The lord chancellor has rejected calls by an influential committee of MPs for an urgent review of the law of joint enterprise. 

The justice committee last December recommended that the government request the Law Commission to undertake an urgent review of the law in murder cases. It recommended that the review should consider the appropriateness of the threshold of foresight in establishing culpability of secondary participants.

It should also consider the proposition that it should not be possible to charge with murder secondary participants who did not encourage or assist the perpetration of the murder. Rather, they should be charged with manslaughter or another lesser offence, the committee said. 

However, in a letter to committee chair Sir Alan Beith, Chris Grayling said the question of whether the law should be reviewed and clarified in statute would need to be considered carefully by ministers in the next parliament.

‘It would not be appropriate for me to ask the Law Commission to launch a review prior to the general election, as this would effectively tie incoming ministers to a particular course of action,’ he said. ‘The scope of any review and who should lead it are issues that should rightly be left to the new ministers.’

Grayling said the Ministry of Justice could not commit resources to reviewing historic case files as recommended by the committee, ‘and I am not convinced that such an exercise would have any real practical benefit’.

He added that further discussions between MoJ officials and the Crown Prosecution Service were needed before any new system that records homicide cases brought under the joint-enterprise doctrine could be put in place.