Courts and Tribunals Bill (Seventh sitting)

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I will first call Dr Kieran Mullan.

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I am sure we will get to hear from the hon. Member for Birmingham Erdington shortly.

The proposal in clause 3 is being framed as a mere administrative adjustment—a common-sense fix for a system under strain. The Government’s plan to introduce a Crown court bench division, where a judge sits alone without magistrates to decide the fate of those accused of either-way offences, is being sold to the public as a remedy for the backlogs that currently paralyse our courts. But we must be clear from the outset that the crisis in our courts is not the result of the jury system. The backlog, which sees tens of thousands of cases waiting for a hearing, is the result of long-term challenges and the unprecedented impact of covid on our justice system.

Eroding a defendant’s right to a trial by their peers is not a fix; it is a fundamental reconfiguration of the English legal system. Across the Bill, we see a pattern emerging: a shift away from what we are clear is the gold standard of justice towards a swift model. The evidence supporting it is dangerously thin, and we must resist the permanent eroding of a right that has stood for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The right to a jury trial is often described as fundamental. It is not merely a traditional quirk of our system; it is an important constitutional safeguard. The core of the Government’s plan, as outlined in their impact assessment and the Second Reading briefings, is to remove the right to elect. Currently, if someone is charged with an either-way offence—crimes like theft, assault or certain drug offences—they have a right to choose whether they are tried by a jury in the Crown court or by magistrates. The Government’s plan to strip away that choice in clause 3, under a new bench division model for when the sentence outcome is likely to be three years or less, will remove even the role of lay magistrates from the decision.

The briefing provided by the organisation JUSTICE, which I have referred to several times, makes a compelling case against that. JUSTICE points out that the right to elect is a long-standing protection that ensures that a defendant can seek the judgment of a diverse group of citizens when they feel the state’s power is being unfairly applied. By removing that right, we are effectively saying that the state knows better than the citizen how they should be judged. This is not unheard of, as we have talked about before, but clause 3, combined with previous clauses, represents it being done at a scale never seen before.

This is a dangerous path. When we move cases from juries to a bench division, we are moving from a system of community participation to a system of professionalised adjudication. The jury is the part of our constitution where the greatest number of ordinary citizens have a direct, hands-on role in the administration of justice. It is the primary way that the public grant their consent to the upholding of criminal law. If we remove the public from the process, we risk the law becoming something done to people, rather than something that belongs to them.

The Government’s narrative suggests that a judge-led bench division will be just as fair as a jury, only faster. But it ignores the fundamental and unique aspect of fairness delivered by a jury trial, which they acknowledge by continuing to maintain jury trials for what they describe as the “more serious” offences. A jury is, by definition, balanced. It consists of 12 people from different backgrounds, with different life experiences and different biases, in the crucible of the jury room. Their diversity is its greatest strength; a single judge, no matter how well intentioned, cannot possibly replicate that breadth of perspective.

There is also the phenomenon of being case-hardened: when a professional judge or magistrate hears 50 similar cases of theft or assault in a year, there is a natural human tendency to begin seeing patterns rather than individuals. Evidence that might seem fresh or potentially exonerating to a jury can seem like the usual excuse to a professional who has heard it hundreds of times before.

Juries bring fresh eyes; they are not jaded by the grind of the system. They are instructed to look only at the facts of the case before them. That is why juries are considered—by the Opposition, at least—to be the gold standard. The evidence submitted to the Committee warns that we lack clarity as to why the Government are so eager to discard this standard. If the jury is the best way to ensure an accurate and fair verdict, the burden of proof for removing it must be exceptionally high.

Furthermore, the bench division model threatens to undermine the lay element of our justice system. Originally, as recommended in the Leveson review, the idea was that a judge would sit with two magistrates. That was intended to maintain at least some form of community involvement. However, clause 3 moves towards judge-only trials for many cases, discarding even the judge-plus-two compromise.

I will now address the primary argument made by the Minister in her opening remarks. The Government claim that moving to the bench division will significantly reduce the backlog. However, the Institute for Government has produced an insightful analysis, which we have referred to frequently, suggesting that the evidence for those savings is incredibly weak.

