Fuel Duty

Debate between Luke Evans and Siân Berry

Wednesday 18th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

Our current and persistent reliance on oil for transport, rising costs as a result of instability in the middle east, and the ongoing fuel duty freeze, all have consequences for people who use any form of transport in their daily lives. I agree with the Government—and with the many Back Benchers who have joined in supporting them—that it is far too soon to consider the Conservative motion’s demand for further multiple and ongoing freezes.

The fact remains that ending the conflict in the Gulf and the wider middle east is the best way to ease fuel market price rises. The risk of profiteering by fuel providers is a far greater threat to household budgets than fuel duty collected for the public purse. The Conservatives should consider the consequences before offering their support for any more of President Trump’s appallingly badly thought-out decisions.

[Dr Luke Evans]

At what point would the Green party feel that we should step in to support those in rural communities? Green Members often say that the Government need to provide more support, but if we cannot de-escalate because this is not our war, how can we support constituents in Hinckley and Bosworth, in the hon. Lady’s constituency, and up and down the UK?

[Siân Berry]

My speech will continue to put the case for alternative interventions that will help everybody in every family in the constituencies mentioned.

Campaign for Better Transport has pointed out to the Chancellor that the total cost of cancelling all the planned increases to fuel duty in line with the retail prices index since 2011 has brought real-term cuts for motorists for 14 years, and cost the Treasury a cumulative £133 billion between 2011-12 and 2024-25. The additional 5p cut, meant as a temporary measure when introduced five years ago, has alone cost £13 billion since then.

The fuel duty freeze has been regressive. It has helped the richest tenth of households save nearly three times as much as the poorest tenth. The fact remains that the poorest people, who can afford no holidays whether or not the Government agree to this motion, are not driving or owning cars. Yet through all this time the cost of bus and rail travel, upon which those who cannot afford to own a car rely, has continued to rise.

Jury Trials

Debate between Luke Evans and Siân Berry

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[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.

Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill

Debate between Luke Evans and Siân Berry

Committee of the whole House & Report stage
Wednesday 30th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I associate myself with every single thing that the Mother of the House has just said, because I could not possibly live up to it. I genuinely believe that this Bill will undermine efforts to ensure that equality before the law is a reality for everyone. It flies in the face of expertise and of the painstaking, authoritative work of the Sentencing Council —a rightly independent body run by, and for, the judiciary. This is a strange and populist Bill that is undermining and delaying good, well-evidenced independent guidelines for effective sentencing that would have made our justice system more fair, rather than less.

I will start my objections to clauses 1 and 2 standing part of the Bill—I am essentially opposing the Bill as a whole—by commenting on the process. We have before us a single-page Bill that in its specificity and intent cannot but bring to my mind how the current President of the United States is using executive orders to interfere intrusively and intricately in the rightly independent decision making of other bodies. This is a micro Bill that micromanages. I worry what else we might see from this Government if such an example is set today. On Second Reading, the shadow Justice Secretary was not shy of telling us about his next targets, which include the long-standing “Equal Treatment Bench Book”. The hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) has outlined other guidelines that might be immediately affected if we pass this Bill today.

My second objection is about the substance of the Bill, which is primarily contained in clause 1. I cannot believe that Ministers and shadow Ministers are unaware that achieving fair and equal outcomes does not mean treating everyone exactly the same. That principle is so fundamental that I think I learned it through the round window. I cannot believe they are unaware that systemic racism and unconscious bias are real things that still affect people at every stage of the criminal justice system in the United Kingdom in 2025. They must be aware that the good practice that we put together must mitigate those things, or else it will compound them.

I do not believe that the Government as a whole think that the findings of the independent Lammy review of 2017 are untrue, or that they and a wealth of other evidence did not demonstrate the need for guidelines of this sort to provide information to help mitigate the impact of systemic racism and prejudice. Yet here we are, being asked to vote for legislation that essentially bans this evidence and these principles from being part of independent judicial guidelines.

[Dr Luke Evans]

My concern and that of Opposition Members is that the guidance gave examples where pre-sentence reports would “normally be considered necessary” and picked out an identity of a religion or a minority, thereby entrenching racism back into the system. That is the very aim that the hon. Member purports to not want to see. That is the fundamental argument that the Government and the Opposition are putting forward. We do not want to see this situation made worse.

[Siân Berry]

This is—