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Ministers have proposed to end the right to a jury trial for a vast range of criminal offences in England and Wales, as they grapple with a huge backlog of cases that is delaying hearings by more than a year in many instances.
Under the shake-up, juries would remain involved in only the most serious trials — such as for rape, murder and manslaughter — or if there was a strong public interest. All other cases would be heard by a judge sitting alone.
The proposals were set out in a memo by justice secretary David Lammy, as reported by The Times. One person who had seen the notice said the account was accurate.
Lammy’s plans go far beyond proposals set out in July by retired High Court judge Sir Brian Leveson, who called for the end of the right to jury trial for a far more limited range of offences.
The Ministry of Justice said no final decisions had been made.
But it added: “We have been clear there is a crisis in the courts, causing pain and anguish to victims — with 78,000 cases in the backlog and rising — which will require bold action to put right.”
Mark Evans, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, called the proposals “extreme”.
“This is a fundamental change to how our criminal justice system operates and it goes too far,” he said.
Leveson had suggested limiting trial by jury to cases likely to result in a prison sentence of three years or more. He also proposed ending the use of juries in fraud and other serious and complex cases.
But rather than having one judge hearing non-jury cases alone, Leveson recommended that two magistrates sit alongside them.
England’s most senior judge, Lady Chief Justice Baroness Sue Carr, on Tuesday warned any reforms would need to be “properly resourced” otherwise the proposals would not have the “desired effect”.
When it comes to funding, the justice system is “nearly bottom of the list of priorities in the current spending ladder”, Carr said.
“We’re not giving up, but unless there is a radical recalibration of where we are in the pecking order then we are going to be having these sorts of discussions [about the justice system] for a very long time,” she added.
There has long been debate about whether defendants should retain the right to demand a jury trial in “either way” offences — those that can be heard in a non-jury magistrates’ court or in a Crown Court with a jury.
There have also been long-standing concerns about juries’ ability to grasp the complexity of some fraud cases and put up with the long duration of cases, which sometimes hear evidence for months.
Leveson’s report noted the amount of court time taken up for cases heard before juries had doubled from about 11 hours in 2001 to more than 22 hours in 2024.
There were 78,329 cases awaiting completion in crown courts in England and Wales at the end of June, more than twice the 38,070 at the end of 2019.
The median waiting time for a trial where the defendant has pleaded not guilty was 44.7 weeks in the April to June quarter, according to official statistics. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the median wait was 27 weeks.
The Serious Fraud Office, which investigates complex financial crime, declined to comment on the proposal.
However, Gideon Cammerman KC, who has acted on some high-profile fraud cases, said justice had meant a jury trial “for many hundreds of years”.
“It is not efficient to remove our justice system’s living purpose,” he added. “It is an act of cultural vandalism.”
Previous efforts to curtail rights to seek a jury trial were defeated by trenchant opposition from the legal profession and civil liberties campaigners in the early 2000s.