Speeches by Qureshi.

“There was a time, when I first started practising in the criminal law, when defendants’ previous convictions were never allowed to come in unless they were “strikingly similar”. For example, if the defendant had been convicted of a rape in which they had grabbed a woman at night, dragged her through the streets and bea…”

“Since then, the rules have changed massively. Now, in a lot of cases, previous convictions can be brought in, which means that a lot of cases involve applications to do so. As the jury is separate from the judge, it is not prejudiced by other things. That is important because, at the end of the day, the fact that a per…”

“There are countless applications that can be made; another example is an application to introduce certain evidence. Again, those arguments are made in front of the judge. The jury is unaffected, and the jurors will come back afresh and concentrate only on the evidence that is presented to them. I have described some of…”

“”

“The Government’s case is that judge-alone trials will be faster, but that claim has no reliable evidential foundation. The Criminal Bar Association highlighted that the estimate relied upon—that judge-only trials may be 20% quicker—was itself described as being subject to”

““very high levels of uncertainty””

“I agree with the hon. Member. I want to set out why we have a backlog and what we can do. Everybody has talked about various things that we could do, such as triaging the cases more effectively and more routinely, like Liverpool Crown court and some of the others that have seen a considerable reduction. There are the i…”

“I entirely agree. The state of some of the courts in this country is sad. They are completely neglected, which creates a lot of challenges.”

“The Institute for Government also said that juries do not take up that much time—they save more time. The point is that, without too much difficulty, we could get the courts up and running and working for extra sitting days. Essentially, if we had more court sitting days, we would not have the backlog; it is not the ju…”

“In a moment. The main reason why the Government have cited is the backlog. What I am trying to say is that it is not the juries that cause the backlog. It is quite clearly the case that, with investment in court structures and court personnel, the courts could be fully up and running, and we could probably get rid of t…”

“That is absolutely correct. Of course, one of the reasons why some people left the criminal Bar is the fact that the legal aid funding was not great, but I assure Members that if they did not have other work to do, they would come back to the Bar. There are enough barristers and solicitors in the legal system for that.”

“No, because let’s face it: in the jury trials we are talking about, people are not getting sentences of more than three years. There is hardly going to be a King’s counsel dealing with those cases—it is not even going to be a leading junior who will deal with those cases. A lot of the barristers will be middle ranking;…”

“I will, but first let me explain. We have enough time to get those people in, so that we can increase the sitting days and reduce the backlog.”

“There are enough solicitors, barristers and judges available. Some of my former colleagues, who are now assistant recorders and recorders, were told that they could do x number of jury trials in a year, then the night before they would be due to sit in a particular Crown court, their session would get cancelled. The on…”

“I want to comment on two points. First, I agree entirely with the speech of the hon. Member for Chichester on the problem with clause 3 and jury allocation, and I especially agree with her point about the retrospective reallocation of cases, whereby people waiting for trial by jury will suddenly find that their case wi…”

“I understand that. It will just save me repeating the same thing again and again in support of each of the amendments, all of which concern clause 4. I thank the Committee for enabling me to deal with them in one go. I beg to move amendment 29, in clause 4, page 10, line 34, at end insert— “(d) the length of the trial …”

“I think I am possibly the oldest person in this room. As somebody who was prosecuting, defending and dealing with criminal cases back in the late ’80s, ’90s, 2000s and so on, I saw the criminal justice system at first hand. When I started practising at the Bar, we had full legal aid at all levels, so whenever defendant…”

“There has been a lot of discussion about the amendments. As I said on Tuesday, I will not be pushing my amendments to a vote. They are meant to be probing amendments, and I hope the Government will still look at them and consider what has been said. I wish to talk about a few issues that have been raised. We have heard…”

“Yes, absolutely. At the moment, one of the beautiful things we have is that the judge determines sentence and directs on law, and the jury decides on the innocence or guilt of a defendant. It is fantastic, because that also protects the judges. In a system where judges are going to be dealing with Crown court cases—we …”

“I understand that in some of the more simple, routine cases of two or three days, but for trials lasting eight, nine or 10 weeks, I respectfully disagree that judges can come to that judgment in just a few days, because they have to go through a whole load of evidence, comment on it and come to a decision.”