Clause 4
Fraud (Trials Without a Jury) Bill
4:30 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General & Shadow Spokesman On Community Cohesion, Law Officers (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I support the amendment. The hon. Gentleman touched on the fact that we have a new Fraud Act—the FraudAct 2006—which has not yet been fully implemented. There has also been no time for us to understand the extent to which it will simplify trials.
I mentioned an issue relating to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, which is also highly germane to the debate. Those who participated in the debates on that Act will recollect that it contains a controversial provision that attracted considerable debate, but which the Conservatives did not seek to obstruct. That provision allows for the trial of specimen counts in the case of somebody who carries out what is described as repetitive criminality. When a person has been convicted, it allows the judge alone to make a finding of fact on the outstanding counts that have not been tried but have used the same system to obtain something or otherwise to commit an offence.
The obvious example is someone who uses a credit card 500 times fraudulently and dishonestly to obtain goods or services. Rather than having to plough through all 500 counts, one can pick two or three specimen counts to be tried by jury. After the person has been convicted of those offences, other offences that plainly bear the imprint of their criminality, having been committed in the same period and starting with a specimen count at the beginning and the end of a period, can be dealt with by a judge on his own.
That system existed informally in my early yearsat the Bar. It was called taking offences into consideration. In that period, the system that we had in place was that if a person would not agree to offences being taken into consideration, the judge effectively took them into consideration if he considered that the evidence of a person’s involvement was overwhelming. That system was overturned by the Court of Appeal, which said that if a person disputed TICs, as they were called, the outstanding offences could not go into the balance of the sentencing process. The Government’s proposal in the 2004 Act was precisely to get around the problem by having a formal system of adjudication on outstanding counts. Although some had concerns about the extent to which it might usurp trial by jury, I for one considered it to be a sensible way to proceed.