The British criminal justice system is in crisis. More than a decade of austerity, Covid, and many other issues have culminated in trials being postponed into 2030. The government’s solution? Cut jury trials for all crimes carrying a sentence of less than three years. The government has framed this as a straightforward debate: remove juries or tolerate unjustifiable delays for victims and defendants alike.
This is a false binary, and one that could backfire.
The costs and benefits of reform
The costs are real, making the reforms risky at best. The Institute for Government (IfG) has estimated that roughly half of UK jury trials would be scrapped.
Juries are a uniquely democratic form of peer-on-peer justice; Lord Judge, the lord chief justice observed in 2009 that “trial by jury is a hallowed principle of the administration of criminal justice”.
But by relying on a judiciary that is blatantly unrepresentative of the British public – just 1% of circuit judges identify as Black or Black British – the government risks deepening the “chronic trust deficit” David Lammy himself identified back in 2017.
The benefits, however? This proposal is estimated to save around 10% of courts’ time according to the IfG. This contrasts poorly with a 23% decrease in processed cases due to productivity losses in the last decade. Lammy has suggested the backlog could be cleared by the mid-2030s via these reforms, an ambition that does not line up with the IfG’s estimations.
This 10% saving largely depends on the magistrates picking up the slack from the crown courts at the cost of procedural fairness: fewer jurors, shorter trials, limits to legal representation, and less deliberation on key issues.
Proposed savings are accompanied by a grab-bag of reforms, presented as necessary, which will aggravate the risks posed to rights and justice. The automatic right of appeal at magistrates’ courts would be scrapped under Labour’s plans.
The role of juries
England’s jury system has evolved over around 800 years, with its origins tracing back to the Magna Carta. It has become an established principle of British common law.
The seminal case law for juries is Bushell’s Case in 1670 where jurors resisted efforts to convict two Quakers, despite the judge imprisoning the jury until they returned a guilty verdict. The jury’s role is as a check on power.
More recently, the Hillsborough inquests – the longest case in history – offer a contemporary example of juries holding the powerful to account; challenging a narrative that scapegoated ordinary people for police misconduct.
This is the root of why these cuts are so fundamental. Lammy had previously tweeted in 2020 that “you don’t fix the backlog with trials that are widely perceived as unfair”, and that “criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.” These sentiments appear at odds with the sweeping cutbacks to jury trials he now proposes, and which were notably missing from Labour’s manifesto.
The downsides of sacrificing jury service
The risks are numerous. The judiciary, which can often become desensitised to these cases and also necessarily lacks the diversity of background that juries provide, is already in a situation of declining public confidence.
Juries are drawn at random, are less susceptible to institutional bias, and are representative of the public and society that the justice system serves. This gives juries’ verdicts a degree of public confidence: a crucial part of the justice system’s legitimacy that would be hindered by these reforms.
YouGov polling found that people who have served on juries are significantly more likely than the general public (67% to 54%) to prefer the final decision to rest with a jury rather than a judge. They are also more likely to say they would serve on a jury again.
This is a real vote of confidence. In many ways, jury service is the most important duty we can serve in peacetime. Labour is sacrificing that democratic legitimacy for little benefit.
Another problem arises from the expectation that magistrates will simply pick up the load. Yet, for every hour added to the average trial’s length, the projected time savings fall by over a percentage point.
The reality is stark: Conservative austerity reforms created a much stricter threshold for legal aid which will result in more unrepresented people at trial, risking delays and miscarriages of justice.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire
Magistrates’ courts face a crisis arguably as severe as the crown courts, with 373,084 outstanding cases. This backlog has soared by over 120,000 in the last two years alone. The magistrates’ yearly rate of completed cases has halved since 2016; it would take a decade to process the current backlog alone at this rate.
The Bar Council warns that these reforms put the magistrates at “high risk”, and with good reason: the IfG estimates that they could add 10-15% to magistrates’ workload.
Understaffed and underfunded magistrates’ courts face a bleak choice: decline to try cases, making the reforms pointless, or rush cases, at the expense of justice.
This unhappy marriage of rushed cases, without juries and with cuts to defendants’ rights of appeal, risks miscarriages of justice, improperly tested evidence, and unsafe convictions. Unrepresented defendants and overstrained courts aggravate those risks even more.
Even the upheaval to set up a new Bench Division in crown courts, or to transform magistrates’ roles, will pose significant delays for victims and defendants already trapped in years-long backlogs.
The false comparison
The government claims it will mirror Canada’s ‘judge-only’ trials, but the comparison is completely misleading. Canadian defendants may choose to waive a jury if they fear prejudice. Labour’s plan makes judge-only trials mandatory.
The government presents this as a like-for-like comparison, but it is little more than a distraction from the real effects of their reform.
As Professor Laura Hoyano warns, this comparison is a “misrepresentation that risks undermining centuries of common law protections.”
The heart of the problem
While the government argues that cutting jury trials is a real solution, it doesn’t argue that jury trials are the problem. Britain’s justice system is in crisis, but that crisis is born from underfunding, overworking, and understaffing – not from juries.
There are simply too few overworked court staff whose often most-experienced colleagues have been laid off, working in underfunded, often crumbling facilities.
Criminal lawyers get unpredictable, and often very low, income and work extremely long hours; it’s a common joke that they will never retire. This, unsurprisingly, has caused many trainees and pupils to look elsewhere, causing a shortage.
The crisis is not about a rise in incoming cases alone: the number of cases before the crown courts was roughly equivalent in 2016 and 2024, accounting for case complexity. The number of cases closed by the crown courts is simply far lower than it was ten years ago, and the magistrates’ completion rate is even worse. The IfG attributes the heart of the problem to a ‘productivity gap’ of nearly a quarter compared to 2016.
Fixing a symptom not the cause
Our courts have a productivity crisis, due mostly to austerity ‘efficiency cuts’ that have produced only inefficiency.
Our governments have created a punitive system with the highest incarceration rate anywhere in Western Europe, yet channel still more through ever ‘tougher’ criminal justice systems.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that justice funding is set to be 24% lower, in per-person terms, than in 2008. We are expecting more from less and getting nowhere. This contrasts with Scotland, which opted to increase investment, allowing it to be the only part of the UK where court backlogs have largely fallen back to pre-Covid levels.
Jury trial reforms therefore mark another government plan that will deliver marginal change for structural risk, all while the backlog continues to spiral out of control.
Criminal defence lawyer Greg Foxsmith has warned the time savings may be as low as 2%, not 10%. Victims waiting years for trial may receive trial only a few weeks sooner, and the trial they receive may be unreliable, rushed, or miscarried.
Despite opposition from thousands of lawyers and across party lines, including Labour MPs like Karl Turner and Charlotte Nichols, it seems the government will plough ahead.
If governments continue to look everywhere but at funding, the justice crisis will never end. As the backlog piles up further, the democratic legitimacy of our justice system erodes beneath our feet.
