Dominic CascianiHome and legal correspondent
The government is set to announce plans to restrict the right to a jury trial in England and Wales in an attempt to turn around unprecedented backlogs and delays in justice.
David Lammy, the deputy prime minister and justice secretary, will lay out the proposals in Parliament later on Tuesday.
But he has insisted that juries would remain a “fundamental part of the criminal justice system”.
It is not clear if the plan – which would end jury trials other than for most serious cases including murder – has been approved by Cabinet or retreated from.
Last week his final “decision”, contained in a document circulated around government, was leaked to the BBC and The Times.
The proposals to cut jury trials are based on recommendations from a senior retired judge, who advised ministers that the reform would help tackle delays.
There are currently 78,000 cases waiting to be completed in Crown Courts. In practice, this means that some suspects being charged with serious crimes today may not have a trial until late 2029 or early 2030. Officials predict the caseload will grow to more than 100,000 before then, unless there is further action.
Last week’s leak of an internal government briefing showed final Ministry of Justice plans to create new forms of jury-less trials, where cases would be decided by a judge alone. Jury trial would therefore end for the majority of crimes currently before Crown Courts – including theft, most drugs, violent and sexual offences and fraud.
Cases would only definitely go before a jury if the defendant was likely to be jailed for more than five years or was accused of murder, manslaughter or rape.
Volunteer magistrates – who handle the overwhelming majority of criminal cases in the lowest courts – would see their sentencing powers doubled to two years.
The leaked plan does not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland and was circulated to other departments before final Cabinet sign off. It goes further than recommendations earlier this year from retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Brian Leveson.
Lammy has not confirmed the package, but said there would be an extra £550m over three years for specialist victim support services – and £34m aimed at attracting more barristers into criminal work.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast ahead of the announcement on Tuesday, he said that juries were, and would remain, a “fundamental part of our justice system” and paid tribute to the 350,000 people who serve in them every year.
But he suggested that magistrates could be used in their place for less serious crimes in order to bring the Crown Court backlog down.
“If you steal a phone, a trial could take two days, and lead to delays for more serious offences like rape or murder,” he said.
Lammy has previously said that cutting juries would be a mistake, but told the BBC that the “facts had changed” and the government needed to bring in reforms to clear the backlog.
“We’ve got to invest more, we’ve got to modernise, we’ve got to reform. I’m determined to do that for victims right across our country.”
But Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, said that it was not juries that had caused the unprecedented delays – but years of underfunding.
“Imposing an untried, untested layer of complexity and cost in the form of any new division of the Crown Court on our desperately underfunded system with its crumbling infrastructure is counter intuitive,” she said.
Many criminal barristers blame the previous Conservative government for the backlogs – saying that the courts have been starved of resources for more than a decade.
Robert Jenrick MP, shadow justice secretary, said David Lammy had extensively defended juries in the past – and accused him of abandoning his principles.
“Labour have chosen to spend billions of extra pounds on benefits payments rather than funding the courts to get the backlog down,” he said.
