The electronic noticeboard outside a London Crown Court lists trials stretching years into the future. In one corridor, lawyers swap stories of cases bumped for a third or fourth time, while victims and defendants drift past, unsure when – or whether – their day in court will come. It is this mounting sense of a system close to breakdown that ministers say lies behind plans to strip thousands of defendants of the right to be tried by a jury.
Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy is expected to announce reforms that would create a new division of the Crown Court in England and Wales, where judges sit alone to decide guilt or innocence in many criminal cases. Offences carrying maximum sentences of up to three years – such as lower‑level assaults, shoplifting and some public order offences – would be removed from the reach of juries. Defendants who currently have the right to elect jury trial in these “either‑way” cases would no longer be able to do so.
Under the emerging blueprint, a single judge would both rule on the facts and pass sentence in this new tier of judge‑only trials. More serious crimes – including murder, manslaughter, rape and terrorism – would remain before juries, along with a narrow band of cases deemed to raise issues of particular public interest. The Ministry of Justice argues that concentrating juries on the gravest offences will protect, rather than undermine, the institution of trial by one’s peers.
The three‑year threshold represents a partial retreat from earlier, leaked proposals that provoked a fierce backlash from lawyers and MPs. Those plans would have confined juries largely to cases carrying potential sentences of more than five years, a move critics said could remove juries from around 90 per cent of Crown Court trials. Lammy is instead edging closer to the framework recommended by retired judge Sir Brian Leveson, whose review this summer urged curbs on jury trials to avert what he called the risk of “system collapse” in the criminal courts.
Leveson proposed that many either‑way offences should be heard not by a lone judge but by a panel made up of one judge and two magistrates, preserving a degree of lay participation. Lammy’s preference for single‑judge trials goes further, and is likely to be a central point of contention. The reforms will be presented alongside a wider “Swift and Fair Justice” package, including £550m over three years for victim and witness support and additional funding for extra Crown Court sitting days.
Ministers frame the changes as an emergency response to a backlog that has left nearly 80,000 cases waiting to be heard in the Crown Court, with some trials already listed into 2029 and 2030. Lammy has described the situation as a “courts emergency”, warning that “justice delayed is often justice denied” as complainants in serious cases, particularly sexual offences, abandon proceedings after years in limbo. Government projections suggest that without radical change, the backlog could climb towards 100,000 cases by 2028.
Opposition to curbing jury trials has come from across the political spectrum and much of the legal profession. The Criminal Bar Association has warned that removing juries from most Crown Court cases would “eviscerate” the existing system, while the Bar Council and Law Society argue that a single judge sending someone to prison for years without any lay input marks a profound shift in the country’s concept of justice. Conservative politicians have denounced the plan as an assault on an “ancient liberty”, pointing to centuries‑old guarantees of trial by jury as a bulwark against state power.
Civil liberties groups and race‑equality campaigners highlight a further tension: Lammy’s own 2017 review into racial bias in criminal justice concluded that juries were “fit for purpose” and, on the available evidence, less prone to discrimination than magistrates’ courts. They fear that reducing lay participation will exacerbate existing disparities in conviction and sentencing between white defendants and Black and Asian defendants. Free speech campaigners, meanwhile, cite Ministry of Justice data suggesting higher acquittal rates in jury trials for speech‑related offences, saying the reforms could chill expression.
Beyond principle, experts question whether judge‑only trials will deliver the promised gains in speed. Judges are generally required to produce detailed, reasoned verdicts, which may offset any time saved by not empaneling juries. The Institute for Government has argued that chronic shortages of judges, lawyers and court staff, crumbling buildings and inefficient listing practices are more significant drivers of delay than the presence of juries in itself.
Lammy is expected to tell MPs that legislation will follow a period of consultation, with detailed safeguards and appeal rights still to be worked out. For now, the government’s attempt to reconcile a creaking court system with a centuries‑old commitment to trial by jury sets up a defining argument about the balance between swift justice and the public’s role in deciding guilt – one that is unlikely to be settled quickly, whatever happens to the backlog.