New Clause 3
Fraud (Trials Without a Jury) Bill
6:30 pm
Dominic Grieve (Shadow Attorney General & Shadow Spokesman On Community Cohesion, Law Officers (Assist the Home Affairs Team); Beaconsfield, Conservative)
I, too, am grateful to the Solicitor-General. I certainly understood—my memory is engraved with all the sections, even from 2003—that oral representations could be made. However, I perhaps differ from the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome: I certainly think that the possibility should be preserved for oral representations to be made to the Lord Chief Justice at the end of a certificating process.
I do not want to labour the point and I do not want too convoluted a system, but I have said in the past that I want jury trial to be preserved in so far as possible. To achieve that, at every stage when a prosecutor is making his application—if we were to move to a situation where a defendant could do it as well, I would wish it also to be preserved at every stage—the line of reasoning should be, wherever possible, that a jury trial should happen. For that reason, I had always understood that the Lord Chief Justice’s role was an important safeguard, and although I would normally agree that it would be appropriate for that to be done by written submission if necessary, the possibility of it being done by oral submission is important, and I should like that option to remain.
The Solicitor-General may say that the option exists without further amendment, in which case I shall be reassured, but it is an issue of some importance and we must face up to two facts. First, in the Government’s view, the number of cases in which such things will happen in any year is likely to be pretty minimal. Therefore, I do not think that the burden that we will place on the judiciary in the process of deciding whether it should happen will be too great. Secondly, the decisions, when taken, will be of some public interest. For that reason, it is important that there should be a full understanding by the public of what has happened, and oral hearings often provide an opportunity for that to happen.