Jury Trials

Caroline Dinenage Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I will just advance my case a little, and then I will come to my hon. Friend. The most important thing that we could do is get the courts sitting round the clock. There are sitting days on the table that are not being used. The Lady Chief Justice, the most senior person in our judiciary, has said repeatedly that she is able to offer the Government more sitting days. She has said it in the press, she said it before the Justice Committee the other day, and I am sure that she has said it privately to Ministers as well. The Government have been pushed, slowly, to take her up on those sitting days, and I commend them for that.

However, there are still, by the Lady Chief Justice’s measure, at least 2,000 extra sitting days available that the Government are not taking her up on. We need to go back to her, welcome those sitting days with open arms, and say, “What would it take for you to produce more? Can we turn 2,000 into 5,000, or 10,000?” Get the courts actually sitting. That is not happening right now. The principal reason for that is financial: the Ministry of Justice has not been able to secure from the Treasury a comparatively small sum of money. We can argue about the priorities of this Government, and we will differ across the House, but the sum of money that we need for the proper operation of our criminal justice system is relatively small. It must be better to spend that money on this cause than to scrap an ancient freedom that we have enjoyed, generation after generation.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage]

My right hon. Friend is making excellent points about alternative solutions to scrapping the right to a jury trial. Any MP who has spent any time in their local courts will have seen that the issue is not the juries, but poor administration, which is resulting in about a quarter of trials having to be rescheduled. Does he agree that rather than setting a precedent of scrapping the right to trial by jury, the Government should start by looking at ways to remove the pressure on an overwhelmed CPS? Does he think that giving the police greater charging powers would be a way to move forward on this?

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend makes a number of very important points. There are better ways to handle this situation. I do not pretend that they are simple; they are difficult. They involve getting to the heart of bureaucratic organisations that have been poorly managed and are unaccountable. Let us look at some of the solutions. One, which Brian Leveson mentions in his report, is incentivising early pleas to prevent cases dragging on unnecessarily, for example by ensuring that those accused of offences meet their counsel earlier, so that they get good advice about their likelihood of success or otherwise sooner, and changing the fee structure accordingly to achieve that.