Jury Trials

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I rest my case, my Lord. I sincerely thank the hon. Gentleman for the way he has conducted himself, and the campaign that he has fought and is fighting on this issue. Having campaigned at times against my own Government and having voted against the last Conservative Government, I know that it is not easy to do, and I credit him for the work he is doing.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

Let me answer the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner), because he is making an important point. Lawyers rarely agree—in fact, their profession is often to disagree. This issue has united everyone in opposition to it. The Law Society, the Bar Council, the Criminal Bar Association and lawyer after lawyer has said that this policy is wrong and a better way is possible. This is not party political. It cuts across all parties, and opponents include vehement critics of mine. I woke up the other day to hear Anna Soubry on the “Today” programme saying that everything I was arguing was right. This is about getting the right answer for our criminal justice system.

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[Dr Murrison]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that there are alternative models for getting to the place where we all want to be—that is to say, for reducing this awful backlog, which is denying people justice? Will he take particular note—he probably already has—of the model introduced in the south-west by my constituent James Ward OBE? He introduced covid resolution courts, which were able to bring the backlog down from 52% to 2% through proper case management in the Crown Prosecution Service. That intervention alone saved 10 sitting years.

[Robert Jenrick]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Let me come to some potential solutions. It is important to note that the backlog varies very widely across the country. His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service is a poorly managed organisation with limited accountability to Ministers, and it has not been performing its function as well as it should. There are parts of our country where the backlog is far smaller than in others. In Liverpool and parts of Lancashire—despite the closure of your local court, Mr Speaker—the court backlog is substantially lower, as it is in Wales. There are significant regional differences because better managers, active judges and good case management of the kind that my right hon. Friend mentioned have made a significant difference.

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[The Minister for Courts and Legal Services (Sarah Sackman)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to end and insert:

“believes that the Government inherited a justice system on the brink of collapse with a record and rising caseload created under 14 years of Conservative mismanagement, austerity and cuts to the justice system that has forced victims of crime to wait years for justice; notes that the justice system has historically evolved to match the needs of the society it serves; supports the Government in making the investment required, including continuing to break records on the number of sitting days funded; looks forward to Sir Brian Leveson’s upcoming recommendations on reforms to improve efficiencies across the courts system; further supports taking forward reforms to the justice system based on Sir Brian Leveson’s independent review of the criminal courts in which victims and the public can have confidence; and further notes that the Government will introduce legislation and publish its impact assessment in due course.”

“Let’s fix it tomorrow”, says the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick)—tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow. What a luxury! Our justice system is in a state of crisis, as he has said, but although in every crisis there is risk, there is also opportunity. The opportunity here is one that we in government grasp, to modernise our justice system and bring it into the 21st century.

Let us start with the crisis. I did not hear an apology in the right hon. Gentleman’s speech, but he did lay bare the facts about what the previous Government did to our justice system. Being in government is about choices. We know what choices His Majesty’s Opposition would make about the justice system because they had 14 years to show the world. Now the right hon. Gentleman says, “Let’s come together, talk about investment in our system and talk about solutions,” but what did the Conservatives do for 14 years? They closed half of all courts in England and Wales. Who did they entrust with the guardianship of our justice system? Liz Truss, Dominic Raab, Chris Grayling. They decimated our legal aid system and all but broke our prison system.

What is the result? Well, the right hon. Gentleman is right: there is consensus that we are in crisis and that the status quo cannot be tolerated. Nearly 80,000 criminal cases are currently waiting to be heard in the Crown court—more than double the waiting list pre covid. Victims are waiting years for justice—over 20,000 open cases in the Crown court backlog have been waiting for a year or more. Justice delayed is justice denied, and the Conservative party must bear much of the blame, but we will never hear the word “sorry.”

[Dr Murrison]

I am not interested in a party political rant, but plainly the Minister is. What I am interested in, however, is expediting justice for my constituents. She will have heard in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the shadow Justice Secretary that there is a model to solve that. Will she please explain why the model that my constituent James Ward brought forward, which had spectacular results in reducing delays in our criminal justice system, is not being applied but the abolition of trial by jury is?

[Sarah Sackman]

The Conservatives had 14 years to implement the solutions that they now say are blindingly obvious. The fact is that swift courts, flow courts, blitz courts—whatever we wish to call them—are being operated, but they cannot keep up with demand. Our justice system has simply not kept pace with the times and the demands of modern society. There is now record demand for criminal cases. There are more police officers, arrests are up by 10%, and cases arriving at the Crown court are up by 20%. Trials are more complex, with cases taking, on average, 71% longer. Technology, such as the smartphones we carry in our pockets, is creating more digital evidence than ever before. Jury trials take twice as long as they did in 2000.

