Crown Court (Recording and Broadcasting) Order 2020

Baroness Kennedy of Cradley Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of Cradley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome measures that seek to open up our criminal justice system. I believe that the public want transparency and accountability; people should know how and why justice decisions are made. As many noble Lords have said, more accurate information in the public domain leads to greater understanding and, in turn, to increased confidence and trust in the system.

As noted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, in his opening remarks, public research for England and Wales carried out by the Sentencing Council last August showed how important it is to put in place measures to build public trust. It found that confidence in the criminal justice system was mixed and that only slightly more of the public were confident in the effectiveness and fairness of the system than were not. When asked about their views in general of sentencing, a minority said that sentences were about right, whereas most were likely to say that they were too lenient. Interestingly, the same research showed that, overall, the public get their information from the news and their engagement was high, with the majority of those getting their daily news from watching broadcast media news and current affairs programmes. These research findings therefore provide a supportive context for the orders before us today. It is evidence that more understanding of sentencing is needed to build confidence in the system, and that using broadcast as a way to achieve it is an appropriate response.

Allowing the public to hear judges’ sentencing remarks in Crown Courts, where they set out the full picture of the facts, the background to their decision and any mitigating or aggravating factors that framed their thinking, should help increase understanding of the sentence passed. Of course, even after hearing the judge’s remarks, there may be those who disagree with the conclusions drawn, but at least they are able easily to hear in full the rationale for the decision. I hope, too, that broadcasting rights will lead to fuller reporting of sentencing decisions and therefore more generally help to reduce uninformed or inaccurate comment.

As many have noted, judges may of course come under more scrutiny due to these measures and they will potentially be put in the public eye like never before. What measures or guidance will be in place to deal with personal and any unwarranted behaviour towards judges?

In the interim, I support judges having discretion to withhold consent for broadcasting, but I hope that permission to broadcast will become the default position. I am sure that cases will arise where this discretion is necessary, but will guidance be drawn up for its use and will the Government consider a review of the discretionary power after an appropriate time has passed?

Before closing, I want to make a broader point about the use of technology in our criminal justice system. At the start of the year, it would have been hard to imagine that our justice system could continue virtually, but it has. Weeks later, we have seen some cases where reporters have been able to join court proceedings via Skype or telephone, have instant message chats with clerks and receive documents digitally. Great leaps forward in the use of technology have been made at break-neck speed. Although the technology has not been without its problems, there are many examples of remote proceedings running smoothly.

At an appropriate point after this pandemic, will the Government review how technology has been used to keep our justice system turning over the past few months? Were the right technological solutions developed for different court settings? What worked well and what did not work at all? Essentially, will the Government assess whether the case has been proven during the lockdown that technology can be used to deal with cases faster, improve people’s access to justice and increase the reliability of data about the justice process and its outcomes? If so, how can we retain the best technological advances from the last few months to improve public transparency and accountability for the future?

I support these orders as measures to give our justice system greater transparency and accountability. They are long overdue and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay of St Johns, that they are a modest step forward but a step forward none the less. They will help build public confidence and trust in our system.