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David Lammy is preparing for a “once-in-a-generation” reform of the courts system. The Justice Secretary today confirmed plans to restrict the right to a trial by jury for a raft of offences where the likely sentence is three years or less. These plans build on the recommendations of retried judge Sir Brian Leveson’s report into fixing the broken courts system, published over the summer. They are slightly watered down from the proposals leaked last week, but still mean that defendants will have their choice curtailed in “either way” cases, where currently they can choose whether to face a jury or have their case heard in a magistrates court. Lammy today announced a new form of “swift courts”, heard by a judge alone. The idea is that this will free up court capacity for the most serious cases – including murder, manslaughter, rape and grievous bodily harm – to be heard by juries.
Addressing the Commons today after a week of furious backlash from the legal community and the opposition benches after the plans were leaked, Lammy tried to take the heat out of the argument. The government, he said, had “inherited an emergency” in the justice system. The current backlog of Crown Court cases is nearing 80,000. Delays of several years mean that tens of thousands of cases are collapsing as witnesses drop out (11,000 in the year to June), while defendants are “gaming the system” by choosing jury trials in order to draw out the process. The guilty plea rate has decreased every year since 2020. The impact this is having on victims is heartbreaking. Lammy cited the case of domestic abuse victim Katie, who reported her partner in 2017 “but then had an unbearable six-year wait for justice”. This is hardly an isolated incident. It is systemic – indeed, Labour MP Natalie Fleet has written for the New Statesman today outlining similar cases.
Lammy told the House the plans for the new courts are estimated to deliver justice at least 20 per cent faster than jury trials, relieving pressure on the system so the most serious cases are not held up by offences like stealing a bicycle or driving licence fraud. Like courts minister Sarah Sackman last week, Lammy framed the move as necessary to put victims first. And he insisted “jury trials will continue to be the cornerstone of the system”, stressing that already 90 per cent of cases are heard by magistrates courts rather than juries, making this an expansion of the existing system rather than a radical change.
If Lammy was keen to take the hyperbole out of the debate, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick was on-hand to inject it back in. He warned of the “beginning of the end of jury trials”, accusing the Lammy tearing down “centuries-old tradition” that predates parliament itself because it was too incompetent to fix the real issues with the system. The two men, who both studied law, gave alternative histories for the role of juries in our justice system – and both cited the Magna Carta of 1215, with its passages on enshrining the right to a trial by jury and ensuring justice is not delayed.
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All of this is something of a sideshow. The history of jury trials is a fascinating subject – as, indeed, is the history of magistrates courts, which, as Lammy noted, have played a crucial role in the justice system since the Victorians. But fundamentally, this is a question of much more recent history. It’s question of money – and of trade-offs.
Something Jenrick was less keen to mention was how we ended up with an 80,000 case backlog in the first place. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has some analysis that might help. Between 2007-8 and 2016-7, the day-to-day budget of the Ministry of Justice was cut by 33 per cent. MoJ capital funding was cut by 70 per cent in the early 2010s as a result of austerity, and while the department has since received a capital injection to offset this, the impacts of the original decision can be seen in Britain’s crumbling court buildings. Recent efforts to compensate for that shortfall by both the Conservative and Labour governments have not offset this. The IFS estimates that today, MoJ day-to-day spending is 14 per cent lower in real-terms than in 2007-8, and 24 per cent lower in per-person terms. (Perhaps the government of the day was simply hoping people would commit a quarter less crime.)
Even by austerity standards, justice has been particularly badly hit. The IFS also notes that: “Had the MoJ day-to-day budget increased at the same rate as the average department over the period since 2007–08, it would have been some 41 per cent (£4.5 billion) higher in 2024–25. If it had grown in line with the average ‘unprotected’ department, it would have been 9 per cent (£1.0 billion) higher.”
What these figures show is that the defunding the justice system to the point where this kind of radical reform is necessary – to the point where victims and defendants are waiting years for justice – is a choice. It was a choice made by David Cameron and George Osborne, a choice perpetuated by subsequent Tory governments, a choice emphatically doubled down upon when Jeremy Hunt announced two national insurances cuts worth £20bn a year to try to avert an election defeat – and a choice this Labour government is making now.
It is true that Labour is investing more money into the system, including an extra £550m over three years Lammy announced today, to try to undo the damage. It is also true that Rachel Reeves could have made different choices in her Budget last week and prioritised cutting the courts backlog without restricting jury trials over, for example, scrapping the two-child benefit cap (£2.3bn a year) or maintaining the triple-lock (£12bn a year). You can argue that the latter causes are more important – politically, economically morally – but you can’t deny it was a choice.
At any rate, Jenrick’s furious rant in the chamber was neutered somewhat by the fact that, as Lammy pointed out, he did not mention “victims” once and had no alternative solution for how to fix the justice system broken by his own party. A more relevant charge came from Jess Brown-Fuller, the Lib Dems’ justice spokesperson. She pointed out that, irrespective of jury trials, there are a host of reasons why the backlog has grown so large and continues to rise. Myriad dysfunctions in the system are adding to delays: the defendant might not arrive in court due to broken private transport contracts, there might be no interpreter, witnesses might not have been told to attend, key evidence might not have been served in time, there might be a shortage of court staff, or the crumbling court infrastructure might mean there is no running water or no working life, forcing matters to be postponed.
The courts maintenance backlog is estimated at 1.3bn. Lammy insisted today he was “pulling every possible lever” to ensure that justice was no longer so delayed as to be effectively denied. If it truly is necessary to rethink jury trials for the sake of a justice system the public can have faith in, surely it is also necessary to ensure cases are heard in fully-staffed court buildings which are not falling down.
[Further reading: Can we afford jury trials?]
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