Nick Timothy: Labour’s attack on jury trials will change our Constitution

Nick Timothy is the Shadow Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary and MP for West Suffolk. 

Labour are not only betraying the finest traditions of their own party, but also eight hundred years of legal heritage. The right to trial by jury can be traced back to Magna Carta and began England’s escape from feudalism towards becoming a free society. It is an ancient legal right that should be protected. None of the great Labour Prime Ministers – Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, and James Callaghan – would have dreamed of such ideological vandalism. But David Lammy is only too happy to take a wrecking ball to our constitution.

What makes this desecration of English liberty so shocking is the fact that the Government’s Bill does not even work on its own terms. We are told that the attack on jury trials is necessary to get the court backlog down. Crown court waiting times were actually lower under the Conservatives until the pandemic. The pandemic had an immense impact on our courts, along with the rest of the public realm. However, this is not new knowledge. If Labour believed this was necessary, then they should have put these changes in their manifesto. If they want proof this will work, then the proposals should have been put out to consultation. Labour decided not to do these things.

Ministers claim they are following the evidence.

Sir Brian Leveson’s claim that stripping back jury trial rights will save twenty per cent of court time has been held up as proof. But Sir Brian’s number is simply a guess. As Sir Brian himself admitted, “How can you find evidence or data without doing it?” What we do have is the Impact Assessment bashed out by officials struggling to keep up with the Government’s efforts to rush the Bill through Parliament. Even their own modelling – if you can call it that – estimates the Crown court time saved will be 3.5 per cent. The Institute for Government calculated that it will actually be closer to one or two per cent.

The Bill will take just one day of oral evidence and give five days to committee members to run through the legislation line by line. That is less time than what was given to the Railways Bill, the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill, and the Pension Schemes Bill. It is about the same time spent on the Salmon Act 1986, which introduced the offence of handling salmon in suspicious circumstances. It is less time than the 44 debates, statements and urgent questions Parliament has heard on Israel, Palestine and Lebanon since the election.

When you look at what is happening in our courts, it is plain to see that juries are not the cause of the backlog nor an obstacle to resolving them. Over 64 Crown courtrooms were empty every day on average over the past year. That is twelve per cent of all Crown courtrooms in England and Wales. Defendants are pleading guilty later in the process, wasting time in the courts. Getting the backlog down requires more efficient use of court time.

Liverpool Crown Court has shown exactly how to do this. Intensive case management has fast-tracked drug offence and domestic abuse cases to secure earlier guilty pleas. Liverpool’s average wait time from charge to trial is 206 days, compared to an average of 321 in England and Wales. Labour MP Kim Johnson, chair of the APPG on Miscarriages of Justice, has called on the Government to look at Liverpool “as an example for what can be delivered nationally”.

But instead of doing the hard yards of court reform, Lammy has chosen to push ahead with this terrible Bill and to avoid another humiliating U-turn. By doing this, he is ignoring how the Bill will actually lead to more court time being wasted. Judges will have to hold hearings on either-way cases to determine whether the likely sentence will be three years or more. In cases with multiple defendants, judges will spend hours listening to each of their representatives. They will spend even more time writing rulings that need to be “appeal proof”.

Juries do not suffer from these constraints.

Jurors can deliberate on reaching a verdict while judges are free to oversee other cases. But under the new legislation, judges will lose this time. Juries also do not need to explain their reasoning after reaching a verdict, while under this law judges must – which will take time, lead to more appeals, and risk the politicisation of the judiciary.

If we take the words of Lammy and his ministers at face value, the reason for this Bill is ideological vandalism. Ministers have explicitly said the change is “ideological” and they would be doing this even if there were no crisis in the courts. This is not the first time Labour politicians and officials have plotted to remove jury trial rights. They tried to attack juries in 1999, 2003, and 2007. Armed with a massive majority, Labour are taking this opportunity to do something they have wanted for a long time.

The modern left-wing project has always wanted to transform Britain from a political constitution into a legal constitution. Less power in the hands of citizens and their representatives. More power to officials and regulators.

Nothing better captures this constitutional shift than the attack on jury trials. In the space of a few months, Labour will transform what has taken centuries to build. This Bill will fundamentally shift the balance of power away from the public and towards the state. This Labour Government is determined to finish the job started by Tony Blair.

We must oppose them every step of the way.