The British government will announce on Tuesday plans to restrict the rights of some defendants to a jury trial in England and Wales, as it seeks to reduce a yearslong backlog of cases in the criminal courts, according to a government document and an official familiar with the decision.
In a statement released by his office, David Lammy, the justice secretary, said he would introduce significant changes to the criminal justice system, including creating “faster routes for lower-level cases” and modernizing court processes to tackle delays.
The statement did not provide details about changes to jury trials, which Mr. Lammy is expected to announce in Parliament on Tuesday.
But an internal government document seen by The New York Times indicated that Mr. Lammy had decided to propose that judges alone should decide defendants’ guilt or innocence for some offenses.
The proposals would not affect murder, rape and manslaughter cases or those where a jury trial is deemed to be in the “public interest,” the document said.
The announcement is intended to speed up resolution in criminal cases, some of which are set to go to trial in 2029 because of longstanding delays. Almost 80,000 cases are waiting to be heard in the Crown Court, where the most serious crimes are heard in England and Wales, a backlog that has more than doubled since 2019.
“We must be bold,” Mr. Lammy said in the statement. “I will set out a fast and fair justice plan that gives victims and survivors the swift justice they deserve.”
Last year, the Labour government asked a retired senior judge, Brian Leveson, to conduct the independent review into the crisis in criminal courts.
In the first part of his review, published in July, Mr. Leveson said that the pileup of cases was having “devastating impacts on the lives of victims and witnesses,” was leaving defendants in limbo and was undermining confidence in the justice system. He called for the government to reduce the number of jury trials by allowing some offenses to be decided by a single judge and others by panels of judges and magistrates.
Mr. Lammy’s proposed changes, which were contained in the document and circulated among government departments last month, would apply to a larger pool of cases than Mr. Leveson had called for and have already met with strong political criticism and resistance from inside the criminal justice system.
It is not clear whether the proposals have been amended since the document was first distributed.
Alex Chalk, who served as the previous Conservative government’s justice secretary until July last year, said in an interview that the plans went “too far.”
He conceded that Labour had inherited lengthy backlogs from the former Conservative government, and said that if he had remained in his role, he would have supported the removal of jury trials for some “really low-level” cases.
But he said that Mr. Lammy’s proposals had jumped “from keyhole surgery to amputation,” adding: “He’s gone from making an incremental change, which could be justified on the facts, to something which is a radical incursion into the right of trial by jury.”
The proposals, which would apply to England and Wales only, are partly inspired by the system in Canada, where jury trials are held only for criminal offenses where the sentence can be five years or more. Britain’s courts minister visited Toronto last month.
In the United States, by contrast, the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a “right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury,” which in practice means that people charged with a felony will always have a jury trial unless they waive that right. Smaller offenses in the United States, like speeding tickets, are often handled by judges or magistrates.
The principle of trial by jury in Britain dates to Magna Carta — a charter of rights drawn up in 1215 — but the law has evolved to mean that the vast majority of criminal cases are already heard at lower-tier magistrates’ courts rather than considered by juries. More than 82 percent of ongoing cases in England and Wales are being heard in magistrates’ courts.
In his statement, Mr. Lammy said that government forecasts predicted that the backlog of Crown Court cases would hit 100,000 by 2028.
But the Criminal Bar Association, which represents lawyers who work in the Crown Courts, said in a statement that the proposed judge-only trials were “unfair” and would be opposed.
Several factors have contributed to the court backlog, including closures during the Covid pandemic, a 2022 strike by publicly funded defense lawyers over pay and a Conservative government policy to cut costs by limiting the number of days on which courts could sit.
Mr. Leveson, who led the independent review that called for limits on jury trials, was also asked to draw up proposals to improve efficiency in criminal cases. Speaking at a policing conference last month, he said that structural changes were required.
“Ultimately, it’s all for the government to decide,” he said. “But the broad thrust of what I’ve recommended is, to my mind, critical to save the system from collapse.”
Michael D. Shear is a senior Times correspondent covering British politics and culture, and diplomacy around the world.
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