The Bar Council of England and Wales on Tuesday called on the government to reconsider its proposed reforms to trial by jury, which aim to scrap jury trials in cases where a convicted defendant would be imprisoned for up to three years, stating that the measure is an “unpopular, untested and poorly evidenced” change to the system.

In a signed letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, more than 3,200 lawyers, comprising a former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, retired judges, senior barristers, solicitors and academics, echoed the wider sentiment of the legal community that jury trials are essential to a functioning democratic justice system.

The signatories further emphasized: “Criminal law professionals continue to stretch themselves to ensure that the voices of complainants, victims and defendants are heard in court. We ask that the government now [listen] to our voices, as solicitors, barristers and recently retired judges who have evidenced measures that reduce the backlog of cases without requiring curtailing jury trials…”

The letter was penned ahead of the second reading debate of the Courts and Tribunals Bill held in Parliament on Tuesday, with figures from the government’s side, such as Justice Secretary David Lammy, arguing that the “silence of waiting” for trial is destroying the lives of victims in rape cases, which take an average of 423 days to be heard. The opposition advanced the case that juries were representative of a democratic system and suggested that the government was “gaming the system” by removing this right without a mandate.

Clauses 1 to 7 of the Courts and Tribunals Bill, which would remove the current right of an adult defendant charged with an “either-way offence” to elect jury trial, are integrated to address the backlog of cases in England and Wales, freeing up capacity for more serious cases to be tried by jury. Latest statistics underscore the severity of the backlog of Crown Court cases, with the Crown Court’s open caseload more than doubling since 2019 and standing at around 79,619 open cases in September 2025. Its trajectory is expected to reach 113,000 open cases in March 2029, and this has been attributed to numerous factors, such as increasingly complex criminal cases and a rise in ineffective trials.

Although the main crux of the government’s reasoning hinges upon the fact that scrapping jury trials would solve the backlog problem, research by the Institute for Government contradicts this by illustrating that judge-only trials would only reduce 2 percent of court time, if they are 20 percent faster. This endeavour has been described as “highly uncertain.”

The jury system in England is centuries old, formed in the 12th century and establishing the foundation of the common law system, practiced across multiple jurisdictions worldwide.