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Mr. Marshall-Andrews: Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Clarke: I shall in a moment.
I was most worried by some of the Home Secretary's passing references to the Bill. I do not know what he thinks about trial by jury, but, today, he offered absolutely no defence of it. He made trial by jury sound as though it were a mediaeval practice that has been handed down to us.
Mr. David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden):
Or Victorian.
Mr. Clarke:
Yes. The Home Secretary also gave the impression that the Victorians had introduced the right to elect trial by jury as an economy measure. He does not seem to believe that trial by jury has any particular value.
As I agreed so much with the earlier intervention of the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall- Andrews), and suspect that he agrees with my views, I shall happily give way to him and then deal very briefly with the remarks of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman).
Mr. Marshall-Andrews:
Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman agree that if one removes the right to elect for trial by jury from people with previous convictions, inevitably that fact will become known to police forces prosecuting in the area? Police forces will therefore know that there is a raft of people who, if arrested and charged, have been effectively denied the right to elect for jury trial.
Mr. Clarke:
I trust that most good police officers will not be affected by that knowledge, but agree that everyone involved in the system will know that certain characters will never be able to elect for trial by jury if they are brought before the courts. The guidance in the legislation makes it quite clear that someone with form and previous convictions should not normally be given the right to trial by jury, but should be dealt with summarily. I agree with the drift of the hon. and learned Gentleman's comments.
I have left myself only four minutes in which to deal with education and employment, which is not adequate time to do so. I agree with the hon. Member for Huddersfield that, if one singles out only one matter for highest priority, it should be training and skills acquisition for 16 to 19-year-olds. Although that was the part of our education system that had been most neglected and failing, it is not true that the previous Government's record on it was deficient. We introduced the National Council for Vocational Qualifications and a new system of vocational qualifications, and we poured money into further education. We gave further education colleges their independence from local government and introduced new funding arrangements. That part of the education system is vital and, of the matters within the Government's gift, it most affects employment prospects.
The Government like to claim that unemployment has decreased in their time in office, and whichever Minister replies to the debate will make much of it. Boy have the Government been lucky! First, they just missed a recession; and, secondly, no one is quite sure why unemployment continued decreasing in that period. They avoided bust, after they had acquired a very healthy and growing enterprise economy that had been enjoying reducing unemployment levels for months before ever they took office.
The Government should not get carried away by hubris. If the economy goes wrong--on another occasion, I will say why we are not in the clear yet--and when employment decreases, all their daft claims for the new deal will not be sustainable. They have produced marvellous statistics for the new deal at a time when the economy is creating jobs--the real economy of private businesses is creating more jobs. Wait until the economy turns down--then, any attempt to dress up the new deal with statistics will show that the only new jobs in the economy are those created by employers and they need skilled employees.
In the short time left to me, let me express some concern about the new learning and skills councils. How much will they relate to local employers, the local business climate and local needs? We introduced training and enterprise councils, which were another example of how we tried to give extra stimulus to the training effort. They were not perfect and I do not mind the Government moving on. The idea of specialist learning and skills councils--the heroic attempt to read across and get a more evenly funded picture in which people have genuine choice, from the sixth form to the fullest extent of further education--is commendable, but the way in which the Government have gone about it is new Labour, new quango.
The best feature of the training and enterprise councils was that they were based on local employers--most were chaired by local employers. They addressed the local labour market and had considerable discretion. That was intended not merely to help business but because local business is where the jobs that young people and their parents require come from.
Every interest group in the locality known to man will be involved with the learning and skills councils, in particular all the providers of further education and training and all the local authority people. The voice of private business and the local employer will be reduced. Also, the amount of discretion that is to be given to the councils will be sharply reduced.
Mr. Robin Corbett (Birmingham, Erdington):
The single most important test of the Government's home affairs legislation must be how it will deter crime and help people to restore the peace and security that too many have had stolen from them.
Communities throughout my constituency are looking to West Midlands police and Birmingham city council to make full use of their powers to combat anti-social behaviour before it turns into criminal activity. For most people, anti-social behaviour is more damaging than criminal acts because it impacts more widely and immediately on whole communities.
The new crime reduction strategies agreed locally by councils, the police, the voluntary sector and others must be turned into instruments that will rid communities of the destructive behaviour of that tiny minority of young people who believe themselves to be beyond the law. However, most young people are as law-abiding as their parents. Indeed, young people are the main victims of crime at the hands of their peers.
Steps are being taken in the proposed measures to improve the effectiveness of procedures when young offenders first meet the criminal justice system, and I welcome those. I urge the Home Secretary to keep up the
pressure in cutting the time between charge and trial,so that young people can better be shown the connection between their offence and the community against which it is generally committed. Research shows that when that first intervention is effective it can divert young people from moving up the escalator of more serious crime towards a more positive way of life. That is why I welcome the crime and protection Bill to modernise the probation service, which wants to offer the help that young offenders need and which will improve the effectiveness of community penalties.
I hope that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretarywill continue to remind magistrates of the range of non-custodial sentences available and encourage them to be used where appropriate. The best of those schemes work well, as our recent Home Affairs Committee inquiry showed. Best practice needs to be better spread among probation officers and all those concerned with sentencing.
As we begin to become smarter in deterring and detecting crime and in dealing with offenders, the better life chances that come with a healthy economy and the success of the new deal for jobless youngsters will help to make a difference. It is important that the criminal justice system responds to that new urgency, which brings me to the Government's proposals to restrict the right to jury trial.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, himself a barrister, was perhaps a little testy when the Bar Council criticised his proposal. He brushed it aside, saying that it was behaving
The Law Society argues that black defendants feel that juries are more likely to represent the ethnic mix of their local communities than are magistrates. That must be the case. With the Home Secretary's support, my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor is working to improve the make-up of the benches for exactly that reason. The Law Society says that juries are more open-minded than magistrates about the veracity of prosecution and police evidence. One factor in that is that it is almost certainly a new experience for jurors, while magistrates deal with the police regularly.
I hope that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will say how magistrates are to evaluate the likely impact on defendants of the mode of trial. It is a very subjective judgment that is bound to favour the few over the many, the white, middle-class haves over the many have-nots. We run the risk of introducing a two-tier system.
I want the Home Secretary to say more about why the changes are needed. Is it all about cash, or is it about getting better efficiency from the system? If it is the latter, surely there are other ways to achieve it. My right hon. Friend claims that the move will save £100 million a year, but what estimate has he made of the cost of appeals against decisions to refuse a trial by jury?
As the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr. David Calvert-Smith, is reported as saying in The Times on 15 November this year:
I am among those who have presented Bills to the House in an attempt to persuade Governments of both colours of the need for freedom of information. I fear that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has been flirting with that young Prudence from No. 11 Downing street, who may have been two-timing the Chancellor. Prudence should have no part in the plans to demolish this far too secret society, whatever she does for the Chancellor. Our task is to rip doors off hinges and throw open the windows so that those who sent us here can better know what Government and Parliament are doing in their name.
"like any good trade union".
Whatever its truth, that comment does not dispose of the concerns.
"only a tiny proportion of cases were tried by jury, about 20,000 cases out of 1.5 million a year."
23 Nov 1999 : Column 513
He added:
Does that not suggest that the more efficient conduct of courts at both levels is likely to yield far more savings at less potential cost to justice than would restricting jury trial?
"There is a feeling in the public mind that they [juries] have some actual say, they are participating in their criminal justice [system]. I have rarely met a juror who did not feel that being in a jury was a valuable part of their experience of being a citizen."
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