This isn’t justice
From David Lammy’s own report1 people of colour get fairer trials in front of juries than in front of magistrates. Twelve ordinary people bring a breadth of wisdom, knowledge and experience that cannot be replicated in a single judge, or even two magistrates.
This isn’t the will of the people
When work was done for the aborted British Bill of Rights, The Ministry of Justice looked at what was quintessentially British and what the British public valued most. The top two were the NHS and trial by jury. Their report found2,
“The right to jury trial is limited to more important cases, yet the government has sought to remove the right in certain types of serious case. This goes against public and Parliamentary opinion, which tends to give overwhelming support to the inclusion of protected trial by jury in a British bill of rights.”
And
“The ICM / Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust State of the Nation poll 2006 found that 89 per cent of people would include right to fair trial by jury in a bill of rights. However, difficulties are immediately apparent over how, and by whom, this issue would be negotiated and decided.“
This will not reduce the backlog
Delays in court are caused by a whole variety of reasons but generally not by the jury. There is a pool of jurors available in the jury waiting room so there is very little delay swearing in a jury.
There is a claim that more legal explanations have to be made because of the jury, but more and more people are forced by legal aid cuts to represent themselves. If anyone is unrepresented then these same legal explanations have to be made.
Leverson estimated that 20% of court time can be saved by removing juries. It is not clear if that figure still applies to cases where cuts in legal aid mean that a defendant has to represent themselves. Multiple other sources have stated that restrictions on the number of days that judges can work, insufficient judges, low staff moral, prosecution and defence barristers leaving criminal law, reductions in legal aid, a failure to increase court capacity when police numbers were significantly increased, the poor state of repair of courts, poor planning for cases and other systems failures have more influence on court delays. 345678
This will not reduce costs
The cost of jurors is very low. A lot of employers don’t claim back the costs from the government, they regard it as part of the costs of employing people. Jurors are only able to claim a minimal amount for lunch (£5.71 per day9) and transport, (bus or train ticket or 31.4p per mile for a car).
In magistrates courts district judges and magistrates tend to convict more people than juries. The extra convictions in the Crown Court will lead to more people going to prison, which will increase costs. The average cost of housing people in prison is £53,000 a year10, this will likely mean the new system will cost more than jury trials.
This is the path to authoritarianism
Juries are one of the few constitutional safeguards that we have in the United Kingdom. A former law lord said11, “The first object of any tyrant in Whitehall would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will; and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for no tyrant could afford to leave a subject’s freedom in the hands of twelve of his countrymen. So that trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution, it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.”
In his ruling in the Warner case12 Judge Saini quotes Sir Patrick Devlin: “[The jury is] an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man’s idea of what is fair and just. If it does not, the jury will not be a party to its enforcement… The executive knows that in dealing with the liberty of the subject it must not do anything which would seriously disturb the conscience of the average Member of Parliament or of the average juryman. I know of no other real checks that exist today upon the power of the executive.”
The law is complex enough, we need it to make sense to ordinary people, juries do that. And we should be very very wary of any person that looks to dim “the lamp that shows that freedom lives”.
1 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/lammy-review-final-report 2 https://justice.org.uk/reports/a-british-bill-of-rights 3 https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-2025/criminal-justice/criminal-courts 4 https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/contact-or-visit-us/press-office/press-releases/backlogs-continue-to-spiral-in-crisis-ridden-criminal-justice-system 5 https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/reducing-the-backlog-in-the-crown-court/ 6 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmpubacc/348/report.html 7 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czdg7r8de2lo 8 https://ifs.org.uk/articles/whats-gone-wrong-crown-courts 9 https://www.gov.uk/jury-service/what-you-can-claim-if-youre-an-employee 10 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67e51acfba11d0060f606d68/costs-per-place-costs-per-prisoner-2023-2024-summary.pdf 11 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/vo991124/text/91124-08.htm 12 https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/hm-solicitor-general-v-warner/