Justice Secretary David Lammy is pushing a sweeping overhaul of England’s and Wales’ criminal courts that would strip thousands of defendants of their right to be tried by a jury.
The proposal would reserve jury trials for only the most serious crimes—rape, murder, manslaughter—or for cases that pass a narrow “public interest” test, while routing most other serious charges to new judge-only courts, according to internal government documents obtained by the BBC. The leaked Ministry of Justice (MoJ) briefing shows Lammy, who also serves as deputy prime minister, wants Parliament to authorize a new “Crown Court Bench Division.”
This new middle tier would sit between local magistrate-level courts and the traditional Crown Courts, handling cases that carry sentences of up to five years. A single judge would decide these cases without a jury, effectively removing jurors from the vast majority of offenses that currently go before a Crown Court as Lammy’s team said the change is necessary to ease overwhelming court backlogs.
Juries are not just part of our tradition. They put ordinary men and women of every walk of life at the heart of justice.
Labour wants to shred this basic right, replacing the common sense of the jury box with rule by lawyers.
It is a short term decision that risks fairness,… https://t.co/HOAwsf9WUX
— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) November 25, 2025
Crown Courts are now dealing with more than 78,000 pending cases, the largest backlog on record, and officials warn that number could climb past 100,000 before the decade ends. Some defendants charged today might not see trial until late 2029 or early 2030.
Lammy wants to go further than Sir Brian Leveson, the retired appellate judge whose recommendations laid the groundwork for the proposal, according to the MoJ document. Leveson suggested eliminating juries for offenses carrying up to three-year sentences. Lammy wants to push that ceiling to five years and add a provision allowing a judge to decide on a jury-less trial in long, highly technical fraud cases.
Under Lammy’s plan, only defendants facing charges of rape, murder, manslaughter, or cases deemed to have significant public interest would automatically keep their right to a jury. Everyone else—including defendants accused of violent crimes, armed robbery, and serious financial offenses—could be routed into judge-only trials.
The briefing also claims the proposal “will not compromise the right to a fair trial,” saying that “there is no right to a jury trial” under British law. Officials say Lammy has already begun the internal government approval process, with an announcement expected in December and legislation planned for early 2026 if the plan moves ahead.
The Ministry of Justice tried to downplay the leak, insisting no final decision has been made. An MoJ spokesperson told BBC the court system is in crisis and requires “bold action” to fix it. Opposition piled up quickly, with Riel Karmy-Jones KC—one of Britain’s senior “King’s Counsel” barristers and head of the Criminal Bar Association—warning the proposal won’t work.
“The consequences of their actions will be to destroy a criminal justice system that has been the pride of this country for centuries, and to destroy justice as we know it,” Karmy-Jones KC said. “Juries are not the cause of the backlog. The cause is the systematic underfunding and neglect that has been perpetrated by this government and its predecessors for years.”
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch slammed the plan as an assault on a core British principle.
“Juries are not just part of our tradition. They put ordinary men and women of every walk of life at the heart of justice,” Badenoch wrote on X. “Labour wants to shred this basic right, replacing the common sense of the jury box with rule by lawyers.”
(Featured Image Media Credit: Courtroom Gavel [Wikimedia Commons/Public/Joe Gratz, CC0 1.0)
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