David Davis
Main Page: David Davis (Conservative - Goole and Pocklington)Department Debates - View all David Davis's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(2 days, 16 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Robert Jenrick
I will come to the hon. Lady in a moment, but I give way to my right hon. Friend.
David Davis
My right hon. Friend is being characteristically overgenerous to the Government when he talks about the requirement for modelling. This is not a “Mastermind” question; it is simple arithmetic. Three per cent of trials are by jury. If we do away with half of them, which is more draconian than even the Government are talking about, and there is a difference of 20%, the maximum difference it could make to the throughput of the court system is 0.3%. It will make no difference whatsoever to one of our most fundamental issues, yet it will throw away the most fundamental tenet of our justice system.
Robert Jenrick
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why if the Government have a case, they should publish the evidence—
David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)
May I start by commending my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick)? I do not always agree with him—I am not quite Anna Soubry—but on this issue, he struck exactly the right tone. I speak as somebody who has criticised the Ministry of Justice, under all parties, rather vigorously for 30 years, and he struck exactly the right tone in saying that the system has to be put right, given the failures over 30 years and more. We have to address this matter but not take the fundamentals out of the system in the process of doing so.
May I do something unusual and commend the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller)? She made a very well thought-through speech.
David Davis
I am losing the House, piece by piece, but that is okay. The Minister should pay some attention to the detail of the speech by the hon. Member for Chichester, because she made some extremely important points.
As for the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), he and I have fought together on some spectacular cases of miscarriage of justice—successfully, I think, in the biggest ones—but I do not agree with him that the Government’s policy does not address matters that are morally fundamental to the justice system, because the jury system is absolutely fundamental, for a few reasons that I will touch on in a minute.
The Minister has a difficult job. Bluntly, her Department—not just the Ministers, but the Department itself—has not done a very good job of managing the system over decades. The system failures have been serially spectacular, and I recommend that she look back at some of the National Audit Office reports. I commissioned one when I was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee; it is the longest NAO report that I can remember and the most complex, because these matters are systemically complex and do not lend themselves to off-the-cuff answers. She talks about modernisation, which is often important, but it should not be at the price of taking out the most important building block in our justice system—one that the rest of the world, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark said, has been copying for centuries.
Of course, the majority of the judiciary does not agree with restricting jury trials. When I raised this matter with the Justice Secretary—I think I did so in oral questions on one occasion—I asked him whether he had read the report by Mr Rivlin KC, which does a formidable job of forensically taking apart the Leveson recommendations. One of the points he makes is that Leveson is making judgments—quite properly, as a very distinguished judge of very long standing—but he is not making them on the basis of empirical data. There was very little empirical data behind what Lord Justice Leveson argued, and it is really important that we look at that. I recommend to the Minister that she read Mr Rivlin’s note. He was the head of Southwark Crown court, which has one of the highest throughputs in the country, and he put this point to all his judges. Not one of those working, active judges agreed with Leveson.
Implicit in Leveson’s comments, and certainly in what the Minister said, is an underlying idea that juries are not quite up to it in certain cases. It is suggested that they cannot quite cope, particularly in technical and financial cases. Well, I have handled about a dozen miscarriage of justice cases over the course of the last decade or two, and in not one of them was the jury the source of the error. More often than not, it was a misdirection by a judge or an error of the system, or the court case was allowed to get out of control in some way or another—I will come back to an example or two in a minute. It was pretty much always down to the judge, and sometimes to the lawyers in court, but not to the jury.
The risks involved in restricting jury trials are significant. When the Minister is modelling the numbers—she talks about the speed of the magistrate system—she should look at the appeal rates for magistrates’ decisions and the number of appeals in which the magistrates’ decisions are overturned.
Linsey Farnsworth
I gently say to the right hon. Member that the current system for appeals from the magistrates court requires a full retrial. When somebody comes to give evidence, we ask a lot of them, particularly the victims. To do that all over again, after a wait of a considerable number of months or even years, is very onerous. Quite simply, the victim does not want to go through it all over again. That is the problem, which this policy fixes.
David Davis
Frankly, the hon. Lady highlights yet another problem with the magistrates court. The point is that if we are going to implement a big, systemic change, we should not change the fundamentals. That should be done as a separate testable exercise later, after we have tried everything else.
