Jury Trials

Siân Berry Excerpts

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.