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Mr. Malins: "The Runaway Jury".
Mr. Blunkett: Thank you. That was an excellent book—[Interruption.] I am glad to hear that John Grisham's latest book is excellent. I may one day have a chance to read a book again, rather than Bills and policy documents.
The John Grisham book demonstrates clearly how we must avoid falling into the traps entailed in long jury trials. I shall answer the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) straight. Yes, of course we had to consider other options. Roskill and the debates around that led us to consider whether it would be sensible for assessors to sit with a judge. Once one gets beyond the discussion about having a normal jury trial, one has abandoned the jury and invented a new proposition, which is what the official Opposition are advancing.
Mr. Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden): Rather than calling upon fiction to find evidence for his case, will the Home Secretary look to facts and accept that although serious fraud cases may impose difficulties on jurors, they do not seem to have resulted in difficulties in securing convictions, since over the past four years the Serious Fraud Office has had a 92 per cent. success rate in obtaining convictions, as against 57 per cent. on average for contested trials?
Mr. Blunkett: Such success is achieved only after a trial has been put together and a jury obtained. We are all painfully aware of that, because we are debating the best way forward for the investigation and presentation of serious fraud, and the best way of ensuring that we get more cases to trial, as well as getting more trials to successful conviction. They are two separate processes, but the right hon. Gentleman rightly and mischievously suggests that we address reality, rather than a mythical jury. I agree. That is the basis for our proposals. There have been instances of real difficulty in obtaining and maintaining a jury that is truly representative, picked from across the nation, not consisting of the unemployed or the long retired—
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich): What is wrong with that?
Mr. Blunkett: Nothing at all is wrong with the long retired or the unemployed, so long as the jury is not made up only of those who are retired or unemployed, as the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey suggested. That is what I was responding to.
Lady Hermon: In introducing the proposal for non-jury trials in specific cases, could the Home Secretary enlighten the House and say whether his decision was informed by the experience in Northern Ireland of non-jury trials in serious criminal cases, which we have had for 30 years, and the moon and stars did not fall out of the sky during those years? In particular, would he consider two features of the Diplock courts? First, and
importantly, there is a right of appeal not only on points of law, but on points of fact; and secondly, and importantly, the judge, who sits alone in those courts, must give a statement of his reasons for coming to his conclusions. That is why we have rarely had bad decisions from the Diplock process of non-jury trials in Northern Ireland.
Mr. Blunkett: No, the stars have not fallen from the sky. There are obviously specific circumstances in Northern Ireland, which we should weigh. We have taken account of the range of experiences, including those that the hon. Lady enunciated, and we have learned a great deal from the Diplock courts, as I said 18 months ago when we debated the development of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. The House had reflected on these matters in 1997, when it unanimously determined that way forward. I am grateful to the hon. Lady.
Mr. Marshall-Andrews: When dealing with the constitution of juries in serious fraud cases, the Home Secretary points to the fact that people who are unemployed, either voluntarily or because of misfortune, form some part of those juries. Does he also accept that it is the universal experience of those who practise in such trials that the juries contain rather more women and rather more disabled people, both of whom are extremely desirable in our juries? Thus we arrive at a more, rather than less, representative jury than we otherwise would. While I have got the Secretary of State, may I also ask whether he is suggesting that a single judge is more representative than any jury in the circumstances?
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Mr. Blunkett: I am not putting that argument. Those arguing against me are saying that they want a representative jury, but undermining that argument by talking about changing its representative nature. That is the simple fact. I am suggesting that once one does away with the presumption of a jury drawn from the population as a whole in the normal way, one has reached a different argument and is on a different wicket all together.
I did not get into the argument about retired people or women. I answered a question from the Liberal Democrat spokesman that presumed that we should be free to retain jury trial, but not the method of drawing on the population for such trial. That is what I am dealing with. Once we have moved away from the presumption of drawing freely on the population as a whole, we are arguing about a different sort of hearing.
Mr. Hogg: Will the right hon. Gentleman tell the House whether his primary reason for seeking to do away with jury trials in specialist cases is the complexity of cases relating to financial matters, or the fact that their likely length is such as to be intolerable for a typical juror? They are not the same point. Which one is he making?
Mr. Blunkett: I did not confuse those two issues or suggest that one cancelled out or overrode the other. Indeed, I did not say that I was relying on one, but not the other. I do not know whether there is a text
somewhere that I am not following, but on whose basis the right hon. and learned Gentleman intervened. If so, it was not mine and I have not said it. It is very difficult to answer a question that I have not addressed.
Mr. Bercow: I am worried about the Home Secretary. I am not a lawyer—I say that as a matter of pride—but it seems to me that he thinks that he can make his case purely by sweeping assertion, rather than by any sort of reliance on evidence. Why does he think that the contrast is between the total representativeness of the established jury and the complete unrepresentativeness, as the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) put it, of the single judge? Why is the choice not between a more or less imperfect group of people—more than one person and probably several people—and the dependence of the defendant on the views of one individual?
Mr. Blunkett: I think that the argument is very interesting, and it will be put by the right hon. Member for West Dorset from the Front Bench, but it is not the argument about retaining the normal jury system. That is the point that I have been making, and it has to be made because the attacks on our proposition publicly have been about the destruction of the jury service. I read out the views of the right hon. Member for West Dorset from The Independent and the Financial Times on Saturday, and he has enunciated them on radio since.
We need to be clear on what we are arguing about. If we are not arguing about retaining the normal jury system and its selection for particular trials, we are arguing about something entirely different. So let us argue about whether a panel or a wider set of assessors with expertise and training to deal with financial matters is the right way forward, presumably on the grounds that wider jury selection does not allow that to happen. Alongside that, let us argue the question of how much time people can devote to jury service without destroying their lives or undermining their jobs so that they seek to withdraw from the jury. I said earlier that more than three quarters of those called for jury service had chosen to find a way of getting out of it.
Mrs. Dunwoody: My right hon. Friend will forgive me if, as I am not a lawyer, I do not follow some of the more esoteric arguments. To me, the issue is very simple. What we are suggesting is taking away from people an ancient right to be tried by however motley a crew is gathered in a court and giving that role to one person, professional though they may be. Is it not a principle in this House that we do not make laws that rely almost entirely either on exceptions or on the convenience of the Executive?
Mr. Blunkett: I do not think that we should ever rely on the convenience of the Executive, and there is nothing convenient for the Executive about any of this. We are seeking to find a solution to a problem that now appears substantially to be acknowledged across the House. One option is to draw on a limited number of people, assessors or otherwise, who are financially expert in the areas in question. That is an option, and it is about to be put by the right hon. Member for West Dorset. We are not presuming that there is something clever about this; we are trying to find a solution to a
genuine problem. Of course, there is nothing exceptional about judges either in magistrates courts or, as I have illustrated, in higher courts. I thought that I heard the world around me suggesting that we should be defending the rights, position and integrity of judges.
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