My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, for introducing this matter so fully. He started by saying that this was a troubling aspect of the law. I want to talk about how troubling it is and to reflect on the academic research which underpins many of the comments he made. I was a youth magistrate for many years, and my experience is underpinned by the academic research which I will refer to.

As the noble and learned Lord said, this originated from Kim Johnson’s Private Member’s Bill. There have been repeated attempts at legislation on this issue. I first became seriously aware of it about 10 years ago when I made a friendship with Lord Justice Bill Davis, who has sadly now died. At that point, I was chair of the board of London youth magistrates and he was the lead Law Lord for the youth justice system. We spoke about joint enterprise and how the law is applied. I believe he had recently conducted or been involved in a review of the whole situation.

I want to draw some of the academic research to the attention of the Committee. Dr Nisha Waller at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies states that joint enterprise Laws are vague and wide in scope, causing systemic injustice, including overcriminalisation, overpunishment, discriminatory outcomes and convictions where there is no compelling evidence of intent and the defendant’s physical contribution is minimal. Her research shows that the current flawed law encourages, first, the police and the CPS to charge suspects based on poor-quality evidence, secondly, highly speculative prosecution case theory to take precedence over evidentiary foundations, and, thirdly, use of gang narratives and vague concepts such as “being in it together” to imply collective intent, allowing mostly young Black males to be stereotyped and criminalised. She recommends that the scope of secondary liability law must be narrowed in favour of a clearer and safer legal framework and calls on the Government to make good on their commitment to reform the laws of secondary liability as soon as practically possible.

Research by Becky Clarke and Patrick Williams at the Manchester Metropolitan University shows that nearly £250 million is spent every year on prosecuting defendants in joint enterprise cases. About a thousand people a year are convicted under joint enterprise cases and the total future punishment costs of those convictions are about £1.2 billion, so this large number of convictions has an expensive cost implication.

I also want to talk about the group Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association. Together with Liberty, it says that the CPS agreed to collect and monitor data on the disproportionate prosecutions of ethnic-minority, disabled and working-class people under joint enterprise. The results of its pilot data collection were stark, showing 16 times more Black people being prosecuted under joint enterprise than their white counterparts. The results from the first full year of the CPS data collection scheme were published in September of last year and confirm stark disparities in charging and prosecution data. The proportion of Black defendants made up 25% of its caseload last year, compared with 4% of the population. The percentage of joint-enterprise defendants who are mixed race is 7.8%, compared with 2.9% of the population.

The CPS also looked at the use of discriminatory language and stereotypes in language used by both police and prosecutors in charging decisions which revealed clear differences in language used to describe suspects and circumstances of offences depending on the subject’s ethnicity. In a letter to the chair of the Justice Select Committee in November 2024 regarding its investigations into the data on disproportionate prosecutions of ethnic minorities, the Director of Public Prosecutions stated:

“it is clear from the data that there have been racial disparities in our legal decision-making”.

This is an ongoing serious issue. I know the Government take it seriously, and the noble and learned Lord has come up with a very practical way of addressing this. I know that my noble friend the Minister will be very familiar with these issues, and I look forward to her response with great interest.