Those delays mean that in many cases justice is simply not being served. With those delays, witnesses pull out, memories fade and, as others have pointed out, more trials crack. As a result, justice is not being served. We have a system in which, as we know, there are criminals who are planning to spend next Christmas, and the Christmas after that, at home with their families. They are gaming the system, while victims wait longer and longer for justice, dealing with isolation and mental torment, unable to heal and to move on.

No one is defending the status quo, yet no Government to date have been bold enough to take the necessary action towards finding a solution. I am a firm believer that politics is an agent of change—that is why I left my career in law to enter politics. When we are presented with a crisis, we see the opportunity, we find the plan, and we fix it—we make it better.

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[Jess Brown-Fuller]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and I will come later in my contribution to the inefficiencies within the system.

[Dr Murrison]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I will make some progress, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind.

The Government claim that this decision has stemmed from the review undertaken by Sir Brian Leveson, the first part of which was published last year. The objective behind the review commissioned by this Government was rightly to find solutions to the overwhelming backlog, and Leveson’s original suggestion was the creation of a Crown court bench division, including a judge and two magistrates, which was modelled to reduce trial length by 20%. The Government, however, have gone further than Leveson recommended, meaning that those accused of crimes with likely sentences of less than three years will, for the most part, not be heard by a jury. New so-called swift courts will be created where just one judge hears cases. The efficiency savings quoted by the Government are the same figures suggested by Leveson under his Crown court bench division model, but the modelling has, like this entire proposal, been widely criticised for lacking transparent data behind the calculations.

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

I thank my hon. Friend, who is also a member of the Justice Committee, for her important point that Leveson did not make this proposal at all. He was talking about a separate division, which the Deputy Prime Minister has announced as a swift court. He has ignored the impact of having two laypeople as magistrates as part of that. It does not make any sense to me, and it does not make sense to many people in this Chamber.

[Dr Murrison]

Does the hon. Lady share my dismay that not only did the Minister admit in her closing remarks that her plans are ideological, not practical or expedient, but also that she spent 30 minutes without talking about the central issue, which is that the majority of cases listed in our courts crack on day one, meaning that the courts are there, but nobody is working within them? That is what needs to be sorted out, rather than this maladroit plan to reduce liberties that we have enjoyed for 800 years.

[Jess Brown-Fuller]

The right hon. Gentleman pre-empts what I will go on to say in my speech. We are yet to see an impact assessment. That was spoken about by the shadow Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick). It is also mentioned in the amendment tabled by the Government. We need to see the modelling and the impact assessment, and understand where these savings are coming from. Even if the figures are accurate, they avoid the glaringly obvious fact that they are measured against a completely inefficient system. The system is fundamentally not undermined by jury trials, but instead plagued by years of under-investment, creating an ever-growing list of unaddressed issues across the system. The Government seem willing to ignore that fact, despite it being present in every piece of discourse surrounding their proposals. They have bought a car that will not run, and they have decided to spend all their time and money on a new paint job before opening the bonnet.

This proposal is utterly shameful, fundamentally because there are alternatives, despite the narrative that the Government are advancing. They do not have to attack jury trials, especially when their own Ministers and their own Prime Minister have been fierce advocates of jury trials in the past. Instead, they should be looking at the real issues within the system that have led us to this point. Chief among them is the productivity decline that our criminal courts have experienced since 2016. Wasted time in and around courts is caused by a wide range of issues, all of which are being ignored by the Ministry of Justice. It means that the Government’s increased investment is being used inefficiently. It also means that many of these issues will persist, even if their attack on jury trials leads to reductions in trial length.

The solutions are out there, and the majority of legal professionals opposing the Government’s reforms are overflowing with practical suggestions, but the Government are not listening, so today I will lay some of them out. First, there must be investment in the courts estate, not only to reopen the hundreds of courts closed under the Conservatives—including my court in Chichester—but to properly maintain those that remain open. Evidence of leaking roofs, foul smells and flooded rooms across the estate is hardly indicative of a properly functioning justice system, and that must be addressed. Trials being abandoned because the heating is not working or there is no running water is unacceptable for those victims.

Even at the roughest of estimates, the restriction of jury trials will at best save 9,000 sitting days in court a year. That is based on not being able to see an impact assessment. The Government could increase the number of sitting days up to the possible 130,000, which would far exceed the apparent savings they would gain from the removal of trials. The concept of a restriction on sitting days is artificial. If there is a case, a courtroom, a defendant on remand and court staff ready to go, the case should be heard.