Law firms should be more supportive of solicitors applying for judicial positions and stop allowing the issue to blight promising careers, the UK’s two senior judges told a House of Lords committee last week.

Supreme Court president Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers and Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge said diversity is at the core of their vision for the judiciary. This encompasses not only more women and ethnic minorities on the bench, but also more solicitors and the skill-sets they bring, they said.

The lord chief justice said he is ‘very sad’ more solicitors do not put themselves forward for selection, but it is ‘not a job I’m giving up on’.

The judges, who were appearing before the House of Lords constitution committee, said balancing the ‘primacy of merit with diversity’ is a major challenge when selecting for judicial posts. Phillips said it is rarely possible to say with certainty that two candidates are of precisely equal merit because ‘different candidates have different attributes’. But if one is ‘jolly good (and) a woman, that is going to help her’. Judge said it would be ‘good to have a 50/50 Supreme Court of men and women judges’.

However, he said that such a balance would need to evolve rather than be imposed, because ‘female judges say it would be completely unacceptable to have a quota system’.

Judge is similarly opposed to quotas around ethnicity, saying the recent appointment of a judge of ‘Indian extraction’ to the High Court [Rabinder Singh] ‘had nothing to do with racial origin, but because he is very good at his job’.

Phillips told the committee that, even after judges were appointed, their work was monitored for consistent merit in a ‘transparent’ way ‘because they give their judgments in public’.

Judge agreed, adding: ‘There are several hundred judges in England and Wales, and some of them will make mistakes or not be up to scratch.’

He explained that when complaints are received about a certain judge, enquiries are made to see if there has been a ‘family catastrophe’ or whether the judge is ill or ‘getting old’. In some cases, the offender is reprimanded or given advice, or steered towards more straightforward cases, such as ‘boys in a punch-up after too much to drink’.

Phillips and Judge agreed ‘wholeheartedly’ with former lord chancellor Baron Irvine of Lairg, who said he was against involving members of parliament in the appointment of judges.