Workload Of The Lord Chancellor

EDM number 729 in 2002-03, proposed by Austin Mitchell on 12/02/2003.

That this House, seeing that the office of the Lord Chancellor requires the incumbent to function under strain with too heavy a work burden and perform too many roles and carry out too many jobs for any one person, however hard working, brilliant or highly paid, urges the Government to lighten the enormous load by creating a Ministry of Justice with a Minister in the Commons to modernise justice and make the legal system answerable to Parliament, by setting up a new Supreme Court and an independent Judical Appointment Commission to appoint all members of the judiciary, and by making the Lord Chief Justice the non-political head of the judiciary, thus setting the Lord Chancellor free to perform the most demanding job, that of presiding over the House of Lords.

This motion has been signed by a total of 33 MPs.