- Statement
- 6:44 pm
- My Lords, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place. The Statement is as follows:“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 standing 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 Courts 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 will provide reasoning for their verdicts in open court, so this will hard-wire 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, causing 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 case load. 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”.
- 6:53 pm
- My Lords, I am obliged to the Minister for repeating the Statement from the other place. I thank the Secretary of State for Justice for his Statement on jury trial, although I wonder whether he understood many of its implications before delivering it to the press and then to Parliament. The Government’s troubling habit of engaging in legislation by leakage, of which their recent Budget is another precedent, should, however, not distract us from the content of this Statement.In 2017, while leading the review of racial bias in the criminal justice system, the now Secretary of State for Justice declared that juries were the only stage of the criminal justice system without racial bias. In 2020, he declared:“Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement”.Now, the Secretary of State for Justice declares that, in order to preserve jury trials, he must abolish most jury trials. This has echoes of the logic of the lunatic asylum. Herod declares that to preserve the family unit, he must strike down the firstborn. Or, more recently, there was Gordon Brown’s decision to preserve Britain’s wealth by selling off half of our gold reserves at near the bottom of the market. That decision left the country poorer; this decision will leave the justice system weaker.This is the Government dismantling the institutions they claim to defend, then insisting that destruction is somehow salvation. A judge sitting alone in a Crown Court trial will have to provide not just a verdict but reasons for the verdict. Does the Minister agree? Such reasoning is bound to be the subject of scrutiny and then potential appeal. If so, are the Government planning to abolish such a right of appeal on the merits of the decision? In that event, parties with no right of appeal may have recourse to judicial review. Or do the Government also plan to abolish the right to judicial review in such circumstances?
- My Lords, at the heart of this Statement is a wholesale attack on the jury system. The Government intend first doing away with jury trials in all but indictable-only offences or offences where the likely sentence is three years or less and, secondly, doing away with the defendant’s right to elect for jury trial altogether.On the first, a radical restriction of jury trials, do the Government accept that they propose going far further than the Leveson report suggested, both on which cases would be tried by a jury and on the make-up of the new courts? Two fundamental questions arise. Importantly, since, apart from robbery and some other offences generally involving violence, offences under the Theft Act are not indictable only, would not all but the most serious cases of dishonesty be triable by judge alone?Do the Government really think that the likely length of a prison sentence is the only true measure of severity? Is that not a fundamental mistake? Let us take the Horizon scandal. Almost no postmasters received a sentence of more than three years. Harjinder Butoy received the longest sentence—three and a quarter years—only to be released after 18 months when his conviction was overturned, leaving his life in ruins. Most sentences were between six and 18 months, yet those cases destroyed hundreds of lives, driving many to a breakdown or suicide. Those defendants would have no right to a jury trial.What about the public servant or the professional who stands to lose career, income, reputation and family when charged with minor shoplifting, and who wants the defence of honest mistake or absent-mindedness determined by a jury? What about the teacher or health worker charged with indecent exposure, who will never work with children again if convicted but who is denied the right to a jury trial to decide on a defence of false identity?
- I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, for the points they made on these reforms. I have a great deal of respect for the insight that both bring and their observations about the Statement.I begin with the remarks of the noble and learned Lord. Many people may think that it a bit rich of the party opposite to complain about this, when everybody knows that this is a situation created by them due to the consistent cuts in the criminal justice system over many years. Victims are now reaping what the party opposite sowed. We on these Benches have to try to put this right.Many matters were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Marks; I hope he will forgive me if I do not respond to them all in my short response now. However, there are answers to almost all of them. For example, he asked how we estimate the likely sentence. That it is done using the sentencing guidelines. It is done all the time at the moment; magistrates do it day in, day out in the magistrates’ courts, when they decide where someone should be tried. It is a task that can be undertaken.One of the things I want to say from the Dispatch Box is that I have changed my mind. I have been a criminal barrister for many decades. When I practised as a criminal barrister, I too felt that any attempt to touch what happens with jury trials was fundamentally wrong. However, I then became a judge in the Crown Court and saw what was actually happening. Every judge in the Crown Court up and down this country will have experienced sitting with other judges at lunchtime and saying, “I cannot believe that this case I am trying here and now is actually in the Crown Court. It shouldn’t be here”.We are not sacrificing jury trials—of course we are not. It has never been that every criminal case was tried by a jury; 90% are currently tried in the magistrates’ courts. The question is, where do we draw the line? That is why this Government asked Sir Brian Leveson to conduct an independent review, and we will accept his conclusions. It would be frankly irresponsible not to do so; we cannot ignore what he is saying. We are not going far further, as the noble Lord, Lord Marks, implied; we are doing exactly what Sir Brian suggested: having a Crown Court Bench Division to deal with cases where the likely sentence is three years or less.
- Before the Minister sits down, would she kindly answer the question: is it intended that these proposals will be retrospective? If not, how on earth are they going to impact upon the present backlog?
- At present, there are no plans to make them retrospective, but that is why it is going to take time. That is why it will take time to work its way through. But if we do not do this, not only would we not be tackling the current backlog, we would be letting it grow. That is why it cannot continue.