Let me come back to the expertise of juries. It is illegal in Britain to talk to jurors about what happened in the jury room—it is not allowed—but there is a spectacular lacuna in that. One of the most complicated financial cases was the Jubilee line fraud trial, which collapsed. As a result, it was possible to interview the jurors. This case was in an area where it is said that jurors cannot cope: complex financial law. They were asked, “Couldn’t you cope? Was there a problem?” When they were asked if they could not understand the case, they answered unequivocally, “Oh yes, we could understand the case. It was the lawyers who couldn’t understand the case.” That is precisely what the outcome of that analysis was.
The Minister resisted publishing the model, which is understandable. I can see why she is doing that. She wants it to be presented properly and transparently, I hope, but she has made the decision already, so at the very least, she should tell us the size of the saving and the size of the change. In my judgment, it is less than half of 1%—a point that I made in an intervention earlier. She may disagree. Well, let us see what she thinks the size of the saving really is, because we are expected to take this on trust, and we should never change something that is so fundamental to our constitution and justice system on trust. I do not think the Government’s policy will move the dial at all.
There is one other systemic issue that I want to raise. Again, my hon. Friends might not like it—
David Davis
It is not unusual, I know.
My hon. Friends might not like my mentioning this primary case, because it undermined a part of the Thatcher Government’s activities. It was the case of Clive Ponting. He was the civil servant who gave out the information that the Belgrano was sunk while it was leaving the Falklands, not arriving. The judge in that case instructed the jury to find him guilty, but they found him not guilty. Why? Because they made a moral judgment about the powers and rights of the state over the citizen. We cannot replace that with any judicial mechanism.
My comment to the Minister is that I sympathise with the size of the problem, and she is right to try to take it on. I am glad she is doing so, and I will support her in what she does, but she should not tackle the problem by wrecking the system. Justice delayed is justice denied, but summary justice is not justice at all.
Dr Evans
I refer the hon. Lady directly to the opening speech. If she sits and reads Hansard, it was very much different regarding that point.
I will move on to the other practical points we need to talk about—some even in the letter—about process. For example, the letter states:
“judges will assess the likely sentence in accordance with the Sentencing Guidelines. They will consider the facts of the case to make a determination of likely culpability, harm”—
and so on. It then goes on to say:
“eligibility is based on likely sentence length, any triable either-way offence could be in scope of the CCBD, if it were likely to receive a sentence of 3 years or less”.
What happens if the judge decides that they would not go to a jury trial? Later on, the same letter states:
“judges will retain the full sentencing powers available in the Crown Court, meaning there is no restriction on the sentence that can be handed down in the case.”
That points out the fact that a judge could make a decision at pre-hearing that the case need not go to trial because the sentence will be less than three years, and after that find out that the sentence will actually be five, six or seven years. There is a real discrepancy.
The letter also states:
“As you know, we do not have minimum sentences in law.”
That is demonstrably not true—think about drug trafficking, firearms or repeat knife offences. We only have to look at section 28 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, which talks about how using a knife for a second time will result in a minimum of six months. That was codified and updated in section 315 of the Sentencing Act 2020. The letter is filled with holes.
I thank Joanna Hardy-Susskind, who has pointed out a lot of these issues. She has done a lot of working explaining that the MOJ does not even understand the letters it is putting out in defence of this policy. If the Ministry was to release the modelling and the impact assessment, it could demonstrate to us all why we should make the change.
I am running short of time to talk about the practicality, so I will close where I started.
David Davis
I am not just standing to give my hon. Friend a minute. Does he agree with me that even if we accept what it says, being sent down for a couple of years can destroy a life?
Dr Evans
Absolutely. That is fundamental. There must be trust in the system and in the decision taken, and I worry that that is being eroded by this proposal.
I am going to change my speech. I started on the presumption that the Government are trying to solve an admin problem with a principled change, but I think, after listening to the Government Front Bench, that I am wrong. The Minister was asked, “Sarah, would you still go with this regardless of the backlog?” and the answer was yes. There we have it. It is clearer than ever before. Efficiency is the excuse and ideology is the aim. Regardless of the vote today, the answer is here for all to see that the Government do not believe in maintaining jury trial. For that reason, Members must stay and vote with the Opposition.