Baroness Ludford (LD)

My Lords, I want to make a very brief contribution—cheekily, because I have not taken any role in this Bill. My noble friend’s amendment, what she said in support of it and the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, are highly pertinent to the debate on the Government’s proposal to restrict jury trials. On the Tube in, I read an account of the report from the Institute for Government, which has looked at the Government’s proposals and concluded that the time savings from judge-only trials would be marginal at best, amounting to less than 2% of Crown Court time. It suggests, pertinently, that the Government “should instead focus on how to drive up productivity across the criminal courts, investing in the workforce and technology required for the courts to operate more efficiently”. As others who know the situation much better than I do have said, it sounds dire. One is used to all these problems of legacy systems—lack of interoperability and so on. I remember all that being debated at EU level. It is difficult and probably capital-intensive work—at least, initially—but instead of promoting these headline-grabbing gestures about abolishing jury trials, the Government need to fix the terrible lack of efficiency in the criminal justice system. I am not sure that the civil justice system is any better. Having, unfortunately, had a modest involvement in a case in the county court, I found that it was impossible to phone any staff. You might be lucky to get a response to an email after a week. Making the system work efficiently, with all bits interacting with each other, would do a great deal more to increase productivity and save the time of all those people who are running around. One hears accounts from people who work in the criminal courts of reports not being available, files being lost and staff being absent, let alone the decrepit state of court buildings. All this investment needs to go in before the Government resort to gesture politics and things such as abolishing jury trials.