Sir Jeremy Wright
MP for Kenilworth and Southam · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I applaud my right hon. Friend’s passion and clarity on this issue. On the subject of democratic accountability, he knows that if, as the hon.”
“I welcome the intent that the Secretary of State has set out this afternoon, and the urgency with which she will require the relevant companies to act.”
“The Electoral Commission has made no formal assessment of this. It would be a matter for Parliament to introduce such legal protections. It is prescribed in law that poll cards and ballot papers must be provided in English or Welsh, but there are no other prescribed language requirements relating to election materials.”
“We can all cynically speculate about the reasons why this sudden about-turn has taken place this week, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), who spoke from the Front Bench, said earlier, it is our job to scrutinise this legislation and to ensure that whatever we put in place does justice to the determination o…”
“In today’s version of the amendment paper, for the first time, that amendment has disappeared and been replaced not with the detailed compromise that Intelligence and Security Committee members, who have been engaged with this process, have been working towards, along with many others, but with Government amendment 157.”
“As the House would expect, we engaged with that process as diligently as we could, with no partisan politics, in an effort to make good law in the pursuit of greater state transparency while preserving our national security equities. As the hon.”
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“I am extremely grateful to the Minister for giving way, especially so early in his remarks. I apologise to him and to the House for not being here for his opening remarks, which he has just mentioned. In them, he talked a little about Government amendments (a) and (b) in lieu of Lords amendment 31. I am grateful to him for the concession that the Government are making and for the moves they intend to make. However, can I make just two criticisms of Government amendments (a) and (b)? The first is very minor; Government amendment (a) refers to the “Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2028”. That should, of course, be 2018. I know that the Minister will be able to correct that error in due course. The more substantive criticism is about data collection.”
“He will understand that many will be concerned to ensure that when information is reported internally within the intelligence agencies, it none the less finds its way to those who should have it, in order to give reassurance about what the Government are seeking to achieve more broadly in this Bill.”
“I recognise the strength of the case that the Prime Minister is making. He will understand the interest that the Intelligence and Security Committee has in clause 6 of the Bill, which provides for certain exemptions for those who work for the intelligence agencies. It then says that those people should report internally within their organisation any information that may be of use to an inquiry or investigation. Will he give some thought to how the Government might develop a concept of what then happens to that information, about which the Bill is broadly silent?”
“Given that we now know that the request was to make it clear in terms that, during the relevant period, China was a current national security threat to the UK, who in the Home Office or elsewhere decided that that could not be submitted in a further statement of evidence in very clear terms?”
“I first of all thank the Minister for what he said about co-operation with the work of the Intelligence and Security Committee on this matter. I agree with him, as I often do, that the Government are entitled to clarity about what the question they are being asked is. The question for me is not whether the Government sought to intervene to persuade the DPP to take a different view. I do not think the Government did that. Neither do I think the Government went back and sought to change evidence it had already submitted. The question is, when the CPS asked for additional evidence, as it undoubtedly did, whether the Government chose to supply that evidence or not. That is not about interference; it is about responding to a request made to Government by the CPS.”
“Whether they thought the CPS was right to ask for it or not, it was clear that, with that extra evidence, the CPS would have proceeded with the case as the Government say they wanted. What evidence can the Government provide to us that every sinew was strained and that they did everything they could to find that evidence? If that evidence is in fact available and others could find it, will the Government not have some explaining to do?”
“Surely the Minister and the Government can see that that only weakens the substance of the question that that witness was being asked to answer. It would be useful to understand whether the DNSA came to that view on his own or had it suggested to him that that would be a useful thing to include. The second question is this. The Government have been clear—the Minister has been today, and the Prime Minister was yesterday—about how disappointed they are at the outcome of the trial and how much they wanted the prosecution to proceed. Given the length of time and the number of requests received by the CPS, surely it would be logical to assume that the Government would be straining every sinew to find extra evidence to meet the CPS’s requirement.”
