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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

I will give way to my hon. and learned Friend later, but I need to make some progress. Our criminal justice system needs to deal effectively and fairly with all kinds of crime, but sometimes it fails to do so in the most serious and complicated frauds because defendants do not face trial on charges that adequately reflect the full criminality of the accusations that are made against them. That is the key point. From time to time, trials collapse under the pressure of evidence, with the result that justice is not done and the taxpayer is left to meet substantial costs. The current position is that the greater the scale and complexity of the fraud, the less likely it is to result in a successful prosecution. That cannot be right. We cannot accept a double standard whereby petty frauds are easy to prosecute and frauds on a grand scale which, although small in number, can have an impact on many victims are too difficult to prosecute. Despite attempts to keep trials within reasonable bounds, complex fraud cases often last for many months. In the four years from 2002 to 2005, the Serious Fraud Office reported that 26 fraud trials lasted for more than six months, six of which lasted for more than a year. The prosecution and the courts already do much to keep the length of trials to a minimum. We welcome the Lord Chief Justice’s protocol of March 2005, which will promote robust and well-informed case management. That will help, but it is not an adequate answer of itself. The complexity and potential length of some serious and complex fraud trials still resists the best efforts of all involved to reduce the burden on the jury. In order to make them manageable, trials are too often carved up in a way that prevents the full criminality of the fraud from being exposed in the trial. That cannot serve the interests of justice. Cases are split into separate trials by the severing of indictments. Even then, it is sometimes necessary to restrict the material put before the court, in order to make it manageable and comprehensible to a jury. Evidence is pared down and charges reduced to the main charges. Secondary defendants, who should perhaps be prosecuted notwithstanding, are not brought to justice because it would complicate the trial too much. The result can still be the worst of all worlds—enormously long trials that are intolerable for the unfortunate jurors, but do not enable the full criminality alleged in the most serious fraud cases to be presented to the court.