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Mr. Grieve: I am listening to the Home Secretary carefully. I hope that he will help the House in respect of that particular proposal. He will appreciate that I have not had much time to consider the matter, but my impression is that one consequence of the Government amendments would be that judicial discretion as to what constitutes a long and complex fraud case would be removed. It is envisaged that the prosecutor will serve a notice, but as far as I can see, that notice will not be open to challenge, and there will be no opportunity for a judge to exercise discretion in respect of it. It would be useful for the Home Secretary to deal with that important matter.
Mr. Blunkett: It is an important point, but the debate on this clause is confined to long and complex fraud cases, for the reasons that I have enunciated. As has been spelled out before, the matter is open to challenge. The Serious Fraud Office would investigate such cases, and the presumption put forward by the Crown Prosecution Service would be open to challenge. No one has indicated anything to the contrary, but the proposals are designed to ensure that we can get to the truth.
2.45 pm
Simon Hughes: This is very important territory, and I concede that the Home Secretary has moved to limit the proposal to fraud cases. However, there are two strong arguments against his case. First, there is a much higher conviction rate in most long and complex fraud cases than elsewhere in the jury trial system, and the SFO has testified to that. Secondly, almost everyone who has participated in such trials understands that there is normally only one fundamental and simple issue—is the person honest or dishonest? That question can be understood by a cross-section of the population in a jury of 12 as well as it can be understood by a judge who, by definition, is a jury of one.
Mr. Blunkett: We have been through all this on previous occasions. We are talking about the existing Highams cumulative test. The amendment restricting the proposals to serious fraud trials was designed to ensure that juries in those cases did not have to deal with a range of issues. We want to ensure that people found guilty on a simple test case cannot walk away, and that jury members in trials that last a long time do not end up being discharged because they cannot serve for that length of time.
On Second Reading, I gave the example of the Maxwell trial, in which 750 people were discharged before it was possible to elect a jury. People need to hold down jobs and have a life, and cannot be tied up for a year, or even longer in some cases. It is very difficult to get a jury of 12 good men and women of true origins and citizenship who reflect the community. We have been
through all that before, and people either agree or disagree that we must get to grips with cases that otherwise are likely to end in acquittal. Such cases include the Levitt case and the Blue Arrow case when the courts themselves expressed concern about the threat to justice posed by the way that they were conducted.
Mr. Grieve: Only a week or a fortnight ago, the Government indicated to Opposition parties that they were minded to introduce the Law Commission's proposals on multiple offending on Third Reading in the Lords. That would enable specimen counts to continue to be brought, but it very often happens in fraud cases that multiple identical matters need to be taken into consideration. In such cases, the Law Commission proposals mean that it would be possible for a judge alone to determine those matters at a Newton hearing following conviction on the specimen counts. We made it clear that we supported the Law Commission's initiative, but the Government chose not to introduce those proposals on Third Reading. Should not those proposals be closely linked to any reconsideration of whether juries should try fraud cases? Is not the uncoupling that the Government have performed regrettable?
Mr. Blunkett: Let us be clear about this: we are in favour of those proposals. From what the hon. Gentleman has said, I take it that the Conservative party also agrees with them. However, there is no timetabling of debate in the Lords—and the recent Division in this House shows that the Opposition would vote against the establishment of any such system in the other place. Extending Report stage to a fifth day would have extended the debate and disrupted consideration of other clauses. We would then have had to take the Bill even closer to the wire when it comes to the Queen's Speech. We do not want any posturing this afternoon about whether the Opposition would have negotiated a timetable for acceptance on Third Reading of the Law Commission proposals. I repeat that the Government are in favour of them, and we will introduce them at the earliest opportunity, but we cannot have games in respect of this matter. There is no procedure in the House of Lords for any sort of timetable or closure mechanism, nor any provision for the operation of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker system that is normal in the House of Commons. Until we have such a system in the Lords, we cannot take anyone's word that that House will be in favour of anything that we propose.
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich): I am not a lawyer, and I listen in some bemusement when those of my colleagues who are lawyers discuss the finer points of law. My involvement in this matter is very basic, therefore. I believe that any loss of trial by jury, regardless of what is said in the House, will lead almost inevitably to the removal of rights that have been enshrined in this country for many hundreds of years. I am sorry to say that it is not clear to me what my right hon. Friend is saying. Is it that we have to go ahead with this very basic change because the House of Lords does not proceed in a way that he finds acceptable? If so, that is extremely worrying.
Mr. Blunkett: I shall try to clarify matters for my hon. Friend. In response to the intervention from the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), we are talking not about the amendments that I am moving this afternoon but about multiple cases where, at present, we have to take a specimen case when dealing with complex and serious fraud. The official Opposition pointed out that they were prepared to support the Law Commission's recommendations, which we support, that would allow those multiple provisions to be dealt with on the back of a specimen case. We are not dealing with that matter this afternoon and it is not material to the amendments under discussion, but it was material to the point that I was making to the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey. I would hate there to be any misunderstandings about that.
Simon Hughes: Will the Home Secretary confirm that all the legislation that has come from his Department this parliamentary year has received a huge amount of co-operation from the House of Lords? The Government have accepted that owing to the lack of timetabling in the Lords, the upper House has been able to consider matters that the Commons has not been able to consider and has made great improvements, for example to the rape provisions in the Sexual Offences Bill. The Government have fixed the deadline—the backstop of the date of the Queen's Speech—and they are setting the limits to our debate. If the Lords do not agree tomorrow to what the Government propose on jury trial today, it will be the Government's insistence on such matters that will derail the Bill and not the insistence of the Opposition.
Mr. Blunkett: I do not accept that at all. I paid tribute on Third Reading of the Sexual Offences Bill to the work that had been done in both Houses, to which the House of Lords contributed. The same is true of the Extradition Bill, the Crime (International Co-operation) Bill and, to a lesser extent, the Anti-social Behaviour Bill; it is not true of the Criminal Justice Bill. We are debating the reinstatement of part 7. How can the hon. Gentleman suggest that the Lords did a superb job of scrutiny and revision when they simply knocked that part out altogether? It does not bear thinking about.
Furthermore, on the serious risk of jury tampering—I want to get to clause 43—trials that fail are a major worry throughout the country. People see those accused of the most serious crimes going free not because the system worked, but because it was tampered with so as to make a conviction impossible. One of our most senior judges wrote to my noble Friend Baroness Scotland, just before he was elevated to the Appeal Court, to describe his experiences. He was talking about an organised crime case that took more than three years. Each year, the jury was nobbled—it was discharged twice—although the case was finally concluded. He said that it was surely not a coincidence that the key players were acquitted after those three years and only the minor ones convicted.
If we do not change the law, we will end up with such situations over and over again. We will end up with what is happening in Merseyside with Operation Dolphin, where serious and organised criminality is taken to court again and again but the juries are tampered with—
people are either threatened or bribed—and discharged. Would it really be sensible to say in such circumstances that the judge could not carry on with the trial, which is what the Opposition amendments suggest? Given that the original jury have been tampered with and the next jury would know that, it would be difficult to get another jury and they would be under constant threat too.I was asked how many trials had been discontinued because the jury had been threatened or intimidated. In London alone, we are spending more than £9 million on constant 24-hour surveillance for a large number of trials. Of course, 24-hour surveillance, support and protection will continue, but we will ensure that the course of justice can take shape—clause 43 deals with this—in such cases. It will not be whispering in the ear of the judge, as was mentioned, because we have tightened the criteria for the evidence of serious risk—the real and present danger—which echoes the common-law test for police protection in those cases to ensure that we get it right.
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