And so to Parliament Square, for the publication of the annual report of the Supreme Court and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

The UK’s highest court has plenty of metrics on which to measure improving performance, not least a pleasing reduction in paper consumption: down by 90% over the past six years, the report claims.

Back in 2018, the court gorged its way through 1,592 reams (that’s 31,840 quires, in old money) of paper. By 2020, that had fallen to 534. After bottoming out at just 130 in 2022, the figure seems to be creeping up again: the report records a consumption of 178 in 2023.

One reason may be the court’s continuing inability to offer parties’ skeleton arguments online. We would have thought that a fairly basic website function in the 2020s, but the report reveals it ‘has not been possible to achieve without a change in the court rules’.

This goal has been set back to next year.

Ah well, the report reveals that the court’s water consumption was down by 8% last year and production of landfill waste has fallen to zero.

Topics