- 7:11 pm
- My Lords, was the Minister as surprised as I was by the terms of the attack made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, on these proposals. He suggested that these proposals involve the “destruction” and “dismantling” of jury trials and an “act of constitutional vandalism”? Does she agree that these proposals are nothing of the sort? There has never been an absolute right to jury trial. Pragmatism has always determined which prosecutions are to be heard by a jury and which are to be heard by judges or magistrates.Does the Minister agree that these proposals shift the dial but that they shift the dial for very sensible, pragmatic and practical reasons? She emphasised the impact of delay on victims, and she mentioned defendants who game the system. Would she agree that the scandalous delays that occur at the moment in the Crown Courts also have an appalling impact on a defendant who is innocent? The man who is accused of rape and has that charge hanging over him for years cannot get on with his life. That is also outrageous. It is outrageous for the victim and for the defendant. I support these proposals.
- I am very grateful to the noble Lord for the points that he made. It will not surprise him to hear that I will not respond to most of them other than by saying yes. But in relation to the defendants, it is a point very well made. I was a defender for much of my career, and I entirely agree with what the noble Lord said. There will be people within the system waiting for their trials who are unable to get on with their lives because they are on bail for an offence. We need to think about them as well.
- My Lords, I too welcome the Statement. I congratulate the Government on having the courage to confront a really difficult issue. The status quo is quite unacceptable. I would rather hope that this House and Parliament in general could treat this on a non-party-political basis. There are a lot of reasons why there were delays; some of them were due to Covid, which is a non-party-political issue. But I have long thought that fraud trials, for example, are very often wholly unsuitable for juries. I am glad that the Government acknowledge that.As to the question of judges and reasons, I have just two questions I would like to ask the Minister. I would have thought that judges, when they do determine these things, might well give reasons. That would be consistent with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. There would be a considerable advantage to potential appellants, because they would know the reasons why they had been convicted; whereas at the moment, with jury verdicts, you have the board verdict of guilty or not guilty. You do not know whether they have taken into consideration relevant consideration or irrelevant considerations.My other question is this. The Statement reads:“Our world-leading judges should hear the most serious cases”.Standing back, does it occur to the House and, indeed, to the Minister that it is slightly odd that the 90% or so of the trivial offences are tried by those with professional experience, and yet we give the most serious cases to 12 conscientious but random people taken off the street?
- I thank the noble Lord for his observations. As far as reasons are concerned, yes, absolutely: judges sitting alone will give reasons. Not only is it useful for appellants to know why but it can be useful for witnesses as well.One often hears victims who have been through the system say that if the case results in an acquittal, that is bad enough, but not knowing why the defendant was acquitted is really hard for them. Transparency is important in the criminal justice system, as it is in all systems. That is one of the reasons why we are now going to make the magistrates’ court a court of record. All proceedings in the magistrates’ court will be tape-recorded, and we are going to use artificial intelligence to provide transcripts so that people can get transcripts of what has happened much more often and can follow and read at their leisure.As far as the point about serious cases is concerned, I have been very careful not to talk about seriousness but to talk about length of sentence. Every case is serious to those involved in it, particularly to the victims, and it would be wrong to downplay that. It is also important to note that the magistrates’ court consists of not just lay justices—justice by your peers—but professional magistrates, known as district judges these days. It is a combination who deal with these matters.
- My Lords, at the end of the day, are not random and conscientious people taken off the street the best safeguards of our civil liberties against an overmighty and oppressive state? If any one of us here were to be charged with a criminal offence, would we not rather put our trust and confidence in a jury rather than in a state appointee? Are not juries the best way of linking ordinary people to our criminal justice system?
- My noble friend might have a point if it were not for the fact that 90% of cases are currently being dealt with in the magistrates’ court. They are not dealt with by juries.
- By lay people.
- They are not all dealt with by lay people at all; they are dealt with by district judges as well. They are state appointees. They used to be known as stipendiary magistrates—my noble friend knows this perfectly well; he has practised in those courts. Stipendiary magistrates have a part to play and so do lay people. The important thing is that they have to give reasoned rulings. We have to have a system that is proportionate and fair and deals with everybody’s interests, not just those of a few.
- My Lords, my question follows on very clearly from that of the noble Lord, Lord Boateng. I declare an interest, since a number of my friends and colleagues have been acquitted by juries of charges against them relating to actions of political protest. My question focuses on democracy. Does the Minister agree that juries are not just part of our legal system but important defenders of our right to protest, something our democracy is built around? Given the repressive anti-protest legislation passed in recent years under the previous Government, which it appears this Government have no intention of repealing, are these plans not a serious threat to our democracy as well as our legal rights?
- I thank the noble Baroness for her question. I will repeat what I have already said. Over 90% of criminal trials are already heard in magistrates’ court, which does deal with some protest cases without a jury. It is likely that many protest-related offences are dealt with there. The important thing is that no one group of defendants is more important than any other. Everyone is equal before the law. We cannot have a carve-out for a particular group of offences or a particular group of people. We have confidence in a professional judiciary, highly trained in things such as diversity. They will do a good job.