The IFG points out that the vast majority of Crown court time is not actually spent on the types of trials that the Government want to move to the bench division. The cases being targeted are the less serious ones, which already take up less time than more complex cases such as murder, which will remain subject to jury trial. According to the IFG’s modelling, if judge-only trials are 20% faster than a jury trial, the total impact on the overall Crown court backlog would be a reduction of 2%. When we consider the constitutional cost of us losing, at this unprecedented scale, the right to access a jury, that is simply not sufficient.

The backlog is not caused by juries being slow; it is more often caused by ineffective trials that are postponed because witnesses do not show up, because solicitors or barristers are unavailable, or because courtrooms are not fit to operate in. These are systemic failures, and moving a trial from a jury to a judge does not make a witness appear or fix a broken courtroom.

The Bill proposes a threshold of cases likely to attract a sentence of up to three years being diverted to the bench division. Predicting a sentence before a trial is never an exact science, and that is something that magistrates actually have more experience of than judges. That unprecedented scenario—without the safeguards that we sought to add through a right of appeal, which the Government rejected—will create huge questions of impartiality and bias.

A three-year sentence is not a minor matter. Three years in prison is a life-altering event. It can mean the loss of a home, a career and a family. To suggest that a person facing such a consequence does not deserve what they consider to be the fairest possible trial betrays that principle of fairness in our justice system when the consequences are so severe.

There is also the issue of the absence of a sunset clause. If these measures are truly a temporary response to tackle an emergency backlog, they should include a sunset clause that ensures that rights are restored once the crisis has passed. As I have said previously, changes were made during world war two and then reversed when the war was over. The fact that the Government have resisted such a clause suggests that this is not a temporary fix, but a permanent land grab by the state. Once the right to a jury is surrendered for either-way offences, it is highly unlikely that any future Government will be in a position to restore it.

We must see the Crown court bench division for what it is: a policy of convenience, not a policy delivering justice. It is a policy that ignores the findings of the IFG, which would require us to focus more heavily on other elements of the system. It is a policy that ignores the warnings from JUSTICE, which highlight the erosion of the defendant’s right to elect and its impact on public confidence and fairness in the judicial system. It is a policy that even ignores the original, more balanced recommendations of the Leveson review, which at least sought to keep lay magistrates involved.

We are told that we must modernise and that we must be efficient. The purpose of a criminal trial is not to process cases as quickly as possible; it is to arrive at the truth through a process that the defendant, the victim and the public have trust in. If we allow the Government to erode the jury system in the name of the backlog on this occasion to this extent, we are sending a message that this constitutional right is highly conditional, and that it can be traded away whenever the state finds it too expensive or too cumbersome to maintain. As the Minister frequently points out, lots of countries do without it; “Why shouldn’t we?” will be the next argument.

Instead of stripping away rights, the Government should be more focused on the areas that we can all agree on: prisoner transport, early legal advice, more efficient listing, Crown Prosecution Service reviews of cases in the backlog, facilities that work and IT that works. We do not fix a house by tearing it down to its foundations because the roof is leaking; we fix the roof. Jury trials ensure that our laws remain grounded in the common sense of ordinary people. Let us apply some of that common sense to tackling this issue. Common sense will lead us to oppose clause 3.

--- Later in debate ---

[Linsey Farnsworth]

I do apologise, Ms Jardine.

The report by the Deputy Prime Minister, as he is now, was conducted almost a decade ago. It highlighted concern about the sentencing decisions of judges, so it is often cited—understandably—as a reason to be cautious about judge-only trials. New clause 29 would ensure that a review of judge-only trials will be conducted after a year, and should there be disparities in the conviction rates for those of an ethnic minority background and/or for white British persons living in lower-income households, measures can and will be put in place to prevent such disparities from arising.

It is also right that a further review is conducted between 35 and 36 months after enactment, as the new clause suggests, both to check the initial findings and to take account of the fact that things can change. In the review conducted by the Deputy Prime Minister, for example, it was found that where CPS charging decisions were concerned, a defendant’s ethnicity did not affect the likelihood of their being charged. However, subsequent research conducted by the University of Leeds, in which the outcomes of decision making in 195,000 cases between 2018 and 2021 were examined, identified evidence of disproportionality in CPS decision making. Specifically, defendants from minority ethnic backgrounds were significantly more likely to be charged than a white British defendant for a comparable offence.

