Courts and Tribunals Bill (Third sitting)

Siân Berry Excerpts

Tuesday 14th April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

It is great to see you in the Chair today, Ms Jardine. I oppose clause 1 and its many implications for justice. It takes away the defendant’s right to elect a trial by jury for all either-way offences, which, according to the Bill’s impact assessment, will reduce jury trials by half. That is no minor thing, and I agree with the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle that clause 1 must be removed from the Bill, as well as clauses 2 to 7, which we will debate later.

Compared with the removal of half of jury trials, there would be a highly contested and—in the Government’s own estimates—much smaller impact on efficiency in the courts. There is also the potential for the workload in the magistrates court and the Crown court to increase beyond what is estimated. As Emma Torr from APPEAL highlighted during our oral evidence session, this will include new allocation processes and new multi-step processes for considering appeals, and the need for judges to spend time outlining reasons for their decisions, which juries do not have to do. The chair of the Bar Council of England and Wales also told us about the impact on confidence in the system, stating:

“Overall, the jury system is seen as the only part that still works, so why are we focusing on that? We want to focus on all those aspects that will reduce delays now, rather than hacking at a constitutional cornerstone, which also reflects community participation.”––[Official Report, Courts and Tribunals Public Bill Committee, 25 March 2026; c. 40, Q72.]

This cutback in jury trials is not the measure promised to victims of sexual and domestic violence in the Labour manifesto, and later we will consider amendments that would what was promised. This cut is not a measure that will, under the current system, help victims through more compassionate and better trained court processes, or by improving outdated buildings where they currently risk contact with their abusers. The lack of legal support for magistrates court processes could, as we heard from the head of JUSTICE, lead to more victims being cross-examined by their own abusers.

We heard clearly from the leaders of the circuits that those working in criminal justice day in, day out have not yet been able to employ the real efficiencies that could come with more investment and innovation, and that would bring down the backlog without the measures in the clause. Those include the better user of technology, more sitting days, blitz courts and improvements at the investigation stage. I believe that we must act on the backlog, but that must start with those measures and the increased investment that is needed to correct what the chair of the Bar Council told us about investment under successive Governments. She said:

“We saw a rapid cutting of MOJ funding between 2009-10 and 2022-23: it declined by 22.4%. We are about 30% below where we should be.”––[Official Report, Courts and Tribunals Public Bill Committee, 25 March 2026; c. 41, Q75.]

The main point I want to express today is my concern about the motivation behind the choices that the Government have made in these proposals by taking up, and deviating from, the recommendations of the independent review of the criminal courts in a particular way, and about how the severe erosion of the principle of jury equity can apply to certain types of defendants and certain offences in a way that I suspect this clause is aimed at. That really eats away at a constitutional cornerstone in a truly historic way. It eats away at the principle of jury equity.

We know that jury trials are more often chosen by black and other minority defendants, and that public confidence in a jury of their peers to see through institutional biases is real. We know that defendants whose crimes have been protests, motivated by the public interest and committed to expose or impede powerful corporate or corrupt organisations and practices, also feel this way.

Tim Crosland’s oral evidence on behalf the campaign group Defend Our Juries, which was set up before this Bill was proposed in anticipation of an attack on jury trials, told us about key recent protest cases where juries have chosen acquittal and applied the principle of jury equity in practice. Those included:

“In April 2021, the Shell six, who had spray painted “Shell Lies” on Shell headquarters, were acquitted by a jury. In January 2022, the Colston four, who toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol harbour, were acquitted by a jury. In November 2022, members of Palestine Action, who had defaced Elbit Systems—suppliers of drones to the Israel Defence Forces—were acquitted by a jury. In January 2023, members of Insulate Britain were acquitted by a jury for blocking roads.”––[Official Report, Courts and Tribunals Public Bill Committee, 25 March 2026; c. 89, Q192.]

