To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many complaints about the judiciary were received by his Department and its predecessors in each of the last five years. (180907)

The Office for Judicial Complaints (OJC) was established in April 2006 replacing its predecessor the Judicial Correspondence Unit (JCU). The OJC was created by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and handles complaints about the alleged personal misconduct of judicial office holders in accordance with the provisions of the Judicial Discipline (Prescribed Procedures) Regulations 2006.

Unlike the OJC, the statistics for the JCU do not distinguish between inquiries and complaints, nor do they include data on complaints against tribunal members or lay magistrates. In addition, complaints received by the JCU were recorded by calendar year, whereas complaints received by the OJC are recorded by financial year in order to tie in with the business planning and resource cycles. Direct comparison between JCU and OJC statistics are therefore not possible.

The first table details the number of complaints and inquiries received by the JCU for each year from 2002 to 2005. The second table details the number of complaints received by the OJC during financial year 2006-07.

A further 246 complaints were received by the JCU between January and April 2006.