Lammy’s jury trial curbs ‘will save just 2pc of court time’
Reforms would only create ‘marginal’ gains as Justice Secretary tries to reduce backlog of court cases
David Lammy’s plans to scale back jury trials will save less than 2 per cent of time in crown courts, research by a think tank has found.
The Institute for Government (IFG) said the gains from replacing jury trials with judge-only courts would generate only “marginal” time savings.
Its report, published on Thursday, warned that this cast doubt on the success of the reforms, which are designed to bring down the backlog of almost 80,000 Crown Court cases.
Victims are having to wait more than two years, and in some cases up to five years, for a trial to take place.
The report said it would take at least two years before the overall reforms had any impact, meaning it would not be until 2029 that the Government could hope to see the backlog begin to fall.
The findings are a further blow to the Justice Secretary’s plans, which are facing opposition from up to 60 Labour MPs, the legal profession and peers across all parties in the House of Lords.
‘A fight on its hands’
The IFG report said: “The measures are very politically contentious, and strong resistance – especially to judge-only trials – among criminal lawyers and some judges will only make it harder to enact them.
“The Government is likely to have a fight on its hands to get legislation through the House of Lords, even if it passes the Commons.
“Judge-only trials in particular will provide only marginal savings, and are likely to be highly controversial and to damage public confidence in the criminal justice system.”
The Government is proposing to scrap jury trials where it is likely that the defendant will face a prison sentence of under three years and replace those cases with a judge-only court or hearings by magistrates, whose powers will be increased from being able to consider cases with jail terms of up to a year to up to 18 months.
The IFG report estimated that the number of jury trials would fall by about 50 per cent, from representing 3 per cent of total cases in the court system to around 1.5 per cent.
The overall package of changes would reduce the total time taken in courtrooms by only about 7 to 10 per cent, with judge-only trials contributing to a fraction of that.
Time savings will be ‘marginal’
Cassia Rowland, who wrote the report, said: “The Government’s proposed reforms to jury trials will not fix the problems in the Crown Court. The time savings from judge-only trials will be marginal at best, amounting to less than 2 per cent of Crown Court time.
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