Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

All I can say is that when I went to the Table Office to table my amendment I do not remember seeing any amendment in the name of the Liberal Democrats along the lines of new clause 5. In a conciliatory spirit I shall return to the main issue, which is the contents of the new clause. The key issue will turn on the likely impact of the safety of the verdict. That has a particular merit. To understand it, one must return to the Government’s stated position. The Government have gone out of their way—they have no option but to—to insist that juries are capable of returning true verdicts. If they were to depart from that principle, they would announce their complete lack of confidence in the entirety of the jury trial system. Indeed, we know from the Wooler inquiry into the collapse of the Jubilee line case—one of the very few pieces of evidence that we have about the ways juries function—and from the supporting research documents that went with it, which I conveniently obtained the day before Second Reading, that in that trial, which meandered on for 18 months before it collapsed, the jury had a very good grasp of the issues in the case. There is every reason to suppose, when one considers the responses that the jury gave to those who investigated the matter, that had they had an opportunity of returning the verdict, no one could suggest from the evidence that the verdict would have been unsafe or unsatisfactory, because after 18 months they had preserved a complete grip on the issues that they were having to consider. If we were to adopt new clause 5, it would have the merit that it would be rather difficult ever to have a trial without a jury because it would have to be argued before a judge that there was something about the complexity or length of the trial which made it likely that the safety of the verdict might be impaired. In such circumstances no trial without a jury, on the existing evidence that we have, would ever take place. That is why I commend the new clause.