Jury is still out on Lammy's 'swift court' reforms

“Cabinet feedback” seems to be the euphemism of the day, at least so far as David Lammy’s sweeping reforms to the criminal court system in England and Wales go.

- 

One can only imagine the formal and informal pressure that was exerted on the lord chancellor when his colleagues discovered, via leaks and, presumably, Whitehall gossip, that a shakeup of the legal system, which would signal the beginning of the end for trial by jury, was supposedly being considered.

Mr Lammy has instead announced the creation of new “swift courts”, which will see a judge decide verdicts in thousands of cases, scrapping jury trials for “either way” cases, including those for assault, burglary and drug dealing. This is one government U-turn that is to be warmly welcomed.

Despite the country’s all-too-apparent economic problems and the perma-crises in the public services, Britain cannot have sunk so low as to deprive its citizens of a human right they have enjoyed for 800 years, and in times far tougher than today. It was not, after all, restricted so much even in wartime and, aside from the Covid pandemic, the only part of the United Kingdom where it has been more routinely denied was in Northern Ireland for a brief, and disastrous, period for terrorism offences during the height of the Troubles.

More pertinently, Mr Lammy and his colleagues in the justice department are perfectly correct to place another well-respected principle of fairness on the judicial scales - that “justice delayed is justice denied”. It cannot be right that victims of rape, for example, should need to wait four or five years to see their cases heard - and too many drop out of the system because of the agony of that delay.