I have a friend who applied to become a magistrate more than two years ago. He filled in the form and waited and waited. Eight months after applying he was offered an interview online at short notice. He dropped everything and did the interview online from home. He had two screens (a luxury not available to many applicants!) so could do the interview on one and, concurrently, look up relevant information on the other. Three months later he learnt that he’d passed the interview. Ten months later he learnt that his appointment had been approved by the Senior Presiding Judge. Two years and four months after he filled in the application form he will start sitting as a magistrate. So long… even though he chased the recruiters at every stage. Even though the formal training takes only three days.

Let’s hope the powers that be are improving the process, otherwise they will never recruit enough magistrates. We have a significant backlog in the magistrates’ courts now. And magistrates are in such short supply that they regularly sit as two rather than three. Our volunteer courtwatchers recently observed the London magistrates’ courts. In 1,660 hearings where magistrates (rather than district judges) presided, 15% had only two magistrates on the bench rather than three. This is not ideal – magistrates should sit as three in case there is no consensus and it needs to go to a majority decision. But there aren’t enough magistrates and the wheels of justice need to keep turning.

The push for more magistrates and the way they are recruited has had little attention. But it’s an important role and the recruitment system should work better. Three years ago there was a big campaign to recruit more magistrates. The government paid for recruitment advertising and revamped the website. Over 33,000 people registered their interest in the role. Less than one in five people who registered interest filled in the application form. One new innovation and one old institution prevented the recruitment drive being nearly as successful as it should have been, either in overall numbers or the diversity of those recruited. 

The unchanged bit of the system is the recruiters. Recruitment is organised by organisations called advisory committees. Despite being non departmental public bodies they are opaque. How do they operate? Who sits on them? No information is online. Transform Justice has previously called for the abolition of advisory committees. The length of time the committees are taking to recruit suggests they are not fit for purpose and should either undergo significant reform, or be got rid of. Could someone at least review how they work?

The new bit of the recruitment process introduced three years ago was a new application form and interview. Early on, a whistleblower who was interviewing prospective magistrates under the new system contacted me. He was concerned the process was biased in favour of middle class applicants. The system was based on a set of competencies – as many professional jobs are. People who applied had to provide evidence they met these competencies both in the form and in the interview. My whistleblower said professionals and managers knew the rules of the “game” and so played it better.

Lo and behold, when the first statistics on successful applications were published, the recruitment process turned out to be both biased in favour of middle class applicants and biased against applicants from ethnic minorities. This was a disaster given the magistracy was already dominated by White, middle class people. It’s not clear how, or if, the government and judiciary have tweaked the process. The most recent stats on diversity show a slight improvement, but there still seems to be some bias. In 2024/5 White applicants had a better success rate than Asian or Black applicants, applicants in professional roles had a better success rate than those in working class occupations, and those who had attended private school had a better success rate than those who went to state school. 

And good applicants are still being rejected. One of our most dedicated courtwatchers (who would have made a great magistrate) applied and was knocked back. She struggled with the competency questions in the interview because she’s been a stay at home mum for many years and the examples she was asked for just didn’t fit with her life, e.g. an instance of when she had handled conflict between two colleagues/people in her team. I’m now wary of encouraging anyone to apply to be a magistrate, so onerous is the process. Let’s hope that radical reform of recruitment is on the cards.