Burnham Scraps Starmer-Era Plans to Roll Back Jury Trials

Andy Burnham’s government has scrapped plans to curb jury trials, after months of outcry from lawyers, MPs and the public. 

New justice secretary Alex Norris said on Sunday that his government inherited a court system “on the brink of collapse” – but that the answer to driving down backlogs was not to roll back jury trials. 

He added that scrapping the plans, which were introduced by former justice secretary David Lammy under Keir Starmer, would enable the Ministry of Justice to find better ways of addressing the courts backlog. 

“I have heard the strength of feeling on the proposals for increasing the number of judge-alone trials in the Crown Court and have made the decision to change course,” he said. 

The government has instead promised to invest millions in new technology to modernise the sluggish courts system and give greater resources to judges.

Campaign group Defend Our Juries said the move was “a step in the right direction”. The group has argued Lammy’s plans were a deliberate attempt to stop protesters being acquitted by juries who believe they acted on their conscience when breaking certain laws.  

But the group criticised the government for announcing that courts will “have the final say over where cases should be heard” in order to prevent “criminals accused of relatively minor crimes trying to game the system by electing a jury trial in an attempt to avoid prison.” 

“The centuries-old democratic principle of trial by a jury of one’s peers is not an attempt to ‘game the system’”, the group said on X.

The justice ministry has also said it will give magistrates the power to hand out longer sentences under the new plans. 

Last month, the Crown Court backlog reached a record high, with 81,000 cases awaiting trial and a third of them for longer than a year. 

Lammy’s plans would have meant cases where the sentence is less than three years would not be tried by jury. They also called for lengthy fraud and financial cases to be tried by only a judge, a policy that Norris will keep.

Critics of Lammy’s plans included 39 of Starmer’s own Labour bankbenchers and Shami Chakrabarti, former director of advocacy group Liberty Shami Chakrabarti. 

“The drastic restriction of the right to trial by jury is not a silver bullet,” the rebel MPs wrote in a letter to Starmer last December. “To limit a fundamental right for what will make a marginal difference to the backlog, if any, is madness and will cause more problems than it solves.”