On 24 January 2022, HM Courts and Tribunals Service, the judiciary and the Ministry of Justice launched a £1 million drive to recruit 4,000 new magistrates across England and Wales.
In addition to inputting to its development, the Magistrates’ Association was pleased to publicly endorse the campaign, which specifically seeks to increase the diversity of the bench and reduce the backlog of criminal cases that accrued during the Covid-19 pandemic.
As the only independent voice of the magistracy, we were approached for comment by a range of print and online national, local and specialist publications. Among others, these included: Independent Living, The Daily Mail, The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Register and This is Wiltshire.
Bev Higgs, our National Chair, also appeared in interviews with BBC Radio 4, Talk Radio and Times Radio, while Luke Rigg, the chair of our young magistrates’ network, featured in a related Reasons to be Cheerful podcast.
This flurry of media interest followed the previous week’s array of coverage around magistrates’ increased sentencing powers. It was another very welcome opportunity for us to grow public consciousness of the invaluable work of our members—and of magistrates more broadly—as well as to debunk harmful myths about the magistracy.
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