Judicial Review and Courts Bill

Debate between Baroness Whitaker and Lord Pannick

Committee stage
Thursday 24th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I express my support for Amendment 36A. When I was a member of your Lordships’ Constitution Committee we looked into the impact of the pandemic on the criminal courts. What was striking about our activity was the difficulty we had in extracting from the Ministry of Justice any valuable, reliable statistics on what was happening in the criminal justice system. To have a specific statutory obligation to produce data on this important subject is essential if Parliament is to know what the impact of these new provisions will be.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group. My support comes from my experience as a magistrate, and I appreciate the endorsements of the role of the magistrate from all around the Committee. As those who frequent magistrates’ courts will know, they are places where invariably vulnerable and some other defendants are simply not able to understand or cope with the requirements of the legal system, as my noble friend Lord Ponsonby described, so effectively they do not have a fair trial. With regard to increasing the powers of magistrates in Clause 13, magistrates too are not experts, and that is partly the point of them. In my view, the safeguards in Amendments 35 and 36 would be very useful against inadvertent injustice.