A full assessment of the impact of curbing jury trials will be published when the necessary legislation begins its parliamentary journey, justice minister Sarah Sackman has said - amid growing calls from MPs to see the evidence.

Announcing plans to axe a quarter of jury trials earlier this month to cut the Crown court backlog, the Ministry of Justice said cases heard by judges alone in its proposed ‘swift courts’ would take an estimated 20% less time than jury trials.

In a written parliamentary question, Labour’s Andy Slaughter, chair of the Commons justice select committee, asked for the evidence backing the time estimate and other analysis mentioned in part one of Sir Brian Leveson’s criminal courts review.

Replying, Sackman said jury selection, the need to explain legal concepts to a juror and jury deliberation add to the time it takes to hear a case, and offences heard by magistrates complete four times faster than similar cases in the Crown court.

On the work done to reach Leveson’s ‘conservative estimate’ of a 20% saving, Sackman said quantitative analyses explored potential proxies for jury trial savings by drawing comparisons within the current system. ‘Whilst there is no directly comparable proxy for judge-only trials within our own systems, this provided a framework for elicitation workshops and judicial engagement,’ Sackman said.

David Lammy MP arrives at Royal Courts of Justice to be sworn in as lord chancellor

Lammy will be quizzed on his jury plan when he appears before the justice committee next week

Source: Michael Cross

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A ‘structured elicitation workshop’ was carried out with operational staff from HM Courts & Tribunals Service. The workshop 'generated a suggested estimated range of 10-30% for lower to upper end plausible time savings, with 20% given as a median value'. Engagement sessions were carried out with judges ‘to understand their personal expectations of potential time-savings... Their views were in keeping with wider estimates’.

Sackman said the 20% assumption was also broadly in line with evidence from New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, which compared quantitative data from judge-only and jury trials. 'A full impact assessment of the policy measures announced will be published alongside legislation as is usual,' she added.

Ministers were repeatedly asked about the impact assessment during an urgent debate in the Commons this week. Justice secretary David Lammy will be quizzed on his jury plan when he appears before the justice committee next Tuesday.