Criminal Court Reform

With your permission, Mr Speaker I will make a statement on criminal court reform.

As the House is aware, the first part of the independent review of criminal courts was published in July. I am grateful to its chair, Sir Brian Leveson—one of the foremost judges of his generation—and to his expert advisers, Professor David Ormerod, Chris Mayer and Shaun McNally. In this review, Sir Brian has produced a blueprint for once-in-a-generation court reform. That is desperately needed, because the Government inherited an emergency in our courts: a record and rising backlog currently at 78,000 cases, and victims face agonising delays, with some trials not listed for years. All the while, defendants bide their time. The guilty plea rate has decreased every year since the year 2000. In the year to June, 11,000 cases were dropped after a charge because victims no longer supported or felt they could support the case.

Behind the statistics are real people. Katie was repeatedly abused by her partner. She reported him to the police in 2017, but then had an unbearable six-year wait for justice. During that time, she lost a job because her mental health deteriorated. She became increasingly isolated, lived in fear and lost faith in the court system. That is not isolated; it is systemic.

We are all proud of our justice system, rooted in Magna Carta, but we must never forget that it implores us not to

“deny or delay right or justice.”

When victims are left waiting for years, justice is effectively denied to them. That is a betrayal of our legal heritage and of victims themselves. Some will ask why we do not simply increase funding. This Government have already invested heavily in the courts, including nearly £150 million to make them fit for purpose, a commitment of £92 million per year for criminal legal aid solicitors, and funding for a record number of sitting days in our Crown courts—5,000 more than those funded last year by the previous Government.

Today, I can announce up to £34 million per year in additional funding for criminal legal aid advocates, to recognise the vital support that they give to those navigating the system. I will also accept Sir Brian’s recommendation to match-fund a number of pupillages in criminal law, to open a career at the Criminal Bar to more young people from across society. I will also negotiate sitting days with the senior judiciary through the usual concordat process, aiming to give an unprecedented three-year certainty to the system. I am clear that sitting days in the Crown and magistrates courts must continue to rise, and my ambition is to continue breaking records by the end of this Parliament.

However, as Sir Brian has made clear, investment is not enough. The case load is projected to reach 100,000 cases by 2028, and without fundamental change it could keep rising, meaning that justice will be denied to more victims and trust in the system will collapse. To avoid that disaster, I will follow Sir Brian’s bold blueprint for change. First, I will create new “swift courts” within the Crown court, with a judge alone deciding verdicts in triable either-way cases with a likely sentence of three years or less, as Sir Brian recommends. Sir Brian estimates that they will deliver justice at least 20% faster than jury trials. While juries’ deliberations remain confidential, judges provide reasoning for their verdicts in open court, so this will hardwire transparency into our new approach.

Sir Brian also proposes restricting defendants’ right to elect for jury trials—a practice not found widely in other common law jurisdictions, and let us be honest: it is a peculiar way to run a public service. Our world-leading judges should hear the most serious cases, and I agree that they and the magistracy should decide where a case is heard. That will prevent defendants from gaming the system, choosing whichever court they think gives the best chance of success and drawing out the process, hoping victims give up. I will limit appeals from the magistrates courts, so that they are only allowed on points of law, to prevent justice from being delayed further.

Alongside those changes, we will increase magistrates court sentencing powers to 18 months, so that they can take on a greater proportion of lower-level offending and relieve pressure on the Crown court. I will also take a power to extend that to two years, should it become necessary to relieve further pressure. When it comes to exceptionally technical and lengthy fraud and financial trials, judges will be able to sit without a jury where appropriate. While those cases are small in number, they place undue pressure on jurors to sit for months—a significant interference with their personal and professional lives.

These reforms are bold, but they are necessary. I am clear that jury trials will continue to be the cornerstone of the system for the most serious offences—those likely to receive a sentence of over three years and all indictable-only offences. Among others, that will include rape, murder, manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, robbery and arson with intent to kill.

I would like to clear up some misconceptions that colleagues unfamiliar with this area might hold. In England and Wales, magistrates have long done the vast majority of criminal cases. That was true in the Victorian era, right through to Winston Churchill’s time, and today magistrates hear about 90% of criminal cases. In fact, only 3% of trial cases in England and Wales will ever go before a jury, and almost three quarters of all trials going to the Crown court will continue to be heard by one under our changes.

Conservative Members talk about the Crown court as if it were an ancient institution. I should remind them that it was established in 1971—the year before I was born—to replace a patchwork of part-time courts unable to cope with a rising caseload. Parliament acted because the country needed a more efficient system that could command public confidence. We now face an emergency in the courts, and we must act. As Lord Chancellor, my responsibility is to ground reform in the rule of law and the right to a fair trial. We will ensure cases are dealt with at the right level, proportionate to their severity, and deliver the swifter justice victims deserve.

I am also clear that we must future-proof our approach. Technology is changing almost every aspect of our lives, and the courts can be no exception. That means we must modernise. We have asked Sir Brian to write a second report, focused on efficiency and how we can make much better use of technology to deliver the modern and effective courts the public rightly expect.

