Judicial Review and Courts Bill

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. My support comes from my experience as a magistrate, and I appreciate the endorsements of the role of the magistrate from all around the Committee. As those who frequent magistrates’ courts will know, they are places where invariably vulnerable and some other defendants are simply not able to understand or cope with the requirements of the legal system, as my noble friend Lord Ponsonby described, so effectively they do not have a fair trial. With regard to increasing the powers of magistrates in Clause 13, magistrates too are not experts, and that is partly the point of them. In my view, the safeguards in Amendments 35 and 36 would be very useful against inadvertent injustice.