Jury Trials

Debate between David Davis and Linsey Farnsworth

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[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—