We will also continue to support victims, to make sure they have the confidence to come forward and see justice through to its conclusion. I announced this week that I will provide multi-year funding for victim support services, including specialist emotional and practical support for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence, and increase budgets to reflect rising costs. That will give providers the certainty to plan for the next three years. It amounts to a total record investment in victim support services of £550 million—more than half a billion. I want those victims to stay the course.

Finally, we must also be honest that this is a problem that has taken years to build up, so it will take years to fix. The changes I am proposing will require legislation, which will take time to implement. Our investment will also need time to have an effect, but we are pulling every possible lever to move in a positive direction, and my ambition for the backlog to start coming down by the end of this Parliament remains. I commend this statement to the House.

I call the shadow Justice Secretary.

I am glad to see that the Justice Secretary has finally come into work today. When 12 prisoners were mistakenly released after the introduction of his brilliant new checks, he did not bother to come to Parliament to inform the country; then, when I asked his Department whether it is paying compensation to terrorists in prison, he did not show up; and when the news of his plans to scrap jury trials mysteriously emerged in the press last week, he was nowhere to be seen. Like the prisoners under his watch, he has been a man on the run—the “Lammy dodger” of this sorry charade of a Government—but today we are blessed with his presence.

His past is catching up with him, because the best opponent of the Justice Secretary’s plans to curb jury trials is the Justice Secretary himself. In 2020, he said:

“Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea. You don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair.”

In 2017, in his report into prejudice in the criminal justice system, he found that juries

“act as a filter for prejudice”,

but now that he has become the Justice Secretary, he is scrapping the very institution he once lauded. Which is it? Will the real David Lammy please stand up?

It is not just the Justice Secretary. Who can guess which Labour MP said that taking away jury trials

“would be a wholly draconian act”?

It was his own junior Minister, the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Jake Richards). And what about this one? Who said there should be a

“right of trial by jury in all criminal cases”?

Any ideas, Mr Speaker? Who else? It is the Prime Minister this time. Do this Government have no shame?

Yesterday, the Justice Secretary boldly claimed that if the medieval barons were around today, they would support his changes. Then again, English history has never been his specialist subject, has it? Eight hundred years on from Magna Carta, we have another unpopular leader who does not listen to his subjects and who levies eye-watering taxes, and a state that locks people up for what they say. Well, I say that the link between British citizens and the administration of justice is as important as ever. It is a link that serves as a check on an occasionally overbearing state. Our ancestors did not stop bad King John, only to be undone 800 years later by this Prime Minister and his court jester.

Order. I wanted, quite rightly, the Justice Secretary to be heard without comment from Opposition Front Benchers, and I certainly expect the same from Government Front Benchers in return.

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

This morning, more than 50 Crown courtrooms sit empty in England alone. In fact, over 21,000 court days have gone unused this year. Why? Not because there are too many juries, but because the Justice Secretary will not fund the sitting days. Had he done so, the backlog would have shrunk by up to 10,000 cases, but the fact is that it has risen this year.

The truth is that scrapping juries is a choice. This Government could find the money to bear down on the backlog of asylum claims and to spend more on benefits, but not to fund the courts to sit round the clock. Last year, the entire budget for courts and legal aid was £5.5 billion, which is almost exactly the same amount of money—£5.4 billion—that we spent on illegal migrants. He defends their rights under the European convention on human rights, but not our rights under Magna Carta. And for what? He cannot even guarantee that in four years’ time these changes will have reduced the backlog. With this Justice Secretary, it is justice delayed and justice denied.

Much of the rest of the package announced today is sensible, but why has it taken 17 months? The Bar Council, the Law Society and the Criminal Bar Association have all said that jury trials are not the problem.

Order. You are facing the wrong way. It is very hard to hear you when you are looking at the doors.

Apologies, Mr Speaker.

Why did the Justice Secretary not start by reforming the Probation Service and court listings, and by tackling delays from late prison transfers? Why has he still not taken up the Lady Chief Justice on all the sitting days that she has offered him? Lastly, why on earth does this Justice Secretary think he has a mandate to rip up centuries of jury trials without even a mention of it in his party’s manifesto?

The Justice Secretary, in his twisted logic, says he is scrapping juries to save them, but be in no doubt: if he gets away with this, it is the beginning of the end of jury trials. He is already in retreat. Let us unite to send him packing for good.

I am very grateful to the shadow Justice Secretary, although I am a little surprised that in his tirade, he never once mentioned victims—not once. Not once in his clip did he talk about the people waiting in the backlog.

The right hon. Gentleman has boasted that he is an armchair historian. May I give him a history lesson? In 2019, Crown court sitting days were cut by almost 15%. The Conservatives oversaw a 12% reduction in Crown court trials, and many of us remember, over those 14 years of austerity, the magistrates courts and Crown courts that closed in local communities under his watch. The senior presiding judge in England and Wales said:

“It was a political decision.”

I wonder if the shadow Justice Secretary will try to blame the pandemic for that decision.

