Video 2.2 What is the Supreme Court?

Hello, I'm Stacey Dooley and I am here today in London to find out a bit about the highest court in the land, it’s called the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Well here we are. The building has been here for a 100 years but the court itself is actually quite new. The guys who are now sat in there used to be based over the other side of Parliament Square in the House of Lords.

The Supreme Court is the highest court of appeal for all civil cases in the whole of the UK and for all criminal ones except for those in Scotland. It used to sit in the Houses of Parliament and the country's top judges - known as Law Lords – not only presided over the cases there but will also members of the House of Lords. But why was it necessary to move everything over here? To find out why, I'm going to ask one of the Supreme Court justices, Lord Kerr.

[Stacey] So why was the Supreme Court established as a separate entity? [Lord Kerr] Well fundamental principle of separation of powers is a cornerstone of our constitution. What that means is that there should be a division of responsibility between those who make the laws and those who are responsible, like me, for adjudicating on difficult points of law. And the Constitution Reform Act of 2005 by establishing the Supreme Court made that expressly clear.

[Stacey] The old Middlesex Guild Hall building was chosen for the new site and eventually the new Supreme Court of the UK opened in October 2009. As a result the Law Lords became Supreme Court Justices. And I will do right to all manner of people after the laws and usages of this realm. When the Law Lords sat in the House of Lords, it wasn’t very accessible to the public. It was pretty difficult to help people get their heads around what actually went on there. And as a result, very few people ever sat in the public galleries. I wonder if things have changed with the move here.

[Lord Kerr] Working in the House of Lords was super in many ways, but here the working conditions are much better. We have much more space for our staff, perhaps more importantly even than that is that we are much more accessible to the public. We have lots of visitors. We have a very good exhibition centre, we have extraordinarily good reception staff, they explain to their visitors what's happening in the court that day, they conduct tours, and generally, we find we are a very popular tourist attraction.

[Stacey] I don’t know what I expected before I came here, probably that it was all going to feel a bit unfriendly and imposing but being here you really don’t get that feeling at all. What you do notice though is that the courts here don’t look anything like the courts we used to seeing on the telly. So how does it all work here?

For a case to be heard here it needs to have gone through a whole loads of different stages before it reaches the Supreme Court. A typical civil or criminal case in England or Wales might go through three other courts before it reaches the Supreme Court. A case from Northern Ireland will go through different stages within their legal system. As will cases from Scotland, although the criminal cases from Scotland can only reach this court in certain circumstances. The High Court of the Justiciary is usually Scotland's highest for criminal matters. The judges here also serve as the highest court of appeal for a whole loads of other countries in the Commonwealth and for British overseas territories when they sit at something called the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

This used to be something the Law Lords did as well as sitting in the House of Lords and it used to be at Downing Street. So when the Supreme Court was set up here it made sense to bring the judicial committee over so they could work alongside it and they are now based here, in courtroom 3.

Only certain cases make it as far as the Supreme Court. To do so, they must address a wider issue with importance to society. This could be clearly seen in some of the most high profile cases to find their way to the House of Lords, or more recently, to the Supreme Court.

I've come to meet Lady Hale, another of the Supreme Court justices and the first woman to be appointed to the role to find out a bit more about how the court works.

[Lady Hale] Well we’re an appeal court. That means that we don't hear the witnesses, we don't decide who's telling the truth, we don't decide what the facts are. The parties come to us with a set of facts and they ask us what the law is. We only choose to have the cases which involve general points of law, which are important to a large number of the population. For example, we were hearing a case which is all about what responsibilities the Ministry of Defence owes to the soldiers fighting in Iraq, for the equipment that they sent them out to fight with. What could be more important than that?

[Stacey] And why are these points of law so, so important?

[Lady Hale] Well once we have decided what the law is, then everybody else has to follow it. So, the case about the army it comes up to us, we decide what the responsibilities of the government, if any, are. It then goes back to the trial judge, who will apply what we have said, when he comes to decide the case. But not only that case, every other case, that raises the same point, the judges in the courts below us, have to do what we have said the law is. It's called, The Doctrine of Precedent.

[Stacey] I wonder if how the Supreme Court works affects the lay out of the court rooms which looks very different from what you might expect them to.

[Lady Hale] You’ll see there isn't a witness box, there isn't a jury box, there isn't even a press box because anybody can come in and sit at the back and listen to what we're doing, we are all round a table, so the justices are in a curve on one side and the barristers and the other lawyers and the parties they represent in a curve on the other side. And we try and make it feel like a general discussion of these very important issues.