Additional research by the independent disproportionality advisory group and scrutiny by the CPS itself has led to an action plan to tackle the disproportionality that was found to exist, and to deliver change. There is precedent for ongoing review of disparities in outcomes within the criminal justice system where ethnicity is concerned, and precedent for action being taken to address such disparities.

Recent research by the University of Birmingham identified concern about racial bias within juries, particularly when there is no representation of ethnic minorities among the 12 people serving on a jury. This research cited a case in which an attack on the victim was caught on CCTV, yet in May 2022 a jury with no black members acquitted most of the perpetrators. The researchers concluded that their study raised important questions about whether the public in England and Wales see juries as being fair and just in relation to racial minorities, and that juries in England and Wales remain extremely lacking in diversity; that is what the study found. Another problem the study identified in that case was that the concerns of victims’ families about racial bias among the jury were never investigated.

[Dr Mullan]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Linsey Farnsworth]

No. I will make some progress; we need to make progress today.

The researchers found that more than 90% of respondents in the survey they conducted believed that discrimination on juries should be reported to trial judges and properly investigated, yet there is no mechanism under current law that allows juries to do so.

Appeal, a not-for-profit organisation, has submitted evidence opposing some elements of the Bill. However, in a paper that it prepared in 2024, Appeal set out concerns relating to majority decisions, as opposed to unanimous jury decisions, and the impact of racial bias. The case of R v. Connor et al was cited, in which questions from the jury suggested that there had been a focus on the defendant’s race and a letter from a juror after conviction confirmed racial bias in the jury’s deliberations.

Section 8 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 provides for confidentiality in jury decision making. However section 8A, enacted in Scotland, permits the Lord Justice General to allow information about deliberations from the jury room to be disclosed for the purposes of research. That provides an opportunity for the same to follow in England and Wales. Recent statistics show an increase in hate crime, including crime based on race and religion, rates of which spiked after Brexit and, recently, following the Southport murders. Now more than ever, we must be conscious of the impact that discrimination could have on the fairness, or otherwise, of jury trial.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yasmin Qureshi]

No, because let’s face it: in the jury trials we are talking about, people are not getting sentences of more than three years. There is hardly going to be a King’s counsel dealing with those cases—it is not even going to be a leading junior who will deal with those cases. A lot of the barristers will be middle ranking; the KCs will not be dealing with these types of cases. There are enough members of the Bar to fill the capacity issue.

[Dr Mullan]

The hon. Member for Gloucester pointed to what the Bar Council said, but let us be fair and talk about what it said in its completeness. It may well have said that the people currently practising dropped out, but the Minister quite directly asked how it was going to train these people up and get back to that point, and it made the point that the people who have dropped out of practising criminal law have not evaporated into thin air. They are still there; they are just practising in other areas of law, and when the situation is right for them, they can just come back into practising criminal law.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

That is absolutely correct. Of course, one of the reasons why some people left the criminal Bar is the fact that the legal aid funding was not great, but I assure Members that if they did not have other work to do, they would come back to the Bar. There are enough barristers and solicitors in the legal system for that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I entirely agree. The state of some of the courts in this country is sad. They are completely neglected, which creates a lot of challenges.

[Dr Mullan]

We are leaning heavily on the points made by the Criminal Bar Association. The Government seem quite rightly to be extremely concerned about the training of future barristers, but the Criminal Bar Association has made the point that that training often takes place in what the Government are describing as less serious cases. That is where the more junior people get the experience they need to work on the more serious cases. If those cases are not available, how do the Government expect barristers to be trained to the level required to take on the more serious cases with a jury trial?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I agree with the hon. Member.

I want to set out why we have a backlog and what we can do. Everybody has talked about various things that we could do, such as triaging the cases more effectively and more routinely, like Liverpool Crown court and some of the others that have seen a considerable reduction. There are the issues of transporting prisoners on time and internet connections in court. We have discussed a number of things that can lead to a reduction in the backlog.

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington and I thank her for tabling new clause 29. The reason why we need it is that, years ago, the importance of jury trials was recognised by the current Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, and the fact that the new clause has been tabled shows that we believe they are important. We really should not be restricting jury trials. It is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.