March 2026

Not now—later. I will. I want to appeal to Labour Members. We are engaged in ideological strife. But in the Venn diagram that any society depends upon for the sustaining of sufficient points of common ground to keep a society together, jury trial is one of those that appear in a point of intersection between the vast numbers of this House and outside it.

Not just now, but I will come back to the hon. Member. We in this House are engaged in ideological strife. Every day of our lives we are engaged in a political battle, and frankly, sometimes we do not always live up to the highest standards that even our own parties have set. In the course of my legal career, I have been led—when I say “led”, I mean that I was a junior in the courts—by some distinguished Labour Members of Parliament who continued to practise in the criminal courts and regarded i

Parliamentary appearance by Navendu Mishra

Parliamentary appearance by Daniel Zeichner

Parliamentary appearance by Sir Geoffrey Cox

Parliamentary appearance by Natalie Fleet

The Government’s spending plans look very, very iffy. The Minister has a chance of fitting in with the Chancellor’s fiscal rules—if there is no further downgrade on economic growth, which seems unlikely; if the Government have the backbone to rein in public spending and to increase taxes in the last years of the Parliament, which seems very unlikely; if the Government do not have to step in with any significant energy support because no money has been set aside; and if the Government can get £4.

I should declare an interest at the beginning. I am a member of the Bar—that is not uncommonly known—I still practise at the Bar, and I have the honour to be a criminal barrister and a member of the Criminal Bar Association. I have spent 44 years at the Bar. I have defended and prosecuted in some of the largest criminal trials that this country has ever seen—and some of the longest. I have been experienced in seeing how juries react to circumstances of adversity and circumstances that challenge

The other logical absurdity is that, under the Government’s proposed reforms, somebody with a previous conviction may well go above the three-year threshold, so those who have a string of previous convictions will get a right to jury trial, but a person of good character will not.

Parliamentary appearance by Afzal Khan

Parliamentary appearance by Claire Hanna

Parliamentary appearance by Julia Lopez

Parliamentary appearance by James Murray

Parliamentary appearance by Michael Wheeler

Parliamentary appearance by Abtisam Mohamed

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West (Dame Chi Onwurah). I have three quick anecdotal points and then a question for the Minister. Data sovereignty has been part of my life. I started my career as a trainee computer programmer at Shire Hall in Cambridge. My prime job was to carry the punch cards to the punch room to make sure that payroll ran properly. Anyone w

No, I am not giving way. Let me make that clear now. I want to finish in a moment. The reality is that jury trial is too precious a thing to lose. We are faced with a question of principle here. The savings that the Government claim will be made are contested by many expert analyses from the profession, the Institute for Government and others. They are based on questionable assumptions. Are those savings sufficient for us to abrogate a fundamental principle that attracts almost universal assent

I will not take interventions now, and certainly not if they are of the quality that we have had up till now. The reality is that jury trial is the cornerstone of our justice system. Do away with it and we are in trouble. Let us look at the way in which this Bill operates. It automatically presumes jury trial for everything that will have a likely sentence of three years, and those will involve some grave offences. However, in relation to serious, complex or lengthy cases, it could cover any all

T5. Given the events in the middle east, can the Chancellor share with us what work is being done here and alongside our NATO allies and other partners to understand the economic consequences, people’s changing needs and the impact that has on Government spending when countries face times of conflict?

I thank my hon. Friend. The third thing to say is that, for me, closure began after a successful civil process following the acquittal. My rapist may not be considered to have met the criminal threshold for guilt beyond all reasonable doubt, and is out there on the streets as a free man while I live with the life sentence of what he did to me, but what has been established, at a civil standard of proof, is what happened. It found that I had been raped, and a compensation order was made that reco