Joe Robertson MP: speeches

Speeches

• 19 May 2026 · Energy Security · Hansard source

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  I will give way to the hon. Lady to try again.

• 19 May 2026 · Energy Security · Hansard source

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  I accept that there are some difficult questions in and around this whole area of debate. The truth remains that no Government have done more to decarbonise the economy and to bring forward green technology than the last Conservative Government, but we would not do that at the expense of hard-working families. The bonkers green tax agenda that this Government are peddling is harming the debate on decarbonising the economy. I will give an example of that.

• 19 May 2026 · Prisoner Releases in Error · Hansard source

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  13. What estimate he has made of the number of prisoners released in error since July 2024.

• 19 May 2026 · Prisoner Releases in Error · Hansard source

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  Oh dear. My question was about how many prisoners have been released in error under this Government, and the Minister does not seem to know the answer. That is okay, as I can tell him. It is 441, which over a two-year period is the worst on record. Will he now apologise, or will he provide a convoluted excuse about why it is not his Government’s fault?

• 28 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is, as ever, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I too support the new clauses, and I concur with a lot of what has already been said about the reasons for supporting them. I will make a couple of wider points on the merits of specialist rape courts and courts for sexual offences. There is nothing wrong with the legal system in this country when it comes to the fundamental principles of trying these crimes—that someone is innocent until proven guilty, that they have a right to be heard in court, and that evidence must be tested rigorously, as is the right of a defendant in any case. The issue is how that is applied in the way our courts operate in respect of a set of crimes that are extremely sensitive because of the impact on the complainant—the victim—who is almost always a live witness. It is trying to deal with the operation of the court that is at issue here.

• 28 Apr 2026 · Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges · Hansard source

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  I have a suggestion for this disagreement that is going on in the House: why do we not refer it to the Privileges Committee?

• 28 Apr 2026 · Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges · Hansard source

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  I realise that the hon. Member is struggling to read his own handwriting, but does he have anything at all to say about the Prime Minister’s conduct in appointing Peter Mandelson?

• 28 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I seek clarity on whether the new clause would apply to all judges or just to those in the criminal courts. In the family court the idea is to bring in expertise around the sort of issues that she talks about from agencies—such as the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and even social services—in which there are lots of trained people, but that system does not always ensure that the judge is best placed to make a good decision, as we have seen in evidence. Will the hon. Lady clarify that point?

• 27 Apr 2026 · Northern Ireland Troubles Bill (Carry-over) · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is articulating it perfectly. Does he agree that the principle of innocent until proven guilty is no comfort at all for these people who are subjected to years of gruelling inquiry just to establish what we already know: they are innocent?

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Seventh sitting) · Hansard source

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  I wish to address a number of issues in relation to this grouping. First, I will say something about the figures that have been quoted at length today and in previous sittings. Secondly, I will say something about the reasons given by the Government for curtailing jury trials in this way. Then I want to go on to say something about evidence and procedure, and why jury trials exist at all, because sometimes it is possible to sit here listening, wondering whether the Government’s reasoning would not justify a banning of all jury trials for evermore on any crime. Finally, I will talk about some of the perversities that the hon. Member for Chichester has articulated well.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Seventh sitting) · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is making a very good speech, but she is almost being generous. The wording in the Bill is not “complex”; it is “complexity”, which is a description, not even a value. The Bill is even vaguer than what the hon. Member is suggesting in her well-made point.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Obviously judges are not infallible. That is not a criticism of judges—judges know that they can make mistakes. On the mindset of the person, I am unclear as to whether the Government or indeed anyone on the Committee, regardless of party, thinks that there is anything more complex than what is in a person’s mind—a mind that cannot be unlocked or opened. We can ask this person what was in their mind, but they want to be acquitted, so we must take a value judgment on whether they are telling the truth or not. Surely the most complex thing there can possibly be is what is in the mind of a human being. A very complex set of spreadsheets or cryptocurrency that only half of us understand is complicated, but there is perhaps nothing more complicated than the motivation and mindset of a human being. That is specifically what juries are for—to make that sort of judgment on whether it was reasonable for someone to do something. That is why we have 12 members, so that they must come to a view unanimously, or certainly as a large majority. A judge is not in a more privileged position—no one would argue that they are—to decide what is and is not reasonable. They are in a more privileged position to make decisions about the law, and indeed they do make decisions about the law in jury trials and direct the jury on matters of law. It is incredibly uncertain what “complexity” means. I know what the Minister thinks it means, and I do not criticise her. It is a perfectly reasonable view of what it means. My point is that it is not the only view. She thinks—I paraphrase; I do not seek to put words in her mouth—that it is complex financial evidence, presumably written evidence in many cases, in a fraud trial or crimes related to money. It is perfectly possible to have a great volume of evidence but, as the case unfolds, a detailed understanding of that paperwork may no longer be the issue on which the case turns. Does having a large volume of written evidence and a long list of witnesses make a case complex, or does it depend on what the witnesses might say or exactly what is in those papers? The Minister has spoken about juries moving at the pace of the slowest member. Is her test for complexity the mindset of the slowest member of a random 12 selected from the British public, or is it the average—one might say reasonable—person? She could help judges making this decision by setting that out in the legislation. This is not merely a theoretical, academic discussion on the criminal law of this country. I can point to another country. The Minister has taken pleasure in using other countries as examples to justify many provisions in the Bill, as though England and Wales can learn from other jurisdictions. I do not disagree with that premise. I will give her the example of New Zealand, another common-law jurisdiction. It has a similar provision, whereby a judge has to exercise a similar sort of decision making about whether a trial is likely to be “long and complex”, rather than its likely complexity. Set out in its legislation is a legal test. The Minister says that there is a test of complexity in the Bill. I tried to intervene on her to say that there is not. This is what a test looks like. The law of New Zealand directs a judge to consider, in determining whether a case is likely to be long and complex, “the number and nature of offences with which the defendant is charged”. We understand what that means. It also directs them to consider “the nature of the issues likely to be involved…the volume of the evidence likely to be presented” and “the imposition on potential jurors of sitting for the likely duration of the trial”. It has a catch-all, which is not unusual in legal drafting: “any other matters the court considers relevant.” The judge in New Zealand has a test to apply: whether the case is likely to be long and complex. There is absolutely no reason why the Government could not have included a test in the Bill—it does not have to be the same test—to assist the court and give certainty, which would help defendants and victims and would improve efficiency.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Indeed. Might a judge, halfway through a trial, decide that it has suddenly become inappropriate, having heard whatever formal or informal representations are made on that point? Even if there is some objective consensus about how long an ordinary person in this country should be prepared to set aside to serve on a jury, does that in itself make it appropriate that a case should not be heard by a jury? Even if we could agree, for example, that devoting any more than a month to a jury trial is disruptive to a person’s life, does that automatically make it inappropriate for a case to be heard in a jury trial? No, not at all. If it is inconvenient for someone to sit on a jury for a particular length of time, that does not mean the case is inappropriate for a jury trial. Even the Government are not willing to put a specific time value on that.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I intended to intervene on the Minister to ask a question, but I am happy to pose it by way of a speech. She has indicated—in fact, she stated very clearly—that she wants to formally clarify in writing, but she is declining to formally clarify orally. Does she not accept that if we proceed to a vote on clause 3, she is at risk of inadvertently misleading this Committee if she cannot clarify what she says she wants to clarify in writing before we vote?

