Burnham Scraps Plans to Curb Jury Trials After Backlash From Lawyers and MPs

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The main entrance of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London
The Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, London. The government has abandoned plans to replace jury trials with judge-only hearings for less serious offences. Image: David Castor, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Burnham Scraps Plans to Curb Jury Trials After Backlash From Lawyers and MPs

The government has abandoned plans to curb the right to trial by jury in England and Wales, in a significant reversal of criminal justice policy drawn up under Sir Keir Starmer.

The Ministry of Justice announced on Sunday that proposals to divert large numbers of criminal cases away from juries would be dropped, following months of sustained criticism from lawyers, senior judges and Labour backbenchers.

The decision is a personal one for Andy Burnham, who became prime minister in July, to junk a flagship policy of his predecessor.

Key facts

  • The government will abandon plans for judge-only trials in the Crown Court for less serious criminal cases.
  • Justice Secretary Alex Norris said he had "heard the strength of feeling" and "made the decision to change course".
  • Instead of restricting juries, ministers want to divert more cases away from the Crown Court and into magistrates' courts.
  • Magistrates' sentencing powers will still rise from 12 months to two years, a change lawyers warn could shift the pressure elsewhere.
  • Nearly 81,000 cases were waiting for a jury trial in the Crown Courts at the end of June, almost double the figure in 2020.

What has been scrapped

Under the original proposals, drawn up by Starmer's justice secretary David Lammy, jury trials would have been reserved for the most serious "indictable-only" offences such as murder and rape. Lesser "either-way" offences, where the likely sentence was under three years, would have been heard by a single Crown Court judge instead of a jury of twelve.

The plan was designed to cut through the Crown Court backlog, which has left victims, defendants and witnesses waiting years for cases to come to trial. Lammy argued it would speed up justice. The proposals cleared their first parliamentary hurdle earlier this year.

But they provoked a furious response from the legal profession, which said the move curtailed the fundamental right of defendants to be tried by a jury of their peers. The head of England's judiciary raised what Reuters described as "grave security concerns" for judges hearing serious cases alone, and critics argued that years of neglect and under-investment by successive governments, not juries themselves, were the real cause of delays.

The Sunday Times has campaigned against the changes with backing from senior former judges and Labour peers.

Why Burnham reversed course

Growing disquiet on Labour's own benches made the policy politically toxic. Dozens of MPs prepared to rebel, led by Karl Turner, who worked with ministers behind the scenes to kill the most controversial parts of the bill. That pressure left Burnham little room to force the judge-only measures through.

Turner said the plans had been "rightly binned" but warned the campaign was not over: "This is an important step, but the fight to protect access to justice and ensure justice is properly served for both victims and the accused does not end here."

The reversal lands in the middle of a wider criminal justice crisis. Reuters noted that hundreds of prisoners were released early to stop prisons becoming full, another sign of a system under strain.

What stays in place

The government is not walking away from court reform entirely. Rather than taking cases away from juries, ministers want to move them downwards: more less-serious cases would be dealt with in magistrates' courts instead of the Crown Court.

To make that work, magistrates will be given the power to hand down sentences of up to two years in prison, rather than one year as the law stands. Defendants appearing in the magistrates' court will also lose the right to elect for a trial by jury in the Crown Court.

That part of the package has its own critics. The Criminal Bar Association warned that volunteer magistrates were "completely unequipped" to try complex, multi-day trials, and the Bar Council's chair Kirsty Brimelow said giving magistrates greater powers while the magistrates' court backlog itself is growing could prove counterproductive.

The Ministry of Justice will also keep plans to allow complex fraud trials to be heard by a judge alone, an idea that has been floated for years to spare jurors from months-long cases. A government-commissioned review this year rejected the idea, so ministers may face a fresh fight there.

Reaction

The legal profession broadly welcomed the announcement. Criminal Bar Association chair Andrew Thomas thanked the government for "listening to the evidence and reaching the right verdict", though he warned that "a severe threat to our trial by jury remains".

Norris said: "I have heard the strength of feeling on the proposals for increasing the number of judge-alone trials in the Crown Court and have made the decision to change course."

Conservatives accused Labour of restricting juries "by the back door" through the remaining magistrates' court changes, and shadow justice figures signalled they would keep pressing ministers over the detail.

What happens next

A revised version of the Courts and Tribunals Bill is expected to return to Parliament next week, stripped of the judge-only trial provisions and focused instead on expanding magistrates' powers to tackle a Crown Court backlog that now exceeds 80,000 cases.

Whether diverting tens of thousands of cases to magistrates' courts eases the strain or simply moves the queue from one court to another is the question ministers will now have to answer.

For Burnham, the episode marks an early and public break with the Starmer era, and a sign that Labour's new leadership is willing to jettison inherited policies when its own MPs turn against them.

Related reading

Sources

  • Reuters, "Britain scraps heavily criticised plans to curb jury trials after backlash", 3 Oct 2026
  • The Times, "Curbs on jury trial ditched in blow to Starmer agenda", 3-4 Oct 2026

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