The Jury is out
By Alexandra Vivona
A Majority Secured but the Jury is Still Out
I watched last night’s Commons vote on the Courts and Tribunals Bill with the same uneasy recognition I used to feel walking into a police station at three in the morning.
The House returned its verdict. With 304 MPs backing the motion and 203 opposing it, the Government secured a majority of 101.
It looked calm on the surface, but the real message was in the absences. Around ninety Labour MPs abstained and ten went further, voting against their own front bench. A quiet but unmistakable rebellion. Parliament didn’t shout, it simply withheld, a silence that echoed louder than a division bell.
In the Chamber the unease was spoken plainly enough. Former Shadow Justice Minister, Karl Turner MP, drawing on long years in the criminal courts, described the Bill as “unworkable, unpopular, unjust and unnecessary”.
His intervention struck a chord with me, because I have seen the same frailties of the system up close. Before I transferred to the Bar, I spent years as a criminal solicitor advocate in Manchester and Salford. Trudging between the magistrates’ and crown courts with only wood panelling, pink tape and tottering case files for company.
It was there I learned what justice looks like when it is held together by overworked hands and exhausted hope. Early in my career I also learned first-hand why jury trials matter for people charged with criminal offences, especially when loss of liberty is on the table. I learned that many arrive in the system with challenges that long predate their arrest. And that the system itself often operates under considerable strain.
So, when the Courts and Tribunals Bill was brought before Parliament, I felt that familiar tension between urgency and overreach. And last night’s vote only sharpened it.
The Bill may well pursue noble aims, but its constitutional route is harder to defend. It is nowhere to be found in Labour’s manifesto. The public has had no meaningful opportunity to endorse such a profound alteration to the criminal justice landscape. A reform touching a feature of the English legal system that has stood since the Magna Carta deserves a consultation process of far greater breadth and depth.
No one could accuse the Bill of timidity. It marches well beyond Leveson’s own recommendations, tearing out the right of defendants in either-way cases to elect trial by jury, a right Leveson had proposed merely to limit, not extinguish. It then proposes to endow magistrates with sentencing powers of 18 or 24 months, despite Leveson’s explicit view that the existing 12month cap should hold firm. In its most striking manoeuvre, it invents a Bench Division, allowing a single judge to try cases with likely sentences of three years or less, and expands judge only trials into the realm of complex fraud and financial wrongdoing, where the stakes, and the temptations, are at their highest.
The crisis is real enough. The Crown Court backlog in England and Wales sits at around eighty thousand cases. More than twenty thousand have been waiting over a year. Rape cases take an average of 423 days to conclude. These delays are not abstractions. They break people. Victims, witnesses, defendants, families. All left dangling in a limbo that corrodes faith in the system.
But the proposed cure has little connection to the underlying diagnosis. More than 3,200 lawyers including 22 retired judges and a significant number of senior barristers have warned that restricting jury trials will save less than 2% of court time. That is an incredible statistic. It is the courtroom equivalent of tightening your tie and calling it performance improvement.
The Bar Council, normally measured to the point of understatement, has made its position clear. The backlog is the offspring of a decade of under investment. Shuttered courtrooms. Curtailed sitting days. Broken technology. Chaotic disclosure. Prisoner escort failures. Jury trials are not the obstacle. Removing them will not fix this. They urge the Government instead to reopen courts, improve listing, modernise technology and fund legal aid properly.
The Criminal Bar Association website also makes its position unequivocally clear: “Let there be absolutely nodoubt: the Criminal Bar Association is fundamentally opposed to the proposed restrictions on the right to jury trial.”
A few hours before the vote, hundreds of solicitors and barristers marched on Parliament, warning that the reforms strip away the “fundamental” right to be tried by one’s peers. Carrying ‘No Jury, No Justice’ banners, they urged ministers to fix the backlog through more courts and more sitting days, not by removing juries from thousands of cases.
The backlog demands action. But rushing to pare back the jury system is not action of the right kind. Jury trials have survived war, political upheaval and every passing theory of criminal justice reform. They remain the firmest line between state authority and public judgment. To narrow their scope for the sake of a marginal efficiency gain is a choice that deserves far more scrutiny than it has been given.
Political urgency cannot be allowed to eclipse constitutional sense. Reform may be needed, but the foundations of criminal justice are the last place for improvisation.
These are the moments when you feel the balance of the room change. And until the evidence meets the standard we demand of others, the jury, mine included, remains out.