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  As my hon. Friend the shadow Minister pointed out, there are a number of problems that not only arise with what clauses 3 and 4 try to do, but carry over to clause 5, which tries to replicate aspects of jury trials in trials that will not be heard by a jury because a judge has made an allocation decision. The problems with juries seem to be, as the Minister and the Government have articulated, time wasted through swearing in, the unpredictable nature of convening 12 people—with people sometimes dropping out—and the fact they can hear evidence only at certain times of the day, which makes the day for hearing evidence shorter. Of course, none of those things are new; they are things that have always existed with jury trials. Citing issues with juries that have existed since juries began, in order to deal with the more recent issue of backlogs, misses the point. The Government have taken measures to deal with the more recent issues with criminal cases, including the fact that evidence inherently takes longer, although that is the same with evidence that a judge has to consider, and that cases have become more complex because of evidence and technology. That also is true of cases that are heard by a judge only. The Government have made plenty of complaints and shared plenty of views about what they think of the previous Government. They have spoken about under-investment and caps on sitting days, things that they say they have addressed through allocating more sitting days and investing in the legal system. Surely, that is the remedy for their complaints. However, they have not been prepared to spend the time to assess that remedy, to see whether the benefits in reducing the backlog will be felt in the coming months and years. To take an inherent feature of the jury system—the jury itself—as a justification for doing away with it in certain cases because of more recent pressures for other reasons is neither logical nor fair. The problem with simply transferring all the provisions that would ordinarily happen in a jury trial to a trial that is decided by a judge alone, as clause 5 seeks to do, is that there are features of a jury system that cannot simply be replicated by a judge sitting alone. Let us remember that a jury decides the facts. It decides whether something happened and it decides what was in the mind of the defendant at the time in question. That is the preserve of the jury. It is for the judge, even in a jury trial, to decide the law, to direct the jury—where appropriate—and to decide issues of procedure. Some of the procedural issues or arguments about evidence, including about whether evidence is admissible or not, are decided by the judge in the absence of the jury. The jury is sent out of the room. Of course, that can make the whole trial last longer, but there is a very good reason for it. It is because sometimes the arguments that are made—for example, arguments about the admissibility of certain evidence—are in themselves prejudicial to the decision maker of the facts, which is the jury, or prejudicial to the way that they might decide the case. A judge might need to hear the contested evidence, or at least hear what it is about to decide whether it is admissible. A judge might decide that evidence is inadmissible because it is not relevant, or—this is where I go way beyond my legal expertise; I never practised as a criminal lawyer—because it might effectively prejudice the jury. We do not want the jury seeing that evidence, which is why they are out of the room. If the judge rules that the evidence is inadmissible, the jury come back into the room never having seen it, and the trial continues with the jurors’ minds unclouded by inadmissible evidence. However, when the judge is also deciding the facts—that happens, of course in magistrates courts, where the magistrates decide the facts and are guided on the law by a legal professional sitting in front of them—and indeed when a judge is deciding the facts and the law, and procedural issues and issues of the admissibility of evidence, then, if they take separate arguments or separate submissions from the defence and prosecution on whether an item of evidence is admissible or not, and they decide that it is not admissible because it would cloud the judgment of the jury or confuse the issues of the main trial, they effectively have to pretend that they never heard that prejudicial evidence, having decided that it is prejudicial. Judges are trained and professional, and have to do all this anyway in certain cases where a judge decides both—

