Government legal panels lacking diversity, Bar Council says

Government legal panels lack diversity and so hold back the career progression of barristers from ethnic minorities, the Bar Council has said.

It said in Government legal panels: an analysis of membership by ethnicity and sex that 3,267 barristers - equivalent to 24% of the self-employed bar - were on such panels.

They include the Attorney General’s civil panels, Treasury Counsel, Serious Fraud Office counsel panels, and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advocate panels.

The Bar Council noted: “They are seen as a crucial stepping-stone in establishing a successful career as a barrister and are a key marker of career progression for self-employed barristers.”

It said many Government panels failed to record the ethnicity and sex of members, so the Bar Council had done this through data matching the publicly available lists of panel members with its membership records.

This exercise showed “an unmistakable lack of ethnic diversity across the panels” at both junior and KC level, with members being “disproportionately white”.

Matters became even worse at higher levels, where only three out 77 panel silks were from ethnic minority backgrounds even though barristers at the bar overall were “largely representative of the ethnic composition of the population in England and Wales’.

The Bar Council could not identify any black barristers or Asian women barristers on any of the KC panels, and only a very few Asian men were present.

White women were over-represented at KC level, making up more than a quarter of silks, but did not always get equal access to the best quality work available.

Chair of the bar Mark Fenhalls KC said: “The findings of this report act as a stark reminder that work still needs to be done to ensure equality of opportunity at the bar.

“Government legal panels have a key role to play to ensure that career advancement is open to all.” 

He said the Bar Council’s work with the CPS had seen effective work underway to address the disparity between men and women at senior levels, “and we are keen to see this good practice on diversity spread across all government panels”.

The Bar Council said it had engaged with the Government on the report findings and how to improve recruitment, and had asked it to immediately commit to monitoring panel selection, work allocation and income by protected characteristics and to publish the results within the coming year.

A Government Legal Department spokesperson said: “We are grateful to the Bar Council for its work on the make-up of government panels.

“We are committed to continuing to work closely with the Bar Council and the wider bar as part of our longstanding commitment to diversity in the legal profession.”

Mark Smulian