Jury Trials

Steve Barclay Excerpts

Wednesday 7th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[David Davis]

Frankly, the hon. Lady highlights yet another problem with the magistrates court. The point is that if we are going to implement a big, systemic change, we should not change the fundamentals. That should be done as a separate testable exercise later, after we have tried everything else.

Let me come back to the expertise of juries. It is illegal in Britain to talk to jurors about what happened in the jury room—it is not allowed—but there is a spectacular lacuna in that. One of the most complicated financial cases was the Jubilee line fraud trial, which collapsed. As a result, it was possible to interview the jurors. This case was in an area where it is said that jurors cannot cope: complex financial law. They were asked, “Couldn’t you cope? Was there a problem?” When they were asked if they could not understand the case, they answered unequivocally, “Oh yes, we could understand the case. It was the lawyers who couldn’t understand the case.” That is precisely what the outcome of that analysis was.

The Minister resisted publishing the model, which is understandable. I can see why she is doing that. She wants it to be presented properly and transparently, I hope, but she has made the decision already, so at the very least, she should tell us the size of the saving and the size of the change. In my judgment, it is less than half of 1%—a point that I made in an intervention earlier. She may disagree. Well, let us see what she thinks the size of the saving really is, because we are expected to take this on trust, and we should never change something that is so fundamental to our constitution and justice system on trust. I do not think the Government’s policy will move the dial at all.

There is one other systemic issue that I want to raise. Again, my hon. Friends might not like it—

[Steve Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

That is not unusual.

[David Davis]

It is not unusual, I know.

My hon. Friends might not like my mentioning this primary case, because it undermined a part of the Thatcher Government’s activities. It was the case of Clive Ponting. He was the civil servant who gave out the information that the Belgrano was sunk while it was leaving the Falklands, not arriving. The judge in that case instructed the jury to find him guilty, but they found him not guilty. Why? Because they made a moral judgment about the powers and rights of the state over the citizen. We cannot replace that with any judicial mechanism.

My comment to the Minister is that I sympathise with the size of the problem, and she is right to try to take it on. I am glad she is doing so, and I will support her in what she does, but she should not tackle the problem by wrecking the system. Justice delayed is justice denied, but summary justice is not justice at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I would not say this of most of the debates that I attend in the House, but this one has been genuinely revealing, primarily because of what the Minister said at the end and the opening of her remarks. As the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister) pointed out powerfully—he speaks with great professional experience on this issue—these proposals will not work. That is exactly what the Minister has been told by her own colleagues. The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) described the proposals as “ludicrous” and said that they will not work. It is what she has been told by her own profession—her own colleagues in the legal profession point to the fact that these proposals will not work.

That speaks to a conundrum we have considered in past debates on this issue: why is there such reluctance on the part of the Government to bring forward the impact assessment if they have already made this decision? If they have already taken the view that these changes will work, surely they want to present the evidence to prove that. As was pointed out earlier in the debate, if they will not publish the full impact assessment, surely they will publish the threshold—the minimum tipping point—on which this policy will be determined worth while, not least given how fundamental a change is being proposed.

As the Minister set out at the end of her remarks, she would be making this change irrespective of whether there is a crisis in the courts. There we have the crux—the head of the nail that the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim hit—which is that this is an ideological change. That in turn opens up a second paradox: if the change is ideological, why was it not in the manifesto? Indeed, if it is ideological, why is it contrary to what the Justice Secretary said so many times in opposition? When did he have his change of belief to this new ideological position?

Given the time limit, I will turn to a further contradiction. The Prime Minister has so often spoken about the need for more trust in politics, yet here we have a policy that marks a fundamental change after 800 years of legal precedent with no transparency or evidence that it will work, that was not in the manifesto and that is contrary to the remarks that the Government have made.

At the start of her remarks, the Minister spoke about choices. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) pointed out with the list he gave and as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) rightly identified, this will be a choice for Labour Back Benchers, and it is a choice that they are at risk of making only for the Prime Minister to then belatedly change his mind.