“It is now clear that the Crown Prosecution Service asked the Government more than once, over more than a year, for some additional evidence on what the CPS considered to be the crucial question of whether China constituted a national security threat during the relevant period. It seems to me, having read those statements, that at least two important questions arise. The first is the one just asked by the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg). Given that it was clear at the point when the deputy National Security Adviser made his second and third statements that the question he was being asked to comment on was whether that bar of being a national security threat was met or not, what is the possible relevance of the inclusion of information about China as an economic opportunity?”
“The first question was about why the deputy National Security Adviser included reference to economic opportunity in his statement when he knew that that was not the question he was being asked, nor the relevant question.”
“However, that does not mean that we should refuse to contemplate any change or to recognise the pressure on jury trials for some of the offences that occupy large amounts of court time.”
“They will also want to factor in, of course, the need to ensure that lay magistrates have access to good-quality legal advice when hearing cases. On changing access to jury trial, the important point is an obvious one, but one that is worth making for context. As things stand, not every criminal charge entitles a defendant to a jury trial. We already restrict the right to jury trial, so this debate is about moving the threshold for eligibility for jury trial, not about abandoning a principle of jury trials for all. I should say that I have great faith in the jury system. I have sought to persuade juries for the prosecution and for the defence in Crown court trials, and I have heard many jury verdicts, and I have retained throughout my confidence that, in general terms, this is a good system for determining guilt or innocence.”
“In the circumstances, I have no substantive objection to any of those proposals, but in relation to the last of them, I invite Ministers to consider the discrepancy it would create between, on the one hand, trials of offences for which sentences of up to two years’ imprisonment could be imposed taking place in magistrates courts and, on the other, sentencing powers for magistrates remaining limited to 12 months’ imprisonment, which Sir Brian does not seek to change. I am sure that Ministers will also want to factor in the capacity of magistrates courts to do the extra work, as there is a backlog there too, and consider whether a neater way of rebalancing the caseload towards magistrates courts would be the reclassification of some offences as summary only.”
“Nevertheless, because a magistrates court trial is both quicker and cheaper than a jury trial in the Crown court, it makes sense in resource terms to shift the balance further in the direction of magistrates where there would be no injustice in doing so. Sir Brian suggests that that can be done in a number of ways. Some are fairly straightforward: for example, we could increase the financial threshold for trials of criminal damage cases in the magistrates court from £5,000 to £10,000. Of perhaps more significance from a policy perspective is the suggestion of removing the automatic right to appeal a magistrates court conviction in the Crown court and replacing it with a permission to appeal process, and that of removing the right to choose a jury trial altogether for offences with a maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment or less.”
“It is also worth saying again—these points have been made many times by many people, as the Minister knows—that early advice on the prosecution case and the available defences cannot be given if the prosecution evidence has not been served on the defence in time to allow it to be properly considered. Late disclosure by the prosecution remains a fundamental problem, as does the timely production of defendants in custody at court. The second area of Sir Brian’s review I want to focus on is the proposed rebalancing of work between the Crown court and the magistrates court. It is important to recognise that, as Sir Brian points out, the bulk of criminal cases are dealt with by magistrates already—around 90%, in fact, with only 1% of criminal cases being resolved by jury trial.”
“If, as I hope they will be, the Government are attracted to the idea of delaying plea hearings for that purpose, it will also be important to ensure that advocates are properly incentivised, including through fee structures, to conduct conferences with their clients in advance of the plea hearing. Where the client is in custody, allowing access to the client—preferably in person, but via video link if not—must also be made easier than it is now, or appropriate advice will not be delivered early so that appropriate pleas can be delivered early.”
“Defence advocates, of course, have a clear professional duty to advise their clients not to plead guilty if they do not accept their guilt, but discussions between defendants and their advocates about the evidence and the law are very often constrained because they happen only at court on the morning of the trial. It is often that that truly restricts the prospects of realistic pleas at an earlier stage, so allowing more time for that advice to be given is vital. Such advice has to be accompanied, though, by changes that will make it more likely for that extra time to be productively used.”
