Dr Kieran Mullan

As the shadow Justice Secretary outlined, there has not been enough investment in the justice system over many decades. I also want to make it clear that the claim about a record number of sitting days is a bit of a statistical anomaly, because, as the Government know, there was a change in how sitting days are measured. Using the historical measure to make the comparison, we matched that number of sitting days—and perhaps even surpassed it. Of course, we uncapped sitting days for a number of years during the pandemic. This Government have failed to do that, and they have failed to rapidly increase the number of sitting days, which the Institute for Government said makes things more difficult. As I said, there is no dispute about whether there are long-standing issues, as Members across the House acknowledge. The question is what to do about them. Let us be clear about how many of the unacceptably long waits are the result of a wait for a jury trial. The Justice Secretary has rightly been criticised for quoting statistics about victim drop-out rates in a deeply misleading way. We do not want to see any victims drop out for any reason, or any long waits, but fewer than 10% of drop-outs occur post-charge, and that figure is coming down. It is not helpful to understanding this issue for Members to cite waits of six or seven years that in fact relate to the delay from alleged offence to sentencing. Yes, waits for trial from point of charge are too long, but that is just part of the picture. Jury trials are not a quirk or a happenstance for how we deliver criminal justice in this country; they are a foundational principle of our justice system reaching back to Magna Carta. For more than 800 years, ordinary men and women have been trusted to sit in judgment, to weigh evidence, and to decide guilt or innocence. That public participation is not a flaw in the system; it is one of its greatest sources of legitimacy. Removing juries, even for a narrow category of cases, let alone the radical changes before us, alters the relationship between the citizen and the state, and replaces collective judgment with individual arbitrary authority.