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Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill

The hon. Gentleman has made his contribution. I shall go no further. I agree wholeheartedly with two points made by the hon. and learned Member for Medway. First, we have had far too much legislation in the field of criminal law in the past few years. Judges with whom I sit and to whom I talk are baffled by the volume of legislation, most of which is intended purely to get a headline and half of which is never implemented. It gets worse by the day. Secondly, the hon. and learned Gentleman rightly pointed out that none of the judiciary see any merit in the Bill. The Bill is short, containing only four clauses, but it is massively important not just because of its contents, but because of what it might lead to in the jury system in future. I suppose that at first sight the Bill might not seem controversial. On the surface, the Government seem to be saying: ““Some fraud trials are terribly complex and some are terribly long. Wouldn’t it be simpler if in a handful of cases, perhaps only half a dozen a year—nothing to worry about—there is a provision for the trial of such a fraud case to be heard by a judge alone. Wouldn’t we save a lot of time and grief?”” On the face of it, that approach is quite alluring, but let us look a little more carefully. The Government’s arguments do not stand up to proper scrutiny. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham dealt with this very well. If the issue is one of complexity, would not Labour Members accept that not only fraud trials are complex? Earlier, I gave the example of a drugs trial in which I was involved years ago, which bore all the hallmarks of the complexity that the Solicitor-General argues should lead to a judge-only trial. It involved hundreds of thousands of documents and financial dealings all over the world, yet under the Government’s provision that complex case would not be subject to a judge-only trial. My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) made the excellent point that health and safety cases in which he has been involved have been just as complex as any fraud trial could be. If the issue is one of length, then surely we should be focusing on case management to shorten cases. If those are weak arguments for the Government to advance, I have concluded that it is essential for this House to vote against the Bill for a different reason—because I am convinced that it is yet another step along the road that this Government wish to travel, leading in due course to a massive reduction in jury trials throughout our criminal justice system. It continues a shift of power away from the people and fits neatly with the Government’s desire to move power nearer to the centre, based on a presumption that the state or its appointed officers know much better than the people. If we could be absolutely certain that no more than, say, six complex or lengthy fraud trials a year would be handled by a judge alone without a jury, we might just be satisfied, but we cannot be certain. Let us consider what the Solicitor-General said earlier. When I mentioned the complicated drugs case, he used the phrase, ““We have no plans at this stage.”” Later on, in response to another intervention, he said, ““We have no plans.”” Previously, unless I misheard him, he had said that the Government have ““not ruled out”” extending the proposals. So we have a Government who talk about half a dozen cases a year and a Minister who has more or less made it plain to the House that it is at the back of their mind to extend the principle beyond complex and lengthy serious fraud cases to other cases altogether. Looking back on the Government’s attitude to jury trial over the past few years gives greater strength to our feelings that they may yet go further. This is the Government who some years ago introduced measures that would have given the courts, not the defendant, the ultimate decision on where cases were to be tried, thereby taking rights away from defendants—the Government who had the gall to say that they were convinced that the courts, rather than defendants, were best qualified to reach a view on the best venue for a trial. That smacks of a conceited, ““we know better than you”” attitude—scant concern there for the rights of the individual. I think that I heard the Solicitor-General say—I could hardly believe it—““Juries are right for some cases, but not for others.”” That kind of comment makes me think that we have a Government who are saying in terms, ““Now listen: we’re not going to bother any more with the rights of the individual to select trial by his peers—his equals, other members of his community. We’re not bothered about that—we’re more concerned with our own view as to what is right for a particular defendant.”” If we concede the principle that complex or lengthy fraud cases should be tried by a judge alone without a jury, the Government’s next step might be to try to widen that principle to ensure that all serious offences, for example, could be tried only by a judge alone. Gradually, they could whittle away the whole principle of trial by one’s peers. There is a risk that, if this trend continues, jury trial could disappear from our system altogether. All this is happening at a time when the real problem facing the people of this country is the inability of the police to detect the crimes, and to be on the streets to catch the criminals and bring them to court. Frankly, on any list of the public’s priorities relating to the criminal justice system, the need for fraud cases to be tried by a judge alone would be right at the bottom.