Criminal Court Reform

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lammy]

I am hugely grateful for my right hon. Friend’s expertise in these areas. She will know that for lots of reasons, particularly to do with poverty, many women are affected by criminal cases that do not command a sentence of much more than 12 months. Actually, the vast majority of crimes committed by women are dealt with by magistrates, and it is my judgment that those magistrates could do more. Keeping in mind the victims and centring them in our thinking, it cannot be right that we are asking women to wait. In a city like London, a woman who is raped tomorrow will not have her trial listed until 2028 or 2029. The Victims’ Commissioner supports these changes because they put those women first. I also remind my right hon. Friend of the £550 million that I am dedicating to victim support to support the very women she talks about.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

The Government deserve credit for taking seriously a serious report into a serious problem, but is it the Justice Secretary’s preference that the changes he has outlined to jury trial will be permanent or that they will recede when the problem of backlogs recedes? In relation to judges alone deciding either-way cases, he knows that Sir Brian’s recommendation is that the presumption should be that there would be judge-only trials for cases where the sentence may be three years or less, but that presumption could be rebutted. Is it the Government’s intention that that should be a presumption and not a definitive rule? Finally, he knows that Sir Brian also recommended that plea hearings be pushed back to allow for advice on guilty pleas to be given more clearly and more fully, and that is likely to increase the number of guilty pleas preventing cracked trials. The Justice Secretary has talked about extra funding for the criminal Bar, but will he focus that funding so that people can be advised early and we can avoid those cracked trials?

[Mr Lammy]

We will consult on how we implement it so that we can deal with cracked trials. I am pleased that the right hon. and learned Gentleman recognises the importance of Sir Brian’s work and his deliberations with his panel. It is not my expectation that these rules will change. Sir Brian drew on his tremendous experience to reflect on the complexity and the demand that we are seeing in our criminal justice system. For example, DNA evidence, phenotyping, the range of new laws that this Parliament is introducing, and the increase in sexual crimes as a result of smartphones and other technology all require changes in the system, so I believe that the changes that we are making will be permanent.