Tim Crosland told us how the principle of jury equity is there to apply to cases of conscience in which people’s actions were motivated by the public interest. He told us about the High Court’s 2024 judgment in the case of 69-year-old retired social worker Trudi Warner, who had displayed information about the principle outside a court hearing a protest case. It is worth our listening to more details of what was said in that judgment. Paragraph 16 discusses how the principle of jury equity is well established in our common law and recognised across the common law world. The judge gives several examples from Canada, New Zealand and the United States of the principle being applied. The judgment also talks about how its origins lie in Bushel’s case, from 1670, which

“arose out of the prosecution of two Quaker preachers for holding an unlawful assembly. The Recorder of London, presiding at the trial, directed the jury to convict. The jury refused. They were fined and imprisoned until payment. It was this imprisonment that the jurors successfully challenged by habeas corpus, on the basis that juries have a right to find facts and apply the law to those facts according to conscience and without reprisal.”

The judgment also quotes Lord Bingham, in another landmark judgment, on the principle’s history. He states that

“the acquittals of such high-profile defendants as Ponting, Randle and Pottle have been quite as much welcomed as resented by the public, which over many centuries has adhered tenaciously to its historic choice that decisions on the guilt of defendants charged with serious crime should rest with a jury of lay people, randomly selected, and not with professional judges.”

He added:

“I know of no other real checks that exist today upon the power of the executive.”

In my speech on Second Reading, I pointed out that a number of offences created recently to react to successful direct action protests now sit in the triable either-way category. They include, in the Public Order Act 2023, new offences about interference with key national infrastructure, including blocking roads, and specific offences about causing serious disruption by tunnelling; and, in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the offence of causing public nuisance, which replaced a common law offence and applies a higher penalty for acts that create serious annoyance or inconvenience, such as noisy protests.

Importantly, Tim Crosland pointed out to us in his oral evidence that the choices the Government have made in how to implement this measure will serve to virtually eliminate jury equity in practice. He told us that, of the more than 200 people jailed in the past few years for peaceful protest, only one has been jailed for more than three years. In that light, it is suspicious that the Government have chosen three years as the threshold in the Bill, despite the Leveson report’s recommendation of two years. Sir Brian also recommended raising the financial threshold below which criminal damage—often how direct action protests are charged—is charged as a summary offence and kept in the magistrates court, where sentences are limited, but the Government are not raising that threshold. Sir Brian also said that restricting the right to elect for jury trial was

“contingent upon magistrates’ sentencing powers remaining at the current…12 months”,

but the Government propose powers to increase them instead. He also recommended that the new bench division should sit with a judge and two magistrates, to maintain a lay element in these Crown court cases, but the Government have chosen to ignore that, too.

As far as the recent examples of cases in which jury equity has been applied are concerned, all those deviations from the recommendations point in the same way. In the light of evidence that other measures would be more effective at backlog reduction, it therefore seems to me that at least one motivation for adopting this measure is to stop the embarrassment of jury equity. I did not get the chance to ask the Minister about this during the oral evidence, but has she discussed with colleagues, companies or other interests targeted by protesters the implications and impact of the Bill and this clause, in deviating from the Leveson recommendations in the way that it does, on the important principle of jury equity?

Finally, on Second Reading, I raised the question of whether these measures are yet another part of a package of the Government’s wider attacks on civil liberties. I have described this package as a “toolkit for tyrants” that includes

“digital ID, facial recognition surveillance on our streets and the erosion of fundamental asylum rights—all things contrary to our British values and which should not be packaged up for this or any future Government to use against minorities…and dissidents.”—[Official Report, 10 March 2026; Vol. 782, c. 249-250.]

I would like the Minister to reflect on the potential future impact of this attack on jury equity under a much worse Government.

[Alex McIntyre]

While we are on the subject of British values, is the Green party in Westminster’s position that criminals should go to jail? A Green party candidate in Scotland has said that they should close all the prisons in Scotland. Can she clarify the Green party’s position on that for the Committee?

[Siân Berry]

The Scottish Green party is a separate party from the Green party of England and Wales, so I cannot vouch for its policies. However, the Green party’s justice policies look in the round at what is effective in reducing crime, rehabilitating offenders and improving society, based on evidence. I am sure that the Scottish Green party have those principles in mind with any policy it puts forward.

