Sir Terence Etherton, a senior judge who serves as chancellor of the High Court, has criticised the way in which the time of the higher courts and most qualified judges is being wasted. According to Sir Terence, the higher courts are having to handle a large volume of comparatively minor hearings that could actually be dealt with perfectly well in the lower levels of the court system.
Etherton called for greater amounts of investment in courts at lower levels, most particularly at the level of county courts, to enabled greater amounts of work to be filtered down to them.
Speaking to a London conference held earlier this week, Sir Terence said that judges the High Court and the Court of Appeal, in particular, were having to spend their time dealing with cases which could have been handled fully and competently by a lower court. However, while lower courts are perfectly well-equipped to handle those cases in principle they do not currently have the ability to deal with the full volumes in practice. Devolving matters from higher courts to lower ones would therefore involve both judicial and administrative investment, Etherton said.
“A High Court judge,” Etherton told the conference, “is a valuable and expensive commodity; even more so a judge of the Court of Appeal.” Yet, he said, much of the work handled by Court of Appeal judges involves dealing with applications for permission to appeal, both on paper and online. This, along with some of the work that falls at the feet of High Court judges, means they must waste time and energy on matters that “do not warrant their level of expertise.”
He concluded: “It is wasteful, inefficient and costly to deploy a higher level of judge than the case requires.”
Sir Terence’s criticisms are somewhat timely. This very week, the levels of “waste and inefficiency” that are “inherent” in the UK’s justice system came under fire from Michael Gove, who was appointed Lord Chancellor following the recent election. There is, Gove contended, “overwhelming” reason to bring about reform.
Etherton also claimed that improving the efficiency of the UK’s court systems could prove vital for the domestic economy. For commercial cases, he said, the UK was facing growing levels of competition from the likes of Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore and New York.
He said that considerations such as “Cost-effectiveness and efficiency… may be decisive in attracting business and financial international work, which creates considerable wealth in this country, not just for lawyers but for allied professions, including accountants and actuaries, and the financial sector.”