“Those recommendations are that the discount on sentence for an early guilty plea should be increased from one third to 40%; judges should give defendants more information on what their sentence may be if a guilty plea is forthcoming; and the plea hearing should be delayed to allow defendants to receive fuller advice before entering a plea. I suspect that the first two will receive the most attention, but I believe the third may have the most effect. Making sure that defendants know how much shorter their sentence may be if they plead guilty rather than are found guilty, and increasing that difference with bigger discounts for early guilty pleas, may well change some minds, but must not and is not intended to constitute inappropriate pressure to plead guilty when not guilty.”
“If a guilty plea is how a criminal case should and will be resolved, the earlier it is given the more quickly victims and witnesses can be reassured that they will not need to relive their experiences by giving evidence, and the more quickly valuable and scarce court time can be allocated to other cases, so that is a change worth pursuing. Those of us who have practised in the criminal courts know that there is only so much we can do to persuade a guilty defendant to plead guilty—some will always hold out until the day of the trial in the hope that the witnesses against them fail to turn up; I am afraid that delays in hearing the trial make that more likely—but Sir Brian makes three recommendations in particular that might help.”
“As I said at the outset, his review makes many recommendations that I do not have time to discuss, but I hope that the Government and the Minister, who I am delighted to see in her place, will look carefully at his proposals to end release under investigation instead of bail, which I think is sensible, and the increased standardisation of out-of-court disposals. I want to focus on Sir Brian’s recommendations in three areas. The first is how we can encourage guilty pleas, where they are appropriate, to be entered earlier.”
“The complexity of trials has also been increased by the greater volume of digital evidence, including from mobile phones. All of that leads Sir Brian to conclude that we cannot go on as we are, and I think he is right. We all know how difficult it will be for the Government to find significant extra resource for the criminal court system. Even if they could, it would not be enough to address the very different workload and ways of working that the system now deals with so, as Sir Brian urges us, we should look at structural change.”
“The open caseload, which is the number of cases begun in the Crown court but not yet completed, fell from 55,000 in 2014 to 33,000 in 2018, but it has increased significantly since, standing at a historical high of 75,000 in 2024. As Sir Brian set out in his review, there are many reasons for that. It is true that the system has not yet entirely recovered from the covid pandemic, but the other reasons are more structural. Central among them is that the type of cases being heard matters as much as the overall number of cases. The criminal courts are now hearing a greater proportion of cases involving sexual offences or fraud, which are more complex and take longer to resolve, so the length of the average Crown court trial has doubled between 2001 and 2024.”
“The report that he published is 378 pages long; I cannot do justice to all of it in this debate—you will be grateful to hear, Mr Efford—but I do want to say something about his analysis of the problem and some of his solutions. First, I will discuss the problem and the reasons for it. Those interested only in political attack lines will always be able to find them, but this issue deserves deeper analysis. Of course more resources will be important, and Sir Brian makes that clear, but previous reductions in funding can be at least partly explained by periods of reduced demand. The number of cases received by the Crown courts fell, for example, during the nine years I was in government from 150,000 in 2010 to 102,000 in 2019.”
“They certainly worry the Government, who have commissioned Sir Brian Leveson, a very senior and experienced judge, to review the operation of the criminal courts and recommend improvements. Part 1 of his review was published on 18 June and deals with the policy changes that he believes may improve the situation. I have no doubt that Ministers will have been considering those recommendations carefully and will take up some or all of them, but we in Parliament should consider them carefully too. That is why I sought this debate. I have worked with Sir Brian in a variety of roles and have huge respect for his insight and judgment.”
“Remand prisoners are not convicted so no work is done on their rehabilitation in prison. Time spent on remand counts towards an eventual prison sentence but spending longer on remand means a greater proportion of the eventual sentence—in some cases, the majority of the sentence that is ultimately handed down—is served without any rehabilitative work being done to reduce the likelihood of reoffending. Substantial periods on remand also mean that there are more cases where a custodial sentence is imposed at the end of it but the whole sentence has already been served on remand, so the offender is released immediately after the trial. That can be hard to understand and accept for victims and the public, who have to watch that offender walk free from court despite their conviction. Long delays in the criminal courts should worry us all.”
