would no doubt himself acknowledge, feeling undervalued is far from the only problem beleaguering the justice system from top to bottom right now (which, to reiterate, the majority of judges feel is at “breaking point”) – it is arguably just a symptomatic result of a wider and more dangerous malaise in both government and society.

The narratives of austerity and disconnected apathy among many of the electorate are fuelling acceptance of a focus solely on the statistical bottom line at the expense of discernible value. For evidence that this is unhealthy, see, for example, Lady Justice Black’s recent frustration at an unrepresented divorce case sucking up the time and resources of her court, which not only raised her concern that justice would be miscarried, but may also have cost more money than that saved by the legal aid cuts which denied the husband in the case access to a lawyer in the first place. And to illustrate the point more widely, take a look at this week’s Burning Question, which while informative in its analysis of how deregulation and tax cuts for corporations have encouraged economic growth, is representative of an unquestioning focus on the numbers which fails to account for other important questions, such as where this growth will manifest itself – will it be in the pockets of corporate employees working for less than the living wage and workers trapped in zero-hours contracts, or those of the tiny elite who employ them? We hear of the importance of the United Kingdom staying competitive in the international economic race, but who are the winners? We are also told by the Ministry of Justice that sweeping costs savings must be made in the justice system and that this will save the money of hardworking taxpayers, but if the cuts are creating a dysfunctional system that denies justice to those same hardworking taxpayers while actually haemorrhaging money elsewhere, then who is benefitting? People need wages on which they can live and a justice system on which they can rely – requirements which remain essential regardless of any necessity for economic growth and which, despite figures currently telling us that the economy is growing, are not being met.

Some 97% of judges in the survey stated their belief in the importance of their role in society and they are right, so rather than pour scorn on their concerns – even those, as well-off senior professionals, about pay – it is time to start thinking about the value of having the systems that society needs actually working properly, in addition to the bottom line.