The justice secretary is facing accusations of hypocrisy over his proposed scrapping of jury trials, after his Tory opposite number Robert Jenrick said it was a system David Lammy once ‘proudly defended’ before coming to power.
Jenrick stated, “Now [Lammy is] in office, he’s getting rid of them in virtually every case. “Scrapping this pillar of our constitution because of the administrative failure to reduce the court backlog is a disgrace.”
News broke on Tuesday that in order to deal with the crumbling criminal justice system, Lammy is proposing to only have jury trials for murder, rape or manslaughter cases, the rest to be heard only by a judge.
As of June 2025, the criminal case backlog in the Crown Court for England and Wales reached a record high of almost 80,000 cases, while the backlog in the magistrates’ courts was 361,027 cases.
According to a leaked memo, Lammy, who is also the deputy PM, wrote to ministers and senior civil servants in November to say that there was “no right” to jury trials in the UK and that drastic action was needed to cut the backlog of cases in the crown courts in England and Wales.
In response, the shadow justice secretary, Jenrick, said, “Instead of doing the hard yards of governing, Lammy is throwing away a fundamental part of our democracy and one of our country’s greatest gifts to the world.”
“The Labour Party thinks that judges always know best. We see it in their approach to the Chagos Islands, the European Convention on Human Rights and, now, in their willingness to scrap jury trials. For Keir Starmer, the rule of law simply equals rule by lawyers,” he added.
This comes as Jenrick dominated headlines at the Tory Conference in October after announcing a sweeping crackdown on what he describes as “pro-migration bias” in the judiciary, and vowing to remove so-called “activist” judges.
Legal bodies hit back
The news of Lammy’s move, which will require primary legislation planned for early next year, has not been well received in the legal sector.
Riel Karmy-Jones KC, chair of the Criminal Bar Association, stated, “This is beginning to smell like a coordinated campaign against public justice.”
“The government are using the backlog as a pretext for restricting the right to jury trial – and to exclude/limit ordinary people from being involved in the cases that matter to them the most.
Their justification is false. Juries are not the cause of the backlog,” she added.
Meanwhile, the president of the Law Society of England and Wales, Mark Evans, said this move “goes too far.”
“Our society’s concept of justice rests heavily on lay participation in determining a person’s guilt or innocence. Allowing a single person to take away someone’s liberty for a lengthy period or decide a potentially life-changing complaint would be a dramatic departure from our shared values,” he added.