Dr Luke Evans

From prepping for this debate, I know that the policy is one that tries to solve an administrative problem by simply changing a principle. The three areas I will try to cover—we will see how I get on—are the principle, the policy process and the practical side. To deal with the principle first, we have heard a number of times that justice delayed is justice denied. Delay does harm trust and it can prolong suffering, but justice done wrongly corrupts the system itself. The Justice Secretary knows that, as in his own Lammy report he said that juries act as “a filter for prejudice” during trials. Moving on to the policy process, on the one hand the Government are saying that the policy is much needed to help with the admin side, but on the other hand they are saying that these are very small changes. We only have to look at the letter written by the Secretary of State to the Justice Committee to pull some of that apart. It states: “Of the c.3% of criminal trial cases that proceed to a jury trial in the Crown Court, over half would still proceed to the Crown Court and get a jury trial post-reform.” However, later it says: “An alternative way of expressing impacts is to account for cases that will be retained in the magistrates’ courts after the reforms. Based on projected case volumes and case mix, of those cases that still proceed to the Crown Court post-reforms, around three-quarters of them are still expected to be allocated a jury trial.” So we already have a discrepancy, in the same paragraph of the letter, in what the numbers are. The question, “Has any modelling been done?”, has been asked multiple times. We again know from the letter addressed to the Committee that modelling has been done, because it says: “The assumptions underpinning the modelling of the reforms I announced last week are subject to the Concordat process that agrees sitting days with the judiciary and it would be improper to pre-empt the conclusion of this process.” In short, modelling has been done, so if Ministers want to strengthen their argument, why would they not produce that modelling? When we have asked the Minister who is at the Dispatch Box—she was asked again by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild), for the seventh time—whether an impact assessment has been done and not released, or is being done and will be brought forward, we have not got an answer. One would have thought that if you had done the work—