A Labour MP has urged the government to include in the Courts and Tribunals Bill a statutory duty on the lord chancellor to review the impact of his jury trial reforms after 12 and 36 months.
Paulette Hamilton MP made the request for her ‘modest and reasonable’ amendment at the start of the penultimate day of the public bill committee’s line-by-line scrutiny.
Hamilton said her amendment, which applies to clause 3 of the bill - judge-only trials - did not seek to block the government’s proposals or rewrite the substance of the bill. ‘It simply asks that we understand the impact of the changes we are making and we are accountable for them,’ she said.
The committee heard that the amendment would ensure parliament received ‘clear, evidence-based’ assessments of how the provisions of the bill were working in practice. The assessments would ‘crucially’ consider the impact of the reforms on people from ethnic minority backgrounds and white British people living in lower-income households.
On why she specified these two particular groups, Hamilton said: ‘Justice is not experienced equally by all. We know all too well through evidence through lived experience and through countless testimony that people from ethnic minority communities often have lower levels of trust in the criminal justice system. This shapes how justice is perceived and whether it has been seen as legitimate.
‘For ethnic minority communities, this is fundamentally about trust in the justice system and and perception of fairness. Equally, we must recognise that socio-economic disadvantage can profoundly affect a person’s experience of the courts. White British individuals from lower-income households are also more likely to feel marginalised by systems that appear distant, complex or unresponsive to their circumstances. If this house is serious about fairness, then we must be serious about understanding how reform affects those who are most at risk of being left behind.’
Hamilton stressed that her amendment ‘does not assume the outcome’ but recognises that ‘without proper review, we simply will not know’.
This morning's committee session lasted only two hours and five minutes. The committee will meet again this afternoon. However, line-by-line scrutiny, including votes on amendments, must end by 5pm on Thursday.
No comments yet