David Lammy, Labour’s new Justice Secretary, is living dangerously. The leak of plans for an overhaul of the jury system to expedite court cases and address years of under-investment and delays has drawn an unforgiving spotlight onto his argument and political modus operandi.
It has detonated a powerful backlash from senior barristers who have accused Lammy of misrepresenting the statistics about rape cases collapsing in a bid to push through his proposal to remove some rights to trial by jury for less serious offences.
Lammy’s claim that 60 per cent of cases are being withdrawn, due to witnesses falling away or due to exhaustion on the part of the accuser at waiting for trial, has been disputed.
Senior legal sources have instead said that a high proportion of rape cases collapse before a charge has been brought, rather than afterwards, meaning it cannot be blamed on court system delays.
The case for Lammy’s position is that “justice delayed is justice denied” – by which he means that speeding up the efficiency of the court system will free up space for a faster turnaround of rape cases.
Senior cross-party lawyers on the backbenches and the Criminal Bar Association clearly take a dim view of his handling of the statistics and doubt the wisdom of deploying arguments about rape trials in a way that can come across as a manipulative short-cut to winning a difficult debate.
In fairness to Lammy, this task was also a pre-occupation for Sir Keir Starmer as a top lawyer-turned-politician. Lammy took up the brief after the autumn reshuffle with gusto and speed, proposing more sweeping plans for the reduction of jury trials than Sir Brian Leveson’s proposals had made. His frontal approach has now run into trouble on at least three fronts.
The first is the case of how far jury trial rights should be watered down, which is a reasonable question if defendants in less serious cases can game the system by insisting on a judge-led trial when magistrates and a judge could do the job.
The second is how far and fast to shift: the squeeze here comes both from concerns about amplifying bias or miscarriages of justice. The more technocratic objections are that the system could be made more effective by streamlining processes and allowing courts and judges to sit longer (as Starmer himself drove through in an emergency after the summer riots in 2024) – and that Lammy should focus attention more on the bizarre rise in the number of prisoners released accidentally, which infuriates the public.
The Government has long wanted to enhance the conviction rate for rape and sexual assault. But statistics need due care and the reason that credible claims do not proceed to trial is more complex than a lengthy wait for trial – as unpleasant as that surely is.
Certainly, he can be hot-headed and a bit prone to forgetfulness in the details of his arguments when he shadowed Justice. Yet his problems are symptomatic of the disconcerting habit the Starmer Government has of dropping radical reforms on an unsuspecting public and then wondering why there is such upset.
It did so when the Prime Minister abruptly embraced introducing a digital ID scheme at the party conference in September, with no expectation that this was a plan and still has no clear route to implementation.
And while remedies for an overburdened justice system were expected, any proposal that touches the centrality of “trial by jury” as a basic right needed far clearer preparation. The department itself has been in upheaval: Shabana Mahmood moved to the Home Office in September, and Antonia Romeo, its experienced permanent secretary, had made that move in April.
Lammy must have found his time in government frustrating. He reminds interlocutors that he was an early and consistent backer of Starmer. Initially rewarded by the top role of Foreign Office, he then found he had to work under the Prime Minister’s security chief adviser, Jonathan Powell. He also lost control of relations with the EU to Paymaster General Nick Thomas-Symonds, a trusty of Starmer. “NTS”, as the Prime Minister chummily calls him, has now been promoted to attending Cabinet.
Lammy was also edged out of trade deals with the US when Lord Mandelson nabbed the ambassador role, against his advice to Starmer. Vindication has been swift on that front as Mandelson imploded over his Epstein connections.
To add insult to injury, he was moved in a panicky reshuffle in the summer to the role of Justice Secretary and the vague role of Deputy Prime Minister. No wonder he told an interviewer recently it was “hard to say” if he was enjoying the new job.
Lammy is a driven politician who feels under-appreciated in a hierarchy which can have sudden job switches imposed for no obvious reason other than the Prime Minister’s erratic convenience.
Now he is in hot water for trying to put into practice what Starmer wanted in Opposition – improve a struggling justice system and move policy in areas like the handling of rape cases, where there are strong legacies of prejudice and unintended consequences.
By moving fast and breaking things, however, the Justice Secretary finds himself challenged from his own benches by figures like former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, who opposes the reforms on the grounds that they could store up miscarriages of justice – and also from a legal establishment which faults his use of statistics.
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The result will be a backward trudge to a compromise and more frustration from Lammy and others about this government’s tendency to tie itself in knots, even before the Opposition gets going.
So in this muddle, I cut the Justice Secretary some slack. After all, if the Prime Minister, a far more senior lawyer who actually ran the country’s prosecution service, cannot decide what justice reforms he wants as his legacy and how to get them done, it’s a telling vacuum. Don’t fault the pupil – blame the guy in charge, with the knighthood for services to the justice system.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico and co-host of Politics at Sam an Anne’s
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