Courts and Tribunals Bill (Seventh sitting)

Linsey Farnsworth Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st April 2026 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I say gently that if we are referring to the Lammy review we give it its name, and if we are talking about the Secretary of State we refer to him as that and not just his name.

[Linsey Farnsworth (Amber Valley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington for tabling new clause 29, which I support. It is a long-standing principle, established in the case of R v Sussex Justices, ex parte McCarthy, that justice must be done and be seen to be done. It is famous as a legal precedent in establishing the principle that the mere appearance of bias is sufficient to overturn a judicial decision.

To be confident in our criminal justice system, the public need to be satisfied that it is fair. New clause 29 would provide important reassurance that there is a check and balance in place to review the changes the Bill introduces, and that any issues of bias arising from a trial without jury can and will be addressed.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Order. As I have said, if you are referring to the Secretary of State, can you use his title?

[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.

[Joe Robertson]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Linsey Farnsworth]

I am about to conclude, so I will not.

I support new clause 29, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington, but I submit that the change and modernisation that the Bill seeks to introduce bring an opportunity to review all aspects of the criminal justice system in relation to ethnicity and socioeconomic background to ensure fairness for all.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South and Walkden) (Lab)]

I want to comment on two points. First, I agree entirely with the speech of the hon. Member for Chichester on the problem with clause 3 and jury allocation, and I especially agree with her point about the retrospective reallocation of cases, whereby people waiting for trial by jury will suddenly find that their case will be removed from the jury and heard elsewhere. She outlined in comprehensive detail all the issues—not just jurisprudence issues but legal and factual issues. I support what she said so I will not repeat it.

I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley about these issues. She highlighted the disparities in the way that different groups of people are treated in our criminal justice system. I applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Erdington for tabling new clause 29. I hope that the Government will consider accepting it although, of course, if we did not abolish jury trial we would not need it.

We are told that the reason for clauses 1 and 3, which restrict access to jury trials in many cases, is to do with the backlog. That is where the Government start their position—the backlog—and I want to concentrate on that aspect. Please bear with me: I will blind the Committee with a few facts and figures because I think that they will make logical sense of why people such as me say that juries are not the reason for the delays. It is important that we get that sense.

There are currently around 88,000 cases awaiting trial in the Crown courts. The queue for the Crown court is now so long that some trials are being fixed for 2030—the Committee has heard that. We have talked about the old adage that, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” That is happening, and the delay is unacceptable, but the answer is honestly not to get rid of one of the fundamental systems that we have had in our country for centuries.

The reason for the delay is not juries but the court structure and how things happen there. One judge sitting in one courtroom for one day is known as a sitting day. The Old Bailey has 18 courts. It therefore has capacity for 18 sitting days per day, 90 sitting days per week and 4,500 sitting days in a 50-week year. For the last 15 years, restrictions have been placed on the number of sitting days in Crown court centres around the country. Resident judges, who are the principal judges at each court centre, have been told that funding will be given only for a limited number of sitting days. Restrictions of between 9% and 25% have been imposed. That is what the previous Government did.

There is always a queue for the Crown court; that is inevitable, as cases cannot be tried immediately. However—and here is the story—up until the start of 2019, that queue was managed without any undue delay. The backlog had come down from around 56,000 cases in 2014 to 33,000 cases by the start of 2019. All those cases were tried by a jury, and within a reasonable time: within six months if the defendant was in custody, and between eight and 12 months if they were on bail. Given that cases were being tried within a reasonable time in 2019, the suggestion that jury trials somehow take longer or are more complicated has no basis.

The length of the cases backlog rose from 33,000 at the start of 2019 to 71,000 by summer 2024, and rose by another 10% to around 80,000 last year. That increase is a direct consequence of the restrictions placed on sitting days. The problem was exacerbated by the closure of some courts. For example, Blackfriars Crown court in central London, which was a custom-made, modern Crown court building with eight courtrooms and the capacity to host 2,000 sitting days in a 50-week year, was closed and sold in 2019. Over the six years since then, 12,000 potential sitting days have been lost.

There are around 4,000 rape cases in the backlog. Trials for rape that have one defendant and one complainant often takes five days—although some trials are quicker and some take longer—so 2,400 of such cases could have been tried in the 12,000 sitting days that were lost following the closure of those eight courtrooms at Blackfriars. The budgetary decision to close one court led to the inability to try what would have been half of all rape cases in the backlog. Similar examples exist all over the country, including where individual courtrooms within a Crown court building sit empty, meaning that the court is open but operating below its potential capacity.

The Crown court estate has a maximum capacity of around 130,000 sitting days. Currently, it is permitted to have 113,000 sitting days, which is partly because the Government have invested some money and allowed an increase to the number of sitting days. The Government have said that that number is a “record high”, but it is high only relative to the low numbers of the previous 15 years. Given the current backlog, I would say that it is incorrect to say that it is high. We need to invest in more sitting days and having more courtrooms open.