“It means a longer wait before a victim of crime or a witness in criminal proceedings can see the case resolved and move on with their lives. Of course, the longer it takes to get to trial, the harder it is to remember detail and to give the best evidence possible. For a defendant—and it is worth recalling that not every defendant is found guilty—the case continues to hang over their head along with, in some cases, the threat of potentially losing their liberty. A defendant in custody awaiting trial adds to the pressure on the prison population for longer than they should if the eventual outcome of their trial is acquittal or a non-custodial sentence. We can see that in the statistics: remand prisoners made up 11% of the prison population in 2018 but that figure was up to 20% in 2024. There are other consequences of long periods on remand.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts: Part 1. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. Despite the title of this debate—which I will immediately concede is less than exciting—it focuses on a serious problem with significant consequences. The criminal courts of England and Wales are under very significant strain. That is translating to very long delays from early hearings in criminal cases to the hearing of trials. I was at my local Crown court a couple of weeks ago and the delay there was at least 18 months. It is as bad or worse elsewhere. That delay is not just an administrative problem; it has real, human consequences.”
“Lady is also right that people have come to see jury trials as considerably advantageous in the delivery of justice, particularly for some of our fellow citizens. However, it is also right to recognise that although we cannot blame jury trial for all the mess we are in, jury trials do take longer than other trials. I am afraid that we will exacerbate the pressure on the criminal court system if we do not at least look carefully at the prospects for restricting those sorts of trials, in addition to other changes.”
“I understand the point the hon. Lady is making, and to be fair to Sir Brian, he is not suggesting that we remove jury trial in all cases; he is very much talking about a subset of cases in which he thinks it is worth restricting that right. However, she is right that we must balance the clear advantages of jury trials, in terms of the interests of justice, with some of the structural and organisational challenge the system undoubtedly faces. To go back to the first point I made, Sir Brian is clear that the current situation cannot persist for much longer without significant change. All the changes we might consider will have downsides as well as upsides, but we must be prepared to contemplate change of some sort. The hon.”
“The hon. Lady is right, and juries are cheap—that is undoubtedly the case—but they do not sit without a judge, and I am afraid that we pay the judge for a jury trial, just as we would for a judge-only trial. I do not think that the financial saving, in that sense, can be left out of account, and there is not much difference, in terms of what the judge is paid, whether they are hearing the case on their own or with a jury. The only difference may be that we will make better use of that judge, because the trial will complete more quickly, and they will be able to get on to other business more quickly. However, I understand the point that the hon. Lady makes.”
“Otherwise, we may see the expectation of fair and swift justice, which underpins our society, erode or even fail. That is not something that we—Government or Parliament—can allow to happen. If Sir Brian Leveson’s proposals are not to be adopted, others must be. On that crucial question, I look forward to hearing what colleagues and the Minister have to say.”
“If all defendants in one trial cannot agree on a judge-only trial, I am afraid that all must be tried by a jury. Any other approach would lead to multiple trials, which could and should have been avoided because of their impact on witnesses, who would have to give evidence repeatedly, and because they would reduce or eliminate the benefit of judge-only trials in using up less court time. As I said, there is too much in this review of the criminal courts for me to be able to talk about everything, and there are some important recommendations that I have not been able to mention—perhaps others will. I want to finish where I started, with the reason this review was commissioned and the inescapable context of it: our criminal courts are under incredible pressure, and there must be a policy response to relieve it.”
“Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox)—that complex fraud trials are indeed the cause of much of that pressure and, crucially, that judge-only trials would help substantially to relieve it, then given the relatively even balance of arguments for and against this change, which have been made for decades, it is perhaps a least worst option worth considering. Sir Brian’s proposal to allow most defendants to opt for a judge-only trial if they wish is of course much less controversial and well worth pursuing, as it does not inhibit the right to a jury trial if a defendant still wishes to have one. The only caveat is that we must avoid the complexity of allowing different defendants in the same case to have different types of trial.”
