Courts and Tribunals Bill

Katie Lam Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

We have heard a great deal from Government Members about the necessity of these court reforms. They say that in order to tackle the backlog in our courts, we need to curb jury trials, but previous statements from Ministers betray the Government’s true intentions. On 7 January, standing at the Dispatch Box, the Minister for Courts and Legal Services said,

“People ask me, ‘Sarah, would you be doing this if there was not a crisis in our courts?’ I say yes”—[Official Report, 7 January 2026; Vol. 778, c. 284.]

It would be bad enough to attack the time-honoured right to a jury trial in the name of administrative efficiency; to do so for ideological reasons, without candidly making that ideological case to the public, is a disgrace.

The British people can see what is really going on. The Government want to curb jury trials because they do not trust the public. They think that judges know best, and would rather the justice system was run entirely by them. We know this to be the case because whenever the Government have a choice to make between the British people and their friends in the legal profession, they are on the side of the lawyers, every single time. We saw this “judges know best” approach in the Prime Minister’s disastrous Chagos giveaway; we see it on asylum, immigration and the European convention on human rights; we see it in the Government’s plans to allow prosecutions of veterans who fought in Northern Ireland; and now, we see it in their plans to curb jury trials.

However, jury trials exist for a reason. They are designed to ensure that the judiciary can never stray too far from the public’s conception of justice and fairness. At a time when public trust in the judiciary is low, can it really be sensible to take away this crucial backstop?

I will take just a single example of the divergence between public morality and judicial opinion. According to research conducted by the Free Speech Union, there is a huge gap between the successes of defences based on the right to free speech in judge-led cases and in cases heard by a jury. In judge-only cases at magistrates courts, just 16% of free-speech defences succeeded; in Crown court cases, where juries very often sit, 28% of free-speech defences succeeded. There is a clear divergence between the public’s appreciation of justice and the views of the judicial establishment.

The result of this Government’s plans will be to further alienate the public, and to drag the justice system further away from the views of the British people. If that is what they want, they should at least be straightforward about it.