Criminal Court Reform

Lord Faulks Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for the points that he made. It will not surprise him to hear that I will not respond to most of them other than by saying yes. But in relation to the defendants, it is a point very well made. I was a defender for much of my career, and I entirely agree with what the noble Lord said. There will be people within the system waiting for their trials who are unable to get on with their lives because they are on bail for an offence. We need to think about them as well.

[Lord Faulks (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too welcome the Statement. I congratulate the Government on having the courage to confront a really difficult issue. The status quo is quite unacceptable. I would rather hope that this House and Parliament in general could treat this on a non-party-political basis. There are a lot of reasons why there were delays; some of them were due to Covid, which is a non-party-political issue. But I have long thought that fraud trials, for example, are very often wholly unsuitable for juries. I am glad that the Government acknowledge that.

As to the question of judges and reasons, I have just two questions I would like to ask the Minister. I would have thought that judges, when they do determine these things, might well give reasons. That would be consistent with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. There would be a considerable advantage to potential appellants, because they would know the reasons why they had been convicted; whereas at the moment, with jury verdicts, you have the board verdict of guilty or not guilty. You do not know whether they have taken into consideration relevant consideration or irrelevant considerations.

My other question is this. The Statement reads:

“Our world-leading judges should hear the most serious cases”.


Standing back, does it occur to the House and, indeed, to the Minister that it is slightly odd that the 90% or so of the trivial offences are tried by those with professional experience, and yet we give the most serious cases to 12 conscientious but random people taken off the street?

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his observations. As far as reasons are concerned, yes, absolutely: judges sitting alone will give reasons. Not only is it useful for appellants to know why but it can be useful for witnesses as well.

One often hears victims who have been through the system say that if the case results in an acquittal, that is bad enough, but not knowing why the defendant was acquitted is really hard for them. Transparency is important in the criminal justice system, as it is in all systems. That is one of the reasons why we are now going to make the magistrates’ court a court of record. All proceedings in the magistrates’ court will be tape-recorded, and we are going to use artificial intelligence to provide transcripts so that people can get transcripts of what has happened much more often and can follow and read at their leisure.

As far as the point about serious cases is concerned, I have been very careful not to talk about seriousness but to talk about length of sentence. Every case is serious to those involved in it, particularly to the victims, and it would be wrong to downplay that. It is also important to note that the magistrates’ court consists of not just lay justices—justice by your peers—but professional magistrates, known as district judges these days. It is a combination who deal with these matters.