“The argument is made that these cases are really about dishonesty, and that it is the job of counsel and of the judge to make the issues and the evidence clear to a jury. All of those are reasonable arguments, and those of us who believe in the jury system instinctively baulk at the idea of restricting it. However, I go back to the central premise of this report: the system is under intolerable pressure, and something must be done about it. If it can be established—this goes to the point made by my hon.”
“Let me come on to the third area of recommendations that I want to discuss, regarding the removal of a right to jury trial, particularly in complex fraud cases, where trials can take months and where, apart from anything else, the impact on the lives and jobs of jurors can be immense. As I have suggested, this is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, but I am not yet certain that it would be right to conduct all such trials without a jury. Many who practise in this area, and some judges, continue to believe that juries can consider these cases thoroughly and fairly and reach appropriate verdicts, even when the evidence is complex; indeed, I have seen that for myself.”
“Yes. My hon. Friend makes a really important point. Again, to be fair to Sir Brian, it is not within his capacity to do all the analysis necessary to follow through his recommendations and to understand quite what the effect on the system will be. However, I agree with my hon. Friend’s point. As I was about to say, we have to balance the advantages that Sir Brian sets out with the disadvantages that would undoubtedly arise from his proposals. It is hard to do that in an informed way if we do not know exactly what the resource benefits will be of implementing these proposals.”
“As the Minister says, she will have to consider each of Sir Brian’s proposals, although she will know that he says that they are to be taken as a “package” and not with a “pick-n-mix” approach. Is that something that the Government accept? Will they take the view that it is either all of Sir Brian’s recommendations or none of them, or not?”
“I hope that we find that courage, because it may be that some of these solutions are controversial and have significant downsides, but the burning platform that Sir Brian has described is undoubtedly there. Therefore, we must act and must find a way of doing so with as much consensus as possible, and I know that is the approach that the Government will seek to take over the coming weeks. Question put and agreed to. Resolved , That this House has considered the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts: Part 1.”
“I thank all Members who have contributed to this debate. In particular, I thank the Chair of the Justice Committee for rearranging his Committee’s diaries so that its members could do so. This has, I hope, been a constructive debate, not least for the Minister to add to her considerations. I hope she will forgive the damage I do to her career prospects by saying that I am glad she is in a position to do it, and I know that she will approach it with the requisite seriousness that the process demands. The Minister is right to say that there is a degree of consensus—we all agree there is a problem. As she knows, the curse of this place is that we tend to identify a problem and ask an expert to help us find a solution, but when they do so, we do not always have the courage to implement the solutions that are put to us.”
“If so, who made that determination? Was it the case that the Government did supply evidence to the CPS on that specific point, and the CPS decided it was not significant enough? If it is the latter, will the Minister publish the evidence to the House? If he does not think that is appropriate—it may not be—will he give authority to the deputy National Security Adviser to share that evidence in full with the Intelligence and Security Committee?”
“The Minister has told us that his Government’s assessment of China is a mixture of national security threats and opportunities for engagement, including economically, but does he accept that that is exactly the assessment made by the last Government? That combination, with reference to the Act and the offence we are concerned with, does not require a country only to present a national security threat, simply that it does so, perhaps in combination with other things. That is the key point, and the Minister has been clear about that, so can we be clear about what happened with the Government’s evidence? Was it the case that the Government could find no evidence of China presenting a national security threat? Was it the case that the Government internally decided that the evidence it could find would not meet the CPS’s requirements?”
“Economic growth is, of course, one of the stated aims of the High Speed 2 project, but the Secretary of State knows well that it has adverse effects on communities along the line of construction. She knows also that those communities need to make plans for land that will be made available to them when construction is over and HS2 no longer needs it. At Transport questions on 27 March, I asked her about the land disposal strategy, which was by then long overdue. Six months later, we still have not seen it. Can she tell us when we will?”
