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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

There is much in what the hon. and learned Gentleman says. The Government’s approach has caused serious problems in the courts, given the uncertainty about which parts of the body of legislation are in force, when they came into force and how much is retrospective. However, I do not want to stray too far from the locus in quo, so I shall return to dealing with the indictment with which I began what is going to be a relatively short speech. The Solicitor-General was quite right to correct me over a slip of the tongue that I made about the statistical basis of jury trials. Juries do not convict in 85 per cent. of cases but, under the jury system, 85 per cent. of serious fraud cases do result in conviction. That conviction rate is higher than for any other criminal activity. I can give chapter and verse for that statement, but we should not get involved in a barren argument about statistics. The plain fact is that juries understand serious fraud very well. I should declare an interest, in that I have done many serious fraud cases in my time at the Bar. No one in my position has ever had the slightest doubt that juries understand such cases. The financial dealings are sometimes complex, but there is almost never any doubt about whether a fraud has been committed, only about who did it. Juries are far and away better than anyone else at deciding that relatively simple matter at the end of a trial. Do we have a problem recruiting juries? No, we do not. The panel of jurors is rather larger at the beginning, and the people who are selected are the ones who are comfortable with sitting for between, say, 12 to 26 weeks to deal with a case. Are they unrepresentative? No, they are not. It is true that we lose a number of people whose jobs preclude them from working on a jury over such a period if time. As a result, some classes of people—disabled people, women, those who have taken early retirement or are temporarily unemployed, for example—are slightly over represented, but are this, of all Governments, going to suggest that such juries are incapable of trying serious fraud cases or that their involvement is undesirable? The proportion of cases in which juries convict demonstrates that they are perfectly capable of coming to a decision. In passing, I want to mention the Jubilee line case, which was cursed from the start by poor case management. Matters that should have been dealt with before a jury was ever empanelled were dealt with only afterwards. As a result, the trial became completely unmanageable and in the end collapsed. Reference has been made to the subsequent inquiry, and the resulting document is a luminous illustration of the seriousness and brilliance with which juries attach themselves to their work. The jury in the Jubilee line case had nothing to do with the trial’s collapse. Indeed, it could well be said that it was an early example of trial by judge alone. The jury had hardly anything to do with it: the case was tried by the judge alone, and the result was a complete disaster. Our adversarial system is wholly incapable of dealing with trial by judge alone. To suggest, as the previous Home Secretary once did, that removing the jury creates an inquisitorial system is the precise equivalent of removing the wheels from a car and claiming that one has invented a boat. The system is incapable of dealing with a judge being the arbiter of fact. I hope that the Solicitor-General will accept the line that I am about to toss to him and intervene to assist me. I want to ask a question about public interest immunity that I could not put to him while he was making his speech, as I did not want to delay progress in the debate. In the vast majority of serious cases there are important issues of public interest immunity, which our system deals with by means of the prosecution talking to the judge and deciding what evidence should be given to the defence, and what should not. The judge can make that decision because—and this has been confirmed by Europe—he is not the judge of fact. However, a judge who determines PII applications and is then a judge of fact will be in possession of material that he will share with the prosecution, but of which the defence will have no knowledge at all. In those circumstances a conviction would last for about 10 minutes in a European Court before it was overturned—