In the courts’ robing rooms, where solicitor advocates rub shoulders with their barrister colleagues, the battle lines are being clearly drawn. In the same report, Helene Richman Pines, chair of the Association of Women Barristers, said the present QC system was unfair because it was based on secret soundings. In its place they suggest prospective judges should be selected on the basis of aptitude tests and written law exams.Eileen Pembridge, who signed the report on behalf of the Law Society’s equal opportunities committee, said much more needed to be done to help women and ethnic minority lawyers who want to become judges. Society president Robert Sayer said solicitors were no longer prepared to participate in a system which he described as having “all the elements of an old-boys’ network”.Since then a joint working group, administered by staff from the Lord Chancellor’s Department and comprising senior lawyers from the Law Society and the Bar, has recommended the scrapping of secret soundings altogether. And while there are many influential lawyers who favour radical change, Lord Irvine is not thought to be one of them.Next week the Law Society will attempt to raise the temperature by hosting a public debate on the controversial and emotively dubbed “secret soundings” – the system where judges, barristers and solicitors are discreetly consulted on the suitability of candidates for judicial posts and the rank of QC.In the summer the Law Society incurred Lord Irvine’s wrath by launching a boycott of all secret soundings. The question is whether it will amount to a cosmetic tinkering or a root and branch overhaul.Much depends on what Lord Irvine considers will be sufficient to answer the growing number of critics of the present system.

Next month Sir Leonard Peach will present the Lord Chancellor with recommendations for improving the current system for appointing judges.
It has already been reported, but not confirmed, that Sir Leonard favours the creation of an independent judicial watchdog to oversee all appointments. And even the Bar, from where the vast majority of senior judges are drawn, has conceded the need for change Some reform now seems inevitable. Judges and their absurd pronouncements provided a rich vein of surreal humour for John Cleese and friends. But no matter how out of touch the judiciary were portrayed as being, no one at the time really thought there might be a better way of selecting them

Times have changed. But then we are told that everything is cash-limited and needs to be rationalised It just doesn’t add up.”. Thirty years ago the only group seriously interested in provoking a debate on the future of the judicial appointments system seemed to be the Monty Python team. “We are supposed to represent local people and have local knowledge.

Mrs Evans believes the LCD is not concerned with the need to provide a local service for local people. It also recommends that the MCC takes into account “distances and public transport considerations in relation to ease of access to the courthouse, or any alternative courthouse, to the public”. These are only guidelines and MCCs are not required to comply with them when considering a court closure.The LCD justifies closures on the basis that although magistrates should ideally live or work locally, this does not mean that each community will have its own courthouse. Every committee is dependent for 80 per cent of its funding from the Government, with the rest from the local authority.The LCD says it is for the MCC to decide how to spend its funding.

The Central Council of Magistrates’ Courts Committees – which represents the 84 MCCs in England and Wales – recommends that committees ensure “that the gains overall outweigh the inevitable losses to the community near to the closed court”. A spokesman said that the Lord Chancellor only becomes involved in the event of an appeal.Crispin Moor, Rural Officer for the LGA, agrees that MCCs (which are made up of about 12 local magistrates) are ostensibly responsible for court closures. But says “they are caught between a rock and a hard place because they have to operate within the resource constraints set by the Lord Chancellor’s Department”. Additional travel and time costs are created for the public and public officials like the police and probation officers.”But according to the LCD, it has no responsibility for court closures. It says this falls to the Magistrates’ Courts Committees, after local consultation with the paying authority. He argues: “Centralisation of court provision into regional centres is not only harming rural communities, it is also a false economy. Not surprisingly, the LGA has started a campaign to fight the closures – there were about 21 in the year to 31 March 1999 – and the resultant regionalisation of magistrates’ courts.Cllr Gordon Keymer, chairman of the LGA’s Rural Commission, accuses the Lord Chancellor of taking a narrow view of his responsibilities to provide equal access to justice for everyone.