“I welcome the Minister to his new responsibilities, and on behalf of the many JLR employees in my constituency, welcome anything the Government can and will do to get JLR back to business as usual as soon as possible. On our broader defences, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 is 35 years old, and there are many who believe that its provisions impede the work of cyber-security professionals almost as much as, if not more than, cyber-criminals. Will he take this incident as an incentive to look again at the provisions of that Act, and to update it, as we need to, to make sure that cyber-security professionals can help companies such as JLR to deal with incidents just like this one?”
“Rather, it is a more secure arrangement because of what has been described as the legal uncertainty surrounding our sovereignty over it. I see the Minister nodding, and I am grateful for that.”
“It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb). I admire his principles and his persistence in his advocacy for his Chagossian constituents, and I know that he would recognise that his predecessor did the same. There is no dispute that Diego Garcia is crucial to the UK’s security and that of its allies; that is not something we are arguing about. I do not think—although I will be corrected if I am wrong—that it is the Government’s position that, in terms of the day-to-day practicalities of operating the Diego Garcia base, this new arrangement whereby we no longer have sovereignty over Diego Garcia but will continue to administer it, at least for 99 years, is better than what we have now.”
“On 5 February this year, the Minister of State at the Foreign Office answered yet another urgent question on the subject.”
“If that ITLOS case is what the Government are relying on, I think there are a few problems: first, the UK was not a party to that case; and secondly, the ITLOS chamber was seemingly basing its decision on that of the ICJ, which, as I have already indicated, could not make a binding ruling on the matter. I am not expecting the House, much less the Government, to accept my opinion on this, but it seems to me that, at the very least, the UK would have the basis of a decent legal argument here. It does not seem to be that this ITLOS decision demonstrates that there was no further hope for UK claims of sovereignty over Diego Garcia. After a bit more prodding, the Government’s argument moves on and introduces the issue of access to the electromagnetic spectrum.”
“Tragically, I do not have time to go into the fascinating detail of that case, but in essence it was a dispute about the delimitation of maritime territory between those two states. The Maldives argued that the special chamber could not determine the case in question because there was an ongoing dispute about the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands between Mauritius and the UK. The special chamber decided, however, that it could treat Mauritius as the coastal state in the dispute before it, because of the ICJ’s advisory opinion on the matter, which it said had legal effect.”
“Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty)—who I see has the misfortune of having to defend this position once again today—answered an urgent question on the Chagos Islands. He said: “International courts were reaching judgments on the basis that Mauritius had sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago.” —[ Official Report , 13 November 2024; Vol. 756, c. 793.] The Minister did not at that point say which courts, but I have done some digging, and I think I am supported in my assumption by what the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), said in opening this debate. I think that he may have been referring to a determination made in January 2021 by the special chamber of the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea when considering a dispute between Mauritius and the Maldives.”
“Those declarations made it clear that the UK did not, however, accept that compulsory jurisdiction in relation to “any dispute with a Government of any other country which is or has been a Member of the Commonwealth”. That involves and includes Mauritius, so any dispute with Mauritius before the ICJ could not result in a binding judgment against the United Kingdom. That point has been put to Ministers and, as far as I know, they have not dissented from that analysis. If the ICJ could not make the binding judgment that the former Foreign Secretary told us was inevitable, which other court might? On that, again, I am afraid that we have not had clarity. On 13 November last year, the Minister of State at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the hon.”
“He told the House that the issue of contested sovereignty over Diego Garcia was becoming more acute, and that “A binding judgment against the UK seemed inevitable”. —[ Official Report , 7 October 2024; Vol. 754, c. 45.] Many of us have been asking where that binding judgment might come from. The only court that had by then been mentioned was the International Court of Justice, which had issued an advisory opinion on sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia. Indeed, on this subject it could only have been an advisory decision, because the UK accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ by declarations dated 22 February 2017—I was Attorney General at the time.”