Thursday, November 27, 2025
Labour press ahead with dismantling our democratic justice system
Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.
Now that he is in charge of Justice, he has changed his tune. As I stated in my blog on 21 November, the government has set itself on a course whereby jury trials for all except the most serious crimes such as rape, murder and manslaughter are set to be scrapped in England and Wales. It now looks like this is going ahead.
As the Guardian reports, in proposals that drew a swift backlash from senior lawyers, who said that they would not reduce court backlogs and could “destroy justice as we know it”, the justice secretary has proposed that juries will only pass judgment on public interest offences with possible prison sentences of more than five years:
Lone judges would preside over trials of other serious offences meriting sentences of up to five years, he suggested, removing the ancient right of thousands of defendants to be heard before a jury.
The Ministry of Justice said no final decision had been taken by the government, but sources confirmed the proposals had been circulated throughout Whitehall in preparation for an announcement in the new year.
Lammy’s proposals, which would create a new tier of court in which most criminal offences would be tried by judges alone, go well beyond the recommendations of Sir Brian Leveson, who was commissioned to review the criminal courts and reported in July. And they exceed the courts minister Sarah Sackman’s interview with the Guardian last week, where she set out a plan to stop criminals “gaming the system”.
The MoJ document, circulated in Whitehall earlier this month, reports that crown courts in England and Wales are facing record backlogs, with more than 78,000 cases waiting to be completed.
Leveson recommended the government should end jury trial for many serious offences that could be dealt with by a judge alone or sitting with two magistrates. The former judge suggested they would preside over a new intermediate tier of criminal court, which has been called the crown court bench division (CCBD).
The deputy prime minister’s decision, according to the leaked MoJ document, is to “go further than Sir Brian’s to achieve maximum impact”.
The principle of abolishing trial by jury is bad enough, effectively dismantling our democratic justice system and putting unprecedented power into the hands of judges, but those in the know also believe that it will not work:
The Law Society of England and Wales’s president, Mark Evans, who represents thousands of solicitors, said the proposals were an “extreme measure” that go “far beyond” Leveson’s recommendations.
“This is a fundamental change to how our criminal justice system operates and it goes too far. Our society’s concept of justice rests heavily on lay participation in determining a person’s guilt or innocence.
“We have not seen any real evidence that expanding the types of cases heard by a single judge will work to reduce the backlogs,” he said.
Riel Karmy-Jones KC, the chair of the Criminal Bar Association, which represents criminal barristers, said: “What they propose simply won’t work – it is not the magic pill that they promise.
“The consequences of their actions will be to destroy a criminal justice system that has been the pride of this country for centuries, and to destroy justice as we know it.
“Juries are not the cause of the backlog. The cause is the systematic underfunding and neglect that has been perpetrated by this government and its predecessors.”
Every politician wants a magic pill that will solve the huge problems facing them, but if such a thing exists at all then there is a cost and in this case that cost is unacceptable. This so-called reform should be strongly opposed.
