Speeches by Mullan.

“We must give great weight to the evidence we have heard, but the Government’s own position is that it is unlikely to materially change outcomes; they are repealing a provision that their own assessment concedes will not make a material difference to what happens.”

“As I understand it, we are removing a presumption; we are not, in law at least, seeking to put in something more nuanced and balanced. I will come on to talk about some of the suggestions that have been made to us in evidence about what we might do. If there is no clear statutory starting point, courts may need to gath…”

“I rise to speak in support of clause 20, which is a technical and geographic provision necessitated by the significant infrastructure developments currently under way in the City of London. As new law courts are developed, specifically at the Salisbury Square site—we mentioned the specialist fraud court earlier in the …”

“I want to begin by acknowledging the gravity of what we heard in evidence in Committee. As the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Chichester, pointed to, the evidence from Claire in relation to her children will stay with all of us. It was so moving and so upsetting for anyone thinking about how they wo…”

“Both Parents Matter also proposes what it calls a parental relationship test to be embedded in the welfare checklist, requiring the courts to consider the”

““quality and sustainability of the child’s relationship with each parent… The nature of the relationship between the parents insofar as it affects the child””

“If the defendant is successful at appeal, we might say that they are doubly aggrieved: they have gone through the process and it has not worked for them. Surely we should want to do everything we can to support that group of people, so that they have a route to the mode of trial that they think is fairest, considering …”

“I accept the Minister’s point that to insist on that being the remedy is not necessarily what the defendant would want. We absolutely want to support defendants who have been through the process of a trial and a successful appeal. Where they could have had a Crown court trial with a jury, prior to the Government’s refo…”

“I understand the Minister’s criticism that the defendant making the appeal may be perfectly content to have their case reheard in the magistrates, and insisting that an appeal be reheard in a jury trial gives no flexibility in that direction—that is a fair point. In response, we will not press amendments 55 to 57 to a …”

“On amendment 37, I have talked about the high rate of error and injustice that is being corrected by the current appeal mechanism, and I have talked about the unrepresented defendants who will have to navigate a more complex and subjective system, such as by reviewing transcripts. On the whole, we do not think that we …”

“As we have discussed in debates on previous amendments, the grounds of an appeal may very well relate to an allocation decision. Someone could successfully appeal on the basis that their trial should never have been heard by a magistrate and that they should have had a jury instead. Providing the option for a jury retr…”

““power is also never concentrated in the hands of one individual.””

“In summary, clause 7 represents a substantial recasting of appellate rights that prioritises administrative throughput over the correction of error. We should not trade away, without any evidence of abuse and with little evidence of meaningful efficiency savings, a safeguard that is successfully correcting mistakes in …”

“”

“I have spent a lot of time working on the issue of victim personal statements, often referred to as victim impact statements, in work on other Bills. We are talking today about someone’s ability to give an effective statement, but the Opposition have also been concerned about restrictions on what people can actually sa…”

“The Family Services Foundation notes in its written evidence that removing the presumption risks placing the United Kingdom “outside” its obligations under that convention.”

“In the previous session, the Minister mentioned that she thought, for example, that the test of whether to allocate a trial would be subject to legal interpretation. That was an admission that the Minister made—which is probably self-evident.”

““the ability to appeal a decision to order a judge-alone trial as an important procedural safeguard that ensures that judge-alone trials are only ordered in appropriate circumstances and in line with statutory criteria. A significant problem with not permitting appeals on decisions to order judge-alone trials is that i…”

“I oppose clause 6, which, as we have discussed, grants the Lord Chancellor the power to increase the maximum sentencing limit in magistrates courts from the current 12 months to 18 or even 24 months. While the Government present that as a necessary measure to relieve the backlog in the Crown court, we must look closely…”

“In their submission to the independent review of criminal courts itself, they identified that”