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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

No—that we have started looking at the pieces of legislation that we would wish to be repealed, and if this legislation were enacted we would vote for its repeal in the next Parliament, when we would hope that there would be a majority for its repeal. The Government need to know that they will take the time of Parliament to pass something that will not get through this year, would only get through next year by use of the Parliament Acts, and is then likely to have an extremely short duration, even if the Government are still in office by the time the Parliament Acts could be implemented. I am very clear about that. It is not pique; it is not theology. It is evidence, it is principle, and it is argument on the merits of the case. The one merit of the Bill, compared with the other three, is that at least it is what it says on the tin. It says that it is the Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill. The Government are not hiding their light under a bushel; they are saying what they want, and it is on that basis that my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I, together with many other Opposition Members—and, I hope, a considerable number of Labour Members—will oppose it both today and later. I shall try not to make points identical to those that others have made, although there is a huge amount of common ground. I want to make the preliminary point that this is part of an approach towards government that I fundamentally object to. The idea built up over the years and centuries that lay members of the public participate as serious players in the criminal justice system—an idea that is hugely important in the law of England, Wales and Northern Ireland—is being undermined. There are three elements in that. The first is that this is a repeated serious attempt to take lay people, not professionals, out of the process of deciding guilt and innocence in serious cases. The second, rightly mentioned by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, is the movement—almost without announcement—to replace lay justices by paid professionals. More people are spotting this, and viewing it with increasing anger and frustration. The benefit of lay justice is that people who do other things and are properly representative of the community spend some of their time judging people in their community for lesser offences in the community. Increasingly we are seeing district judges—the old stipendiary magistrates—paid to do that job. It is a significant transition, about which many people are uncomfortable. The third element is the movement towards removing lay people from the criminal justice system altogether by offering more and more opportunities for people to buy their way out of justice through the fixed penalty notice system, whereby people never appear before a court at all. That may be entirely acceptable for someone who parks on a yellow line, which is an administrative matter that can be visibly dealt with, and for which guilt or innocence is difficult to dispute. It is wholly different from deciding whether someone has been assaulted in a scuffle on a Friday night outside the local pub. That is the background. May I make the obvious observation that I hope that everyone would expect us all to make? Nobody in the House underestimates the importance and seriousness of fraud and no one wants serious fraudsters to go free. We all acknowledge the importance of the work of the Serious Fraud Office, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police service in bringing people who commit serious fraud to justice. It is every bit as important, if not more so, than dealing with those who commit smaller frauds. Serious damage can be done to individuals and their lives by those fraudsters, and we want to bring them to book. One interesting aspect of today’s debate is that we have had an opportunity to look at what has happened since the Criminal Justice Act 2003 was introduced and assess whether this remains as valid a proposition for the Government to advance. I have a simple set of tests as to whether we need to return to this territory, and I am led to the clear conclusion that we do not. I have not heard the Solicitor-General or any other Labour Member argue that under the present system, we have suddenly seen a great increase in acquittals and a great reduction in convictions.