How to… access data for barristers and judges
Barristers
It can be helpful to start conversations early. When preparing the grant application, Natasha had liaised with the Bar Standards Board (BSB) to establish whether they would be willing (and had the capacity) to engage with us on the project and, if they were able to help, who would be the key points of contact for us. The result of these early conversations was positive, and they proved essential for helping us to hit the ground running when it eventually came to working with BSB on data collection for the project.
As Emma explains here, the first regulator we approached for data was the General Medical Council (GMC). Off the back of Emma’s successful conversations with the GMC, Nate designed a template to enable standardized quantitative data collection across the professions to facilitate comparative analysis. Over several months, Nate and I met with colleagues from the BSB to establish what data they held and how the template could be populated or edited to reflect this. Once we had a tailored version of the template, they very kindly populated it with anonymised aggregate data and sent it over to us.
In addition to the BSB, we also approached the Bar Tribunals & Adjudication Service (BTAS), an independent team responsible for appointing and administering disciplinary tribunals for barristers. Although they could not provide us with quantitative data (due to comparatively small caseloads and strict publication policies), they were pivotal in helping me to virtually attend and observe a sexual misconduct hearing (more on that in a future blog).
It is worth flagging that not all cases of sexual misconduct will make their way to the BSB (and eventually BTAS). There are multiple avenues for making a complaint about sexual misconduct at the Bar including, but not limited to, through chambers, the Bar Council or the Inns of Court (see the report from the independent review of bullying, harassment and sexual harassment at the Bar for an overview). However, in England and Wales alone, there are over 400 sets of chambers that have more than 1 self-employed barrister. There are also well documented barriers to reporting sexual misconduct (also detailed in the independent review). As a result, returns on count data for some of the fields in the BSB template are small, which has required careful and ongoing conversations as a team about aggregation and suppression for variables with low counts.
Judges
Accessing data on judicial sexual misconduct has proven more challenging. As with all the other regulators, we began by reaching out to the Judicial Conduct Investigation Office (JCIO), the statutory body responsible for managing judicial discipline. We were advised that, “sharing such information under Section 139 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which states that information about judicial disciplinary cases relating to an identified or identifiable individual is confidential and must not be disclosed without lawful authority” (quote from personal communications with the JCIO). It is also important to note that the JCIO does not fall into the category of a ‘public body’ as defined by section 3 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. As such the JCIO is under no obligation to disclose information requested under a Freedom of Information request.
Following email exchanges with JCIO staff, we were provided with a high-level table detailing the number of sexual misconduct complaints that fell into the ‘Inappropriate behaviour/comments’ category per year since 2018. The numbers are extremely small. In addition, the JCIO publishes an annual report in which they detail the number of complaints received according to different categories. However, the misconduct categories are high level and, although changes made in 2023 brought about new category types (including bullying and/or harassment), there is still no way of establishing the number of cases that relate explicitly to sexual misconduct other than by conducting searches of material in the public domain (i.e. media reports and disciplinary statements). We note too that in our discussions with people working within the profession, judicial bullying (non-sexualised), is the more known concern. In summary, official published information on sexual misconduct by judges in the UK is largely absent.
© Hannah Richards for the Powerful Perpetrators project, 2026.