Judges will receive a 3% pay rise for 2022/23, the government has announced – but the increase is significantly below the current 9.4% rate of inflation and less than that recommended by the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB).

Lord chancellor Dominic Raab said yesterday that a 3% rise, combined with a commitment to introduce a new judicial pension scheme, ‘demonstrates the value the government places on our independent judiciary’.

However, the SSRB this month called for a 3.5% increase for all judicial office holders, saying it is ‘concerned about the continuing shortfalls in recruitment, mainly for the court-based judiciary in England and Wales and particularly for the district (civil) bench’.

‘All those joining the judiciary do so from an external labour market of mostly highly paid individuals – barristers, advocates, solicitors, or more rarely academics – who are already well-established in their careers,’ the SSRB said.

‘They need to be positively attracted to leave their existing careers to apply to become judges. We believe the changes to the judicial pension scheme which took effect in April will help to address the recruitment difficulties but we are not convinced that they will be sufficient to fully resolve them.

‘We therefore gave serious consideration to recommending a pay increase higher than 3.5% for the judiciary. However, in the end we did not do so because of new information about improved High Court recruitment and uncertainty about how far the new pension scheme’s benefits are understood by prospective applicants.’

Raab said in a written statement to parliament that, while the government ‘values the independent expertise and insight of the SSRB’, he intends to ‘reject the SSRB’s recommendation and propose a 3% pay award for all judicial office holders within the remit group for 2022/23’. ‘This ensures that the judiciary are not receiving a pay award in excess of what is on offer to court staff and senior civil servants,’ he added.

In December, the government asked the SSRB to review judicial pay following a Covid-related pause on the work, having awarded judges a 2% pay rise in July 2020 for their frontline work during the pandemic.

 

This article is now closed for comment.