A leading barrister who represented wrongly convicted sub-postmasters has quit her role at the legal services watchdog in protest against David Lammy’s “tyrannical” plans to curb jury trials.
Flora Page KC said the government would “rip the heart out” of the rule of law by limiting jury trials to cases in which the defendant was facing a likely prison sentence of more than three years.
She said she was resigning from the legal services board in order to campaign against the reforms. The legal services board oversees and regulate lawyers in England and Wales and is independent of government but works closely with ministers and officials in the Ministry of Justice.
Flora Page KC
Page also criticised Sir Keir Starmer for sanctioning the “act of tyranny”, which she said was “a sign that this government has completely lost its way”.
In a letter to Lammy, who is justice secretary and deputy prime minister, she delivered a brutal assessment of his arguments in favour of the reforms, which will halve the number of jury trials and which he claims are necessary to cut the rising backlog of crown court cases awaiting trial.
Page accused Lammy and Sarah Sackman, the courts minister, of “hijacking the suffering of victims” by arguing that the reforms were necessary to deliver justice for those affected by crime.
Lammy told MPs on Tuesday that they faced a “stark choice” as he argued that limiting jury trials was vital to reduce waiting times for rape victims, some of whom waited up to five years for their case to reach trial.
Page told Lammy the backlog was being used as “a cynical cover” to push through the reforms and claimed this was “something that the officials have worked on intentionally to give you and Ms Sackman the ammunition you feel you need to take aim at jury trial”.
She added: “You should be ashamed of yourselves. It was disgusting to see the way you hijacked the suffering of victims to make your arguments yesterday.”
The KC claimed the reforms were part of a deeper “command-and-control urge” in the civil service to curtail jury trials, saying: “There is clearly a seam of tyranny in the civil service as well.”
She said the “real reason” for the record backlog, which stands at nearly 80,000 cases, was the restriction on sitting days in crown courts, which the government could lift.
The KC said that if the reforms were “truly about reducing the backlog, there would be a ‘sunset’ clause’ to restore our ancient rights once the backlog had come down to an acceptable level”.
Page has been widely praised for her role representing sub-postmasters in their efforts to overturn their wrongful convictions. More than 900 were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for offences including theft, fraud and false accounting following incorrect information from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon accounting system, built and run by the Japanese firm Fujitsu.
This week Jo Hamilton, one of the wrongly convicted sub-postmasters who featured prominently in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, also urged Lammy to rethink the proposals, as she warned they would lead to “many more miscarriages of justice”.
Jo HamiltonGareth Iwan Jones FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
The jury reforms passed their first parliamentary hurdle on Tuesday as MPs approved the Courts and Tribunals Bill at second reading in the Commons.
The bill will face closer scrutiny as it goes through its next stages in both houses of parliament, but the legislation is being fast-tracked by the government in an effort to push through the reforms before the May local elections.
Karl Turner, the veteran Labour MP who is leading opposition to the reforms, said he would try to force the government to dilute or scrap the proposals when the bill returns to the Commons for its report stage, which is when MPs debate and vote on specific parts of the legislation.
He has told The Times that he already has 67 MPs willing to back his amendments. He would need at least 80 Labour MPs in order to defeat the government’s majority in the Commons.
In Tuesday’s debate, the Labour MP Charlotte Nichols revealed that she was a rape victim and accused Lammy of “weaponising” victims and offering “false hope” with plans to curb jury trials.
In her letter to Lammy, who also holds the title of lord chancellor, Page accused the government of rushing the legislation through parliament “to give its opponents as little time as possible to organise”. She wrote: “There is a short window of opportunity to do everything I can to prevent this power grab.”
She added: “Everything I have done in my career has been aimed at upholding the constitutional principle of the rule of law, and I cannot stand by silently and let the lord chancellor rip the heart out of that constitutional principle.”
She also gave a damning assessment of the criminal justice system. “Every other part of the system is falling apart,” she wrote. “The police and Crown Prosecution Service are drowning. Defence firms and criminal barristers are melting away. The buildings are wrecked. The companies responsible for getting prisoners to court on time are screwing the taxpayer every day, failing to perform on their contracts with utter impunity. The magistrates’ courts are in chaos, with trials being double, triple and quadruple booked.”
The Ministry of Justice said: “Victims are facing unacceptably long waits for justice after years of delays in our courts. That is why we are pressing ahead with our plans – backed by the Times Crime and Justice Commission — alongside modernising it for the 21st century with record investment.”
You can hear Flora Page KC speaking to Times Radio Breakfast from 8am on Friday