The right hon. Gentleman talks about what I tweeted in 2020. We are saving and protecting jury trials. Jury trials will continue. He talks about trial by jury as if we lived in the United States, but 90% of criminal trials—1.3 million—are done by our magistracy, which has existed for 650 years. We are going to grow our magistrates, who we believe could do more.

The right hon. Gentleman talks about Magna Carta. Yes, clause 39 establishes the jury trial and a fair trial—we are proud of that—but he knows, too, that clause 40 asks us not to delay justice. That is the substance of this debate, and that is why we need reform. He knows that the Conservatives took juries away from defamation cases in 2013. Back in 1933, we had juries sitting in civil cases. Of course we reform; we do so to meet the needs of the system. He also knows that because of DNA evidence, CCTV and a whole raft of reasons, including that the police now arrest 10% more people, we have a demand issue. We must meet that challenge, and we must ensure that we put victims at the centre of our criminal justice system. That is who it is there for, and it is why he should have mentioned them.

I call the Chair of the Justice Committee.

May I recognise the commitment of the Lord Chancellor and the Minister of State in grasping the issue of the Crown court backlog, which, as Sir Brian Leveson says, is a threat to our whole system of criminal justice? The criticism of these proposals from those on the Opposition Benches comes with no solution whatsoever. I also acknowledge the Lord Chancellor’s decision to stay within the limits proposed by Sir Brian for cases that will be tried without a jury in the future.

None the less, these are profound changes to the criminal justice system that not only restrict the role of juries, but substantially extend the powers of magistrates and judges sitting alone. Will the Lord Chancellor therefore evaluate the effects of these changes to see whether they, along with other measures such as increased investment, bring down the backlog and whether they do so fairly, without bias and without increasing conviction rates or sentence length? If they do not deliver on all these points, will he think again?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for all his work in these areas. Yes, I can commit to that evaluation, which is very important indeed. In his report, Sir Brian estimated that the system would be 20% faster: it takes time for juries to deliberate, and without the conveyance of information between barristers, the judge and the jury being necessary, he expects that a judge-led or magistrate-led system will be speedier. As my hon. Friend will know, the magistrates courts do not currently have a backlog and with an increase in the number of magistrates, they can do a little more.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

The Government’s plan, announced today, to reduce the use of trial by jury would be an historic upheaval of our court system, with profound consequences. The Justice Secretary has not argued in favour of judge-only trials on their own terms; instead, he has argued that there is no alternative, which is simply not true. Many within the legal profession have argued that removing trial by jury is a misdirection from the multitude of problems that underlie the backlog.

Those problems, caused by years of Conservative mismanagement, have resulted in countless wasted hours of sitting time and in victims failed time and again. Perhaps the defendant does not arrive in court because of the broken private contract, there is no interpreter, the witness care unit forgets to tell witnesses to attend, key evidence is not served until the day of trial so the defence has no time to consider it, or there are not enough court staff to manage security on the door, so the trial runs late. Maybe our crumbling court infrastructure means there is no running water, a broken lift or even a flooded courtroom. We need a real solution to tackle these issues that plague our justice system, but instead the Justice Secretary intends to remove a huge number of jury trials, despite his previous opposition to that, all while the Ministry of Justice capital budget is being cut by 3% in real terms every year.

While I welcome the £500 million investment in victims and witness support over three years, the total courts maintenance backlog is estimated at £1.3 billion. Where is the investment to fix the collapsing infrastructure in the justice system? Will the Justice Secretary consider reopening many of the Crown courts closed under the Conservatives, including mine in Chichester? As he confirmed to the media today, an entire jury’s worth of prisoners have been released in error in recent weeks. Does the Secretary of State have confidence in his Department to oversee such an extreme and radical reform when it is not even getting the basics right?

The hon. Lady mentions a range of issues that are important in ensuring that our 80 or so courts and 500 courtrooms are working effectively. That is why we have asked Sir Brian Leveson to look at efficiency as part 2 of his review. We need not just our courts but the Crown Prosecution Service and our police to work together at a reasonable level to deliver that improvement.

When we think about either-way cases, I think that it is legitimate for the Government to take a view on whether, for example, a driving licence fraud, fly-tipping or the theft of a bike requires a jury trial that will last for about two days, or whether those cases can be dealt with by a magistrate or a judge. I know that the hon. Lady is committed, like us, to bearing down on violence against women and girls. It cannot be right that if someone is charged with an offence such as theft of a bicycle, theft from a vehicle or employee theft, they can opt for a trial that, by necessity, goes into the system and will delay a rape trial, a murder trial or something like that. That is the balance of the decision that I have sought to make. I think that the Government have made the right decision in implementing Sir Brian’s review.

I call the Mother of the House.

The entire House is concerned about victims, including the victims of attacks on women and girls. However, the entire House is also concerned about the men and women who will undoubtedly suffer miscarriages of justice if the right to trial by jury is curtailed. To quote from a lawyer:

“The right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual. The further it is restricted, the greater the imbalance.”

That lawyer is our current Prime Minister. He wrote that in 1992—it was as true then as it is today. How can the Lord Chancellor propose a limitation of the right to trial by jury when he knows perfectly well the category of defendant who will suffer the ill effects?