Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

I am very happy to have that debate on appropriate occasions, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and there will doubtless be many. The important point is that although this measure relates to courts in England and Wales, people from all over the world—not just all over the UK—appear before those courts, and we want jury trial for those who appear before them on serious charges, including serious fraud charges. So our position is absolutely clear. This is about the safeguards that we put in place and what conditions will be satisfied if, against our will and our votes in both Houses, such a proposal were to pass through Parliament. New clause 4 would insert the following alternative wording:"““The condition is the complexity of the trial or the length of the trial (or both) would be likely to make the trial so burdensome to the members of a jury hearing the trial that the interests of justice required that the trial should be conducted without a jury.””" The current law says that"““serious consideration should be given to the question of whether the trial should be conducted without a jury””." We say that the test needs to be firmer than that and as new clause 4 states, the law should state that the"““interests of justice required that the trial should be conducted without a jury.””" The burden of making the case must fall on the Government. They are seeking to persuade us that there will be circumstances in which the interests of justice require that a trial be conducted without a jury, but so far we have not heard a strong argument from them in that regard. If I may, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I will reserve until we move on to the next group of amendments, because it will be more appropriate then, discussion of the strong evidence that makes it clear that all that we know about jurors serving on serious fraud trials supports the argument that they do understand the complexities of such cases and want to continue to do that job. There is no evidence to suggest that jurors find such trials a problem. If that is indeed so—if there is not an interests of justice case that one can argue from the point of view of the juror—only one of two counter-arguments can be advanced. The Minister and the Solicitor-General have advanced one of them in previous debates, but they have not advanced the second, which I will explain in due course. The first argument, to repeat phrases used by the Solicitor-General and others, is that the full culpability of the case—in other words, the full range of the offence—would be better available to the courts in trials without a jury. The Solicitor-General will make his own speech in his own way, but the argument throughout the debate has been that one flaw of the present system is that one has to cut down a case, as it were, to put it to the jury, because it would otherwise become too long and complex—in other words, too risky in terms of the jury’s comprehension. As a result, not all the defendants who might be charged in a given case are charged, or not all the charges that might be put on the indictment are put. Interestingly, the only jury who have recently spoken on this issue did not say that the prosecution had confused them, although they did point out that the defence was sometimes not as clear as it might have been. Our view is that, in the interests of justice, we should always make sure that everybody who should be charged is charged, but the interests of justice are not necessarily served by having 24 or 48 counts on an indictment if six will do. The House will be aware that because the maximum sentence for one count is the same as for another, similar count, a court’s ability to punish someone with imprisonment—actual and immediate, or suspended—or a fine, for example, is not changed simply by the addition of counts. Of course, if there were 10 counts, for example, a judge could say that they must be served consecutively, but 12 or 24 counts are not needed to achieve the justice that a smaller number of counts can achieve.