Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Government whom he supports are greatly driven by opinion polls. Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that they frequently take opinion poll soundings. We know a little bit about such soundings, although things may have changed. I once saw an interesting internal document that the Government produced a couple years ago—I am not sure that I should have seen it, but it seemed to land on my desk. It explained some of the Government’s background motivation on the issue of fraud trials. It recognised that support for the principle of jury trial was extremely high. Equally, the Government’s soundings showed that the public were disquieted by occasional examples of fraud trials that cost huge sums, ran for many months and then collapsed. On the back of those findings, the Government seemed to adopt the approach that they should apply their mind to the issue of long and complex fraud trials, because the findings were a justification that juries should be dispensed with in such cases. That point is germane to the amendment because as I was trying to explain, I find it difficult to follow the intellectual argument, since there are plenty of other examples of long and complex trials. Another important point is that the evidence suggests that long and complex fraud trials that collapse do so for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with juries. That is the evidence that came out of Mr. Wooler’s report into the Jubilee line case, although at first sight, when his findings were splashed all over the papers, a bad impression was created of a trial with a jury that had lasted 18 months and had collapsed. The trial had cost millions of pounds—I cannot even remember the sums involved, but they were colossal—so it appeared to have a somewhat scandalous quality. However, when one reads Mr. Wooler’s report, it turns out that the problems lay with the Crown Prosecution Service’s approach to the matter. There may also have been other factors on which Mr. Wooler was not in a position to comment, but one thing is certain: the collapse had nothing to do with the jury. The supporting documentation went quite the other way and showed clearly that the jury was working well in that case.