Tony Vaughan

I practised as a civil lawyer for most of my career, and I have been challenging written reasons and decisions my whole career. I do not have a problem with judges issuing written reasons in the criminal jurisdiction. I think it is a way of getting more transparency about why those decisions have been made. That is my personal view. Ideally, I would have piloted this system first and gathered the data, and only then, if that data showed that the measures were necessary to reduce the backlog, would it have been difficult to rebut. If Sir Brian is right and these reforms clearly cut waiting times, that will be good for victims and public confidence. However, if the proposals are rolled out nationwide and he and the Government are wrong, and the gains are negative or outweighed by harms to fairness, equalities or public trust, particularly for minority defendants, it will be important that this House should not have tied its hands. Removing the right to elect jury trial takes out around half of our jury trials. It is a very real interference with existing safeguards and it should not be a permanent change before we know that it works in practice. That is why I believe there must be a clear statutory mechanism in the Bill allowing Parliament to reverse this change if it does not work. In my view, we need a time-limited mandatory review on the face of the Bill to track timeliness, conviction patterns and equalities impacts, with an explicit power to require Ministers to restore the right to elect if the reforms do not deliver. A clause of that nature would be a statement of confidence in Parliament’s oversight, rather than of a lack of faith in the reforms, as has been suggested. Expanding judge-only trials requires us to address the fact that the judiciary do not reflect our country’s diversity. Replacing lay juries with a single judge demands an intense focus on how we improve judicial diversity, and particularly transparency in appointments. For example, judicial references must be disclosable so that there is accountability for providing objective, evidence-based references if we are to improve the recruitment and promotion pipeline for women and minority ethnic judges. One of the last cases in the courts that I was involved in before I was elected to Parliament was a judicial review of a decision of the Judicial Appointments Commission not to promote a district judge into a more senior position. The whole case was about why she could not see the reasons that she was not promoted. That secrecy, which is behind what many campaigners believe has been a process of secret soundings or a tap on the shoulder, has resulted in the situation that we have of a bench recruiting in its own image. That concept was recognised by the Lammy review, and it is a very real thing that we must address if we are to expand judge-only trials. We face a grave crisis, but if we are to curtail long-standing rights, we must build robust safeguards into the Bill. I hope that Ministers will work constructively with Members across the House to ensure that we tackle the backlog effectively while strengthening confidence in our justice system.