That is the end of what I was planning to say, and I hope we will hear more from the Minister about the erosion of jury equity and what Tim Crosland, in relation to the Bill, called its complete elimination. This will be an important effect of what is being proposed, and it has not had enough debate as yet.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden) (Lab)]

Before I turn to the substance of this clause, I want to begin by setting out the perspective from which I speak. Before entering Parliament, I worked as a prosecutor for more than 14 years. During that time, I dealt with a wide range of serious cases, including sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence, historical child abuse and cases involving families and vulnerable victims.

On a daily basis, I saw at first hand the impact of the criminal justice system on victims, witnesses and their families, as well as their emotions, their concerns and the importance of ensuring that justice is done fairly and transparently. Although I have not practised in recent years, my understanding of the system remains current. I remain in regular contact with practitioners, including solicitors, barristers, members of the judiciary and colleagues in the CPS, and I continue to follow closely what is happening in both the magistrates court and the Crown court.

In addition, during my time as a shadow Justice Minister, I worked on issues relating to prisons, probation and the courts, and I have seen how changes in the system, including the increased use of technology, remote hearings and the handling of evidence, have affected the way that justice is delivered. So I speak on this Bill from a position of experience and of ongoing engagement with the criminal justice system. Colleagues will be relieved to know that I will not be repeating this preamble in any future contributions.

Let me begin by addressing what lies at the heart of this Bill: the restriction of jury trials. Trial by jury is not a procedural detail; it is one of the most fundamental safeguards in our justice system. It reflects the simple but powerful principle that when the state seeks to take away a person’s liberty, that decision should not rest with the state alone, but with ordinary citizens—a jury of their peers.

That principle has a deep constitutional root—from Bushel’s case in 1670, which established the independence of juries, to its role across the common law world, trial by jury has long stood as a protection against arbitrary power. That is not just a feature of our legal system, but a principle reflected across the common law jurisdiction and a recognition that justice must be seen to be done and must not rely solely on the state. It is also one of the reasons that the public has confidence in our system.

The proposal in clause 1 to remove the right to elect a jury trial is not a trivial matter. It covers offences such as theft, fraud and stalking that carry real-life consequences, including custodial sentences, reputational harm and long-term impacts on people’s lives. The Government argue that the measure is necessary to deal with the delay in the system. I have great sympathy with the Government about the massive delay in the court system but, respectfully, jury trials are not causing that delay.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Mullan]

rose—

[Siân Berry]

rose—

[Joe Robertson]

rose—

[Sarah Sackman]

I am not sure who to give way to, but I will give way first to the hon. Lady—I will try to be as fair as I can.

[Siân Berry]

We are debating clause 1, which as I understand it will completely remove defendants’ right to elect; the rest of the Bill puts in place procedures whereby other people—judges—will decide whether a jury trial is held. The right to elect a jury trial is being completely abolished. Is that not correct?

[Sarah Sackman]

The hon. Member is right. Where currently a defendant charged with a triable either-way offence has the ability to choose trial by jury in the Crown court, even in a scenario in which a magistrates court has accepted jurisdiction over their case, that ability to choose is removed by clause 1. Currently, defendants do not need to justify that choice; presumably they choose it because they consider that they will derive some advantage from it. The reform that we are making is to remove that ability to choose and, rather, to place the responsibility with the court to allocate the mode of trial according to the seriousness of the offence.

There was much discussion raised by the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle, and I believe one or two others, about the approach, and whether we should have an approach driven by the characteristics of a particular defendant—whether they are of good character, whether they have previous convictions—but that is not the approach we have chosen to take. The approach we have chosen to take is one in which it is the expert court, independently, that is triaging the case and allocating mode of trial based on the seriousness of the case. The best and most objective proxy for that is the likely sentence and the allocation guidelines, much in the same way as magistrates currently allocate trials in their mode of trial hearings.