Juries: the verdict
Bill proceeds but opponents hope to win changes
The House of Commons gave David Lammy’s courts and tribunals bill a second reading by a majority of 101 yesterday. Just 10 Labour MPs voted against the government, though dozens abstained on principle.
Karl Turner, the most vocal Labour opponent of the government’s jury reforms, announced that he would be one of those abstaining after Lammy had offered him a concession. One of the Labour “rebels”, Turner disclosed, would be given a seat on the public bill committee that will examine the bill in detail between now and 28 April.
“I am more confident now than ever before that the worst parts of the bill will be defeated by amendments,” Turner said. “I sincerely ask [Labour colleagues] to let the bill pass its second reading, so that we can make progress on getting rid of the bits of this bill that are completely unworkable, unpopular, unjust and unnecessary.”
Justice secretary
Introducing his bill, Lammy made the well-worn point that delays in the crown court of up to four years were unacceptable and that structural reform — alongside additional investment and efficiency savings — was essential if the backlog of cases awaiting trial was to be reduced. He argued that change was needed and only the Labour party could achieve it:
We do not worship at the altar of how things have always been; we ask how things can work better. We have a record of reforming public services that are failing working people. Despite opposition from conservative institutions at the time, our movement delivered trade union legislation before we ended up in government. Bevan created the national health service, despite fierce opposition from the British Medical Association. Against economic orthodoxy, we introduced the minimum wage. Labour has a proud record of putting victims’ voices into the system…
The choice before the house is stark, and we cannot continue with the rising backlog. Clause 40 of Magna Carta is clear: “To no one will we… deny or delay the right to justice.”
Today, that promise will ring hollow if we do nothing. Let us be the parliament that chose to act. Let us be the parliament that turned the tide. Let us be the parliament that restored swift and fair justice to this country.
Shadow justice secretary
I was interested to see how Nick Timothy would respond in his first major outing since he replaced Robert Jenrick as shadow justice secretary almost two months ago. Timothy must have hoped he could emulate Jenrick’s cold aggression but he is too thoughtful a man for that and some of his remarks came over as no more than rudeness.
If Timothy was going to quote every wrong answer Lammy gave in an edition of Celebrity Mastermind broadcast 11 years ago, he should at least have taken the trouble to watch the recording. At one point, Lammy was asked “which variety of blue English cheese traditionally accompanies port?” Perhaps not a port-and-cheese man himself, the Tottenham MP answered “Leicester” — not “Red Leicester” as Timothy claimed.
The shadow minister’s aim was to demonstrate that limiting jury trial was something that civil servants had been itching to do for years “and after a line of wiser secretaries of state than this one, they finally found a secretary of state foolish enough to go along with it”.
The problem with this thesis is Lammy was not the first justice secretary to seek jury restrictions. As Timothy himself correctly said moments later, when Lammy’s predecessor Shabana Mahmood had “commissioned Sir Brian Leveson to conduct a review of the criminal courts, she knew what she was doing, because in an earlier review Sir Brian had already said that jury trials should be restricted, with magistrates deciding the mode of trial and appeals made to a circuit judge”.
Mahmood had spoken in December 2024 of “different way of managing our crown courts” to reduce the backlog. Her intentions were clear from Leveson’s terms of reference, in which she asked the former judge to consider:
longer-term options for criminal court reform, with the aim of reducing demand on the crown court by retaining more cases in the lower courts. These could include:
The reclassification of offences from triable either-way to summary-only.
Consideration of magistrates’ sentencing powers.
The introduction of an intermediate court.
Any other structural changes to the courts or changes to mode of trial that will ensure the most proportionate use of resources.
Charlotte Nichols
The government had argued that the reforms were necessary so that cases would not collapse before victims could see their assailants brought to justice. But Charlotte Nichols, who disclosed that she had been raped at an event she had attended in her capacity as a Labour MP, accused Lammy of using rape victims “as a cudgel to drive through reforms that are not directly relevant to them”.
I waited 1,088 days to go to court. Every single one of those days was agony, made worse by having a role in public life that meant that the mental health consequences of my trauma were played out in public, with the event that led to my eventual sectioning for my own safety still being something that I receive regular social media abuse about from strangers to this day.
But here is the kicker. In this debate, it feels as if experiences like mine have been weaponised and are being used for rhetorical misdirection in relation to what this bill actually is…
We know that juries are more diverse than the judiciary, and an unintended consequence of these changes could be that women from minoritised backgrounds are less likely to come forward, not more. Juries do not make perfect decisions, but neither do judges.
Sir Geoffrey Cox
I can’t resist giving readers a chance to watch the entire speech delivered by Sir Geoffrey Cox KC, just to remind us what parliamentary oratory used to look like in the days when Churchill was an MP:
I’m not saying it was the most focussed take-down of the government’s plans. Indeed Cox’s comments on summary jurisdiction might have been easier to follow if, like the rest of his remarks, they had not been delivered extempore. But it’s not the sort of speech you see every day.
What next?
Opponents of the bill have just over six weeks to persuade Sarah Sackman, the courts minister, that she should accept amendments to the bill during its committee stage. They may then try to force changes when it is reported back to the Commons in early May.
MPs agreed yesterday that the bill should be carried over to the next session of parliament, planned to start in mid-May, when it will face scrutiny in the House of Lords.