Courts and Tribunals Bill

Lord Garnier Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 27th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord McNicol, for two reasons. The first is that I agree with everything he said about his noble friend Lord Stace, who has just made what the noble Lord, Lord McNicol, described as a thoughtful maiden speech. I am not in the least bit surprised, knowing what I know about the noble Lord. I expect the House to benefit from his contributions on many future occasions and I welcome him to his place. I also agree with the practical approach that the noble Lord, Lord McNicol, applied to this Bill and the measures that it seeks to introduce to deal with some of the plain and obvious problems that the criminal justice system faces.

Before I come to the substance of the Bill, perhaps I may be forgiven for making what I suspect might in other places be called a pleading point. The amendment to be advanced later this evening by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has so far been ignored by the Government. This is a Bill of huge constitutional, financial and practical importance for all of us as citizens and for the institutions of justice. If I may say so, it has been treated by the Government in the other place with considerable disdain. A lot of the Bill before us has not been considered at all, or not adequately, in the other place, so it ought to go back there to be reconsidered before it comes to our House. If that is not going to happen, and I suspect it will not, the Minister ought to have the ability to respond—I was going to say to condescend to us to respond—to the points that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, makes in his amendment.

Far too much of this Bill is ill considered and unconsidered, and it does us no service when we have to do the work that the Commons should have done. I hope that, when we come to deal with Committee, Report and Third Reading, we will not shrink from applying serious thought, skill and expertise to the detail of this Bill, because it has been woefully considered in the other place. I do not mind which view Members of this House take on the merits and various aspects of the Bill one way or the other, but I do care that, if we are to produce legislation, it should be produced properly and well thought through.

That said, given the controversial nature of some of the provisions of the Bill, there is not really time other than to point at one or two questions which need to be thought about very carefully in Committee. I will pick up one point—I do so with some diffidence, since he is sitting right in front of me—that my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne made. He chided our noble friend on the Front Bench for placing too much stress on Magna Carta as the origin of the jury system. He was entirely right to do so, but he then relied on Pope Innocent III as being the founder of the modern jury system.

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

It was King Edward III.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

Well, we may now be getting to a point of agreement; we should be looking at the six statutes of Edward III, because that is where a proper interpretation of Clause 39 of Magna Carta comes. That said—gosh, can I get to the church by way of the moon?—what is more important in the development of our jury system is not what happened in the Middle Ages but what happened in the post-Civil War period with the Mead and Penn case, the development of the Bill of Rights and universal education, the increase in the economic power of our country, the removal of power from the Crown and the Barons to the wider population and the involvement of that wider population in our justice system through the jury. It is important that we recognise the democratic input that the jury system provides in our criminal justice system.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Howard that it is also important to remind ourselves what the previous Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, David Lammy, did in introducing this whole subject in the first place. I have some sympathy for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, who has twice now been asked to carry out inquiries and write reports for two different Governments, and has not found that they have met universal approval by the politicians. I am afraid that that is the fate of report writers. I have had that problem myself, but I have borne it with such fortitude as I have been able to muster.

The serious point, however, is this. Mr Lammy asked himself the wrong question and then came up with the wrong answer to the wrong question. The question he ought to have asked himself is: what, in practical terms —I look across to the noble Lord, Lord McNicol—can best be done to reduce the backlog of cases in our criminal justice system? Bear in mind that only 10% of all criminal cases get before the Crown Court. As I think the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, said, the magistrates carry out the bulk of our criminal justice work. They are to be praised and supported, their work is to be reinforced with adequate resources and decent premises, and so on and so forth. However, I suspect you are not going to reduce the backlog, which now, we are told, stands at 81,000 cases, by reducing the ability of the citizen to get a trial in front of a jury. Certainly the non-violent cases will be pushed back well beyond 2029 or 2030 at the current rate.

Let us think of one or two practical points beyond those that the noble Lord mentioned a moment ago. I confess that I used to sit as a Crown Court recorder. As a civil law practitioner, it may well be wondered by people such as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Leveson, what on earth I was doing in a criminal court.

I see that the great god of time has already enabled me to curtail my remarks, when I know that the whole House is absolutely itching to hear what I have to say. The time will come in Committee when we will have to dismantle this Bill and reconstruct it in such a way that we can reduce the backlog but without reducing access to justice. Unless we pay attention to the state of the buildings and the ability of the delivery service to get people from remand to the Crown Court in time without having enough judges, part-time or full-time, or enough court staff, all the things that the Government think that this reform will do will be lost, because the same mechanical problems will still exist.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Garnier (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, on and thank him for his amendment. It describes precisely what is wrong with the legislative process. This is not a new problem. It is one that my own Government assisted with, as did the Labour Government of which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was a member under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The power of the Executive over the legislature has grown and is growing yet further. The purpose of Parliament is to hold the Government to account. Of course, under our constitution, the Executive sit in Parliament but they should not sit on Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, is entirely right to point this out.