Jury Trials

Luke Evans Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Sackman]

My hon. Friend is right to say that the nature of crime and of the evidence presented is altering the way our criminal justice system works, but let me provide this reassurance to the House: as well as modernising and rebuilding our justice system, these measures are designed to protect jury trials for the most serious cases. As I have said, many of those trials are becoming compromised, with many victims of the most serious crimes waiting years for justice. It is right that when we ask jurors to do the most important civic duty, we use their time wisely. Does it make sense that the queue of the victim of rape or of a homicide is shared with someone who has stolen a bottle of whisky and who could be dealt with by a lay magistrate who, by the way, introduces the lay and democratic element into our courts?

[Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)]

The letter on criminal court reform written by the Justice Secretary to the Justice Committee states on rape and prioritisation:

“We are not introducing a specific target for rape cases, but our overall objective is to drive down these wait times as quickly as possible. Listing is a judicial function and the judiciary already prioritises cases involving vulnerable victims and witnesses, which includes victims of sexual offences, including rape.”

The Minister’s example about a bottle of whisky is therefore not appropriate; it is fundamentally wrong, according to the letter written by the Justice Secretary himself.

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[Esther McVey (Tatton) (Con)]

You’re going soft!

[Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)]

New year, new David!

[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.

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[Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)]

From prepping for this debate, I know that the policy is one that tries to solve an administrative problem by simply changing a principle. The three areas I will try to cover—we will see how I get on—are the principle, the policy process and the practical side.

To deal with the principle first, we have heard a number of times that justice delayed is justice denied. Delay does harm trust and it can prolong suffering, but justice done wrongly corrupts the system itself. The Justice Secretary knows that, as in his own Lammy report he said that juries act as “a filter for prejudice” during trials.

Moving on to the policy process, on the one hand the Government are saying that the policy is much needed to help with the admin side, but on the other hand they are saying that these are very small changes. We only have to look at the letter written by the Secretary of State to the Justice Committee to pull some of that apart. It states:

“Of the c.3% of criminal trial cases that proceed to a jury trial in the Crown Court, over half would still proceed to the Crown Court and get a jury trial post-reform.”

However, later it says:

“An alternative way of expressing impacts is to account for cases that will be retained in the magistrates’ courts after the reforms. Based on projected case volumes and case mix, of those cases that still proceed to the Crown Court post-reforms, around three-quarters of them are still expected to be allocated a jury trial.”

So we already have a discrepancy, in the same paragraph of the letter, in what the numbers are.

The question, “Has any modelling been done?”, has been asked multiple times. We again know from the letter addressed to the Committee that modelling has been done, because it says:

“The assumptions underpinning the modelling of the reforms I announced last week are subject to the Concordat process that agrees sitting days with the judiciary and it would be improper to pre-empt the conclusion of this process.”

In short, modelling has been done, so if Ministers want to strengthen their argument, why would they not produce that modelling? When we have asked the Minister who is at the Dispatch Box—she was asked again by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild), for the seventh time—whether an impact assessment has been done and not released, or is being done and will be brought forward, we have not got an answer. One would have thought that if you had done the work—

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I am also grateful for the motion and for the opportunity to object, cross-party, to the restrictions on our important rights to a trial by jury. I was, however, hoping that the Conservatives would, in this debate, admit some real responsibility for the awful state of our criminal justice system. Will he correct that gap in any further way in his contribution?

[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.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jake Richards)]

It will be quite tough to follow that, but here we go.

This has been a very useful debate. Every single contribution, including those from Conservative colleagues, has commented on the crisis in our courts that we inherited from the Conservatives after 14 years. We have heard some suggestions; the gist of the suggestions from the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Opposition is, “Let us get more court sitting days.” Would it not have helped if the Conservatives had not closed half of the magistrates courts in England and Wales? Across the entire estate, they sold off more than 40% of all court buildings for far less than they were worth to the communities they served.

As a result of the Conservatives’ vandalism of our court system, there are nearly 80,000 cases waiting to be heard and that number will continue to rise beyond 100,000 without investment, efficiency savings and structural modernisation. Let us be clear: this Government will bring forward a modernisation package that will drag the criminal justice system into the 21st century, ensuring that justice is done fairly and swiftly, that our system meets the challenges that modern criminal cases bring, and that we never again reach a point at which the public’s faith in the criminal justice system is so severely undermined.

The House has heard today a clear and compelling case from my hon. and learned Friend the Courts Minister, who set out the bold but sensible reform we need, bringing down the backlog by the end of the Parliament. It is rooted in evidence, grounded in reality and driven by a simple objective: to fix a criminal court system under unprecedented strain and put it on a sustainable footing for the future.

[Dr Luke Evans]

When the Courts Minister closed her statement, the principle was not about the backlog: she said that she would have gone ahead with scrapping juries to this extent regardless of the backlog. Will the Minister clarify the Government’s position? Is it a principled position or is it about dealing with the administrative burden?

[Jake Richards]

We absolutely have to drag the criminal justice system into the 21st century by modernising its structures, but the context in which we operate clearly has an effect on that programme. The fact that we have inherited an unprecedented backlog in our criminal court system affects the urgency and radicalism of that reform.

Let me take this opportunity to pay particular tribute to Sir Brian Leveson, who is no shield. His independent review has driven the reforms that we are taking forward; it is rigorous, thoughtful and absolutely clear about the scale of the challenge before us. Let us be very straight: the reforms being proposed, which will be set out in due course before this House, are not plucked out of thin air but the result of intensive, careful work undertaken by the most senior lawyers, academics and members of the judiciary. The modernisation programme will be built on evidence. These are difficult decisions and no doubt uncomfortable for some in the legal profession, but they are absolutely vital for a properly functioning and robust system that we can be proud of to take into the future.

Let me bust some of the myths that we have heard in the debate. Some right hon. and hon. Members have suggested that these changes tear up a historical right to a jury trial. Let me be abundantly clear that they do not. Article 40 of Magna Carta reminds us that we must not

“deny, or delay right or justice”,

giving us the old adage that justice delayed is justice denied. Sadly, in this country today, justice delayed has become justice denied for far too many victims. The Government will not cling to mythological tradition at the expense of fairness, effectiveness and public confidence. We will rise to meet the challenge of the day, rather than living in the past.

I have heard on countless occasions the assertion that this Government are scrapping jury trials. That is not true. Everyone has and will always have the right to a fair trial, as my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Catherine Atkinson) made clear in her compelling speech. There has never been an inalienable or unqualified right to a trial by jury.

Let us set out the maths in some detail, because this is very important. Currently, 10% of all criminal cases are subject to jury trial. Some 7% of those are pleas, where there is no trial, so just 3% are subject to a jury trial. The reforms before the House would reduce that number to just 1.5%. These are modest reforms affecting a small proportion of the criminal cases in our country.