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Andy Burnham is indicating he will scrap plans to curtail jury trials in England and Wales, abandoning one of the most significant overhauls from Keir Starmer’s government.
In perhaps his biggest repudiation yet of the policies he inherited from his predecessor, the prime minister said he had concerns about the proposals and his instinct was to keep juries at the heart of the justice system.
Speaking at a community centre in Sheffield on Friday, Burnham said his reluctance related to the Hillsborough disaster.
“I have my concerns about the plan to restrict a jury trial, partly from my personal experience, particularly in Hillsborough,” he said. “So I want to really look in detail at that proposal, and my instincts are that we need to find ways of not reducing access to jury trial.”
Burnham’s intervention is the strongest signal yet that the former justice secretary David Lammy’s proposals, which amounted to a historic departure in the judicial system, will be dropped.
The prime minister has previously raised concerns about the struggle of Hillsborough victims to secure justice for what he has called “the greatest miscarriage of justice of our times”.
Lammy announced in December that defendants who were likely to receive a sentence of three years or less would no longer get a jury trial. He said the proposals could clear the backlog of nearly 80,000 cases clogging up the court system within a decade.
However, the plans were met with a fierce backlash from legal bodies and some Labour MPs including Karl Turner, who was suspended over his criticisms of Lammy and Starmer.
On Friday, Burnham said he had asked the chief whip, Anneliese Midgley, to speak to Turner about being readmitted to the parliamentary Labour party.
Two other Labour MPs who had lost the whip for other reasons – Diane Abbott and Joani Reid – have already been readmitted after separate independent disciplinary processes.
Measures under the courts and tribunals bill would leave defendants no longer able to choose a jury trial, and the ability to appeal to a crown court against a magistrates court verdict would also be limited.
Magistrates’ powers would be extended from dealing with maximum sentences of one year to at least 18 months and a judge-only “swift” court would be established to hear cases without a jury.
Ministers argued the move was necessary to halve the number of jury trials from 15,000 a year and to tackle the backlog of court cases that built up during the Covid pandemic.
The idea was set out a year ago by Sir Brian Leveson, who had been asked by ministers to come up with possible ways to tackle a backlog that has seen many defendants and victims wait years for cases to come to court.
In his report, the former judge said he did not “rejoice in these recommendations” but warned they were essential to avoid “a real risk of total system collapse in the near future” and that an effective lack of consequence for lawbreaking could bring grave societal consequences.
Leveson warned that – even if adopted in full – his proposals would take more than five years to clear the backlog.
The idea of limiting jury trials brought a furious response from some Labour MPs, with one mass letter calling it “madness” and something that “will cause more problems than it solves”.
Another group of MPs proposed hijacking the plan by using an amendment to introduce the alternative idea of specialist courts for sexual offences with fixed dates for trial, ensuring victims of sexual crimes saw justice sooner.
Under Starmer, Downing Street was adamant there was no other option, saying that given the scale of the backlogs, “merely tinkering at the edges is simply not enough”.
There were, however, also vehement objections from lawyers. One letter condemning the plans, organised by the Bar Council, was signed by 3,200 lawyers, including 300 senior barristers.
Separately, the founder of Doughty Street Chambers, the legal base for Starmer as well as Richard Hermer, his attorney general, condemned the plans. Geoffrey Robertson called the proposals a “cure worse than the disease”, adding: “Attacking juries must be regarded as a betrayal of the values for which Labour purports to stand.”
