Andy Burnham has indicated he will scrap plans to curtail jury trials in England and Wales, abandoning one of the most significant overhauls from Keir Starmer’s government.
The prime minister said he had concerns about the proposals and that his instinct was to keep juries at the heart of the justice system.
Speaking at a community centre in Sheffield on Friday, Burnham said he was reluctant to do away with jury trials due to his experience campaigning for justice over the Hillsborough disaster.
“I have my concerns about the plan to restrict a jury trial, partly from my personal experience, particularly in Hillsborough,” he said. “So I want to really look in detail at that proposal, and my instincts are that we need to find ways of not reducing access to jury trial.”
Burnham’s intervention is the strongest signal yet that the former justice secretary David Lammy’s proposals, which amounted to a historic departure in the judicial system, will be dropped.
The prime minister has previously raised concerns about the struggle of Hillsborough victims to secure justice for what he has called “the greatest miscarriage of justice of our times”.
Lammy announced in December that defendants who were likely to receive a sentence of three years or less would no longer get a jury trial. He said the proposals could clear the backlog of nearly 80,000 trials clogging up the court system within a decade.
However, the plans were met with a fierce backlash from legal bodies and some Labour MPs including Karl Turner, who was suspended over his criticisms of Lammy and Starmer.
On Friday, Burnham said he had asked the chief whip, Anneliese Midgley, to speak to Turner about being readmitted to the parliamentary Labour party.
Diane Abbott, another Labour MP who had the whip suspended under Starmer, was allowed back into the parliamentary Labour party on Thursday.
Measures under the courts and tribunals bill would leave defendants no longer able to choose a jury trial, and the ability to appeal to a crown court against a magistrates court verdict would also be limited.
Magistrates’ powers would be extended from dealing with maximum sentences of one year to at least 18 months and a judge-only “swift” court would be established to hear cases without a jury.
Ministers argued the move was necessary to halve the number of jury trials from 15,000 a year and to tackle the backlog of court cases that built up during the Covid pandemic.
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