Jenny Rowe appointed Chief Executive of Supreme Court

Minijust has announced that Jenny Rowe will be the first chief executive of the Supreme Court. Until it opens officially for business in late 2009 she’ll be working with the Law Lords to manage the transition, as well as setting up the court’s systems and recruiting the people needed to support them.

This is a very safe appointment: I knew Jenny Rowe at the Attorney General’s Office, and she’s very much the smooth, reassuring, calm, diplomatic and efficient operator one expects to find in the senior civil service. Having worked with ministers for many years, and with a background in what was the Lord Chancellor’s Department, she’ll have no problem working with the Law Lords and organising the court. It’s hard to quibble with this choice.

Having worked as a lawyer in the civil service myself, though, I came to believe the service needed the input of more outsiders at the top; and I do wonder what effect the appointment of someone who’s very much a civil service insider will have on the personality of the new court, on its ethos, its staff and its attitude to the public. The chief executive will have to motivate staff to make into a reality what should be an inspiring, beacon institution; she’ll also have to fight for resources and manage them in a way that delivers absolute legal excellence.

My experience of the civil service generally – and especially of the Attorney General’s Office – was far from that kind of inspiration. The AGO is in many ways a terrific place for a lawyer to work, but when I was there if felt as though there was a war on, and we had to make do and mend. It was a short-term, task-orientated culture where managers were “too busy” to raise their vision and improve systems, or invest in resources, and lawyers were forced to work in sub-optimal ways and with inadequate resources in order to do their jobs. We still made paper submissions to ministers, when other departments did it electronically; the library was embarrassingly under-resourced (I advised on employment law without access to Harvey, the leading employment law encyclopedia – it had been cut before I arrived, and sat on the shelves going steadily out of date); as far as people were concerned, there seemed little time for motivation: no thought seemed to go into lawyers’ careers, or even whether they were doing suitable work for their experience; and the office was far too reliant on temps, some of whom had been there for a long time yet who cannot have felt strong commitment to the office. I don’t blame Jenny Rowe for any of that – but I think the challenge for a civil servant in this new role will be to break completely free of the usual “this will do; it’s how we’ve always done it” mentality that’s often found in Whitehall and in spite of which people manage, somehow, to produce excellence – some of the time at least.

Looking from the outside, one of my touchstones will be openness, as I’ve mentioned before. Fancy logos, poetry and glass doors are all very nice, but beside the point. Will our Supreme Court carry on as the House of Lords does now? Or will we be able to follow proceedings by reading written submissions and same-day (or close) transcripts of hearings? Or even (shock horror) webcasts of hearings, like at the European Court of Human Rights? I think the answers to those questions will tell us a lot.