Ministers Drop the Plan to Cut Jury Trials
The government has abandoned plans for judge-alone Crown Court trials where the likely sentence was under three years, and has dropped the proposed Crown Court Bench Division altogether. Judge-alone trials will survive only for long, technical fraud and financial cases. Defendants still lose the right to elect a jury trial, and magistrates’ sentencing powers still rise from twelve months to eighteen.
This is the Burnham government’s sharpest break yet with what it inherited. The proposals came from Sir Brian Leveson’s review and were announced by David Lammy as justice secretary in December; they cleared their first Commons hurdle earlier this year. Alex Norris, the new Lord Chancellor, said he had “heard the strength of feeling on the proposals for increasing the number of judge-alone trials” and had decided to change course. The pressure he is left with is unchanged: 80,829 Crown Court cases were outstanding at the end of June, almost a third of them waiting a year or more, close to double the 2020 figure, and projected to reach 100,000 without the changes now dropped. What survives still moves a great deal: the Criminal Bar Association puts the elect-and-sentencing package at 25,000 cases a year leaving the Crown Court, including 5,500 jury trials, into magistrates’ courts whose own backlog is rising. Andrew Thomas KC, its chair, said nothing inspires more public trust than twelve ordinary citizens deciding the facts together, and that it “would be a car crash” if magistrates tried to take on serious and sensitive cases. Kirsty Brimelow KC of the Bar Council warned that women, black people, mixed-race people and older people elect jury trials more often, so removing the right “risks deepening existing disparities”. Ministers will write in a statutory commitment to an independent reviewer of exactly that. Watch the Courts and Tribunals Bill when it returns later this month.