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, the Bill will basically lead to a complete lottery in decision making, depending on the judge a person gets on the day. I suspect that judges ordinarily do not like vague law or having to provide their own interpretation. They are usually more comfortable if the statute is more precise, or if it is backed by caselaw, but there is no caselaw here. On the issue of length, we know what the Minister thinks because she has told us in this Bill Committee. I do not criticise her for this opinion, but she thinks a case is long if it is disruptive to the personal or professional life of a juror or their wellbeing. That is her view as to what will make a case lengthy, and I do not criticise her for that, but there is no guidance here for the judge to consider those things —[Interruption.] I paraphrase her—she is welcome to intervene if she disagrees about how I characterise her views on what is lengthy for a juror.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Indeed, it is quite interesting that the Government’s benchmark is the previous Government. I do not recall them making that clear at the last election. I will leave it there.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am not shocked by anything a Labour Government do.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I agree with my hon. Friend; he actually pre-empts the point I am about to get on to. I thank him for taking me on to that. It should be fairly obvious to most people that there will be a wide range of views as to how much time a person can take out of their ordinary life, bearing in mind that people are not called for jury service at the drop of a hat. They are not told, “You must cancel all your plans next week”; there is a degree of warning. Most people take quite a wide view on how much time they can afford to give, depending on what is going on in their life. For some people, taking two weeks or even a week out is very disruptive. This theoretical person that the judge has to imagine would make an argument that it is appropriate that the trial should not take place with a jury, because they do not have a week in their busy life to just hand over. Alternatively, others may say that they see it as a civic duty and a fundamental contribution they make to society to be available for jury trial if called. Perhaps they have never been called and they have reached a ripe old age, and they are happy and prepared to take a month or two out of their life to devote to making a decision on whether someone is guilty.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are a number of personal and professional circumstances that can enable people to make that argument and get exempted from jury trial or, indeed, not have to sit on the jury in the original case but have it deferred to a more convenient time. She is absolutely right that flexibility for ordinary people in this country is already built into the way that juries are selected. “Length” is probably the easiest of these three difficult terms; “complexity” is even harder to nail down. How is a judge supposed to decide what level of complexity makes it appropriate to have a jury? I would argue that the more complex a case, in certain circumstances, the more it should be heard by a jury, especially if the complexity relates to what is in the mind of the defendant, rather than, for example, complex financial papers. Does the involvement of complex financial papers, on its own, necessarily make a trial more complex, if the real issue in the case is whether the defendant intended to be dishonest? As we have already heard with fraud cases, as well as most of the cases in schedule 1, the real issue is not whether something happened; it is the mindset—the legal term would be mens rea—of the person who did that thing. If they did something by accident or unintentionally, depending on the crime, that would often be enough for them to be acquitted. If they did something knowingly, dishonestly or recklessly, also depending on the crime, that would normally be enough for them to be convicted.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  This is a strange venue to ask for an apology for previous Government legislation from an MP who, like me, has been in this place for less than two years. The hon. Gentleman and I were on broadcast media yesterday; that might have been a better venue for him to ask me to apologise, but I would have rejected his invitation at that time, and I will certainly reject it in Committee. This is not about previous Governments’ views or opinions; it is about the views and opinions of this Parliament.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The Minister talks about the statutory test for complexity, among other things. I cannot identify the statutory test for complexity. Where is the test in the new legislation?

• 21 Apr 2026 · Courts and Tribunals Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the shadow Minister, which would ensure the right of appeal to a decision whether a trial should be heard by a jury. The Government’s reason for not accepting the amendment, as they have put forward on a number of previous amendments, is the principle of efficiency—that it would slow the system down and would not drive the efficiencies that they hope to secure through the Bill. The principle of efficiency cannot be an untamed principle that runs roughshod over carefully fought legal principles of fairness and natural justice. Efficiency cannot simply trump everything. If efficiency has no limits, why have trials of more than a few days at all? The arguments have been well made by the shadow Minister, and I do not wish to repeat them, but it is not an inefficient process to allow a right of appeal. I assume that the decision made by the judge in the first instance on how to allocate the trial will not be a particularly lengthy process anyway, so an appeal of that decision will be no lengthier—indeed, less so. I have never heard the argument that appeals are against efficiency in any other aspect of law. Indeed, appealing the substantive outcome of a case—a claim of wrongful conviction—has not one but many stages of appeal: appeal to the High Court, appeal to the Court of Appeal and appeal to the Supreme Court. I have never heard the argument that someone should not have the right to appeal the outcome of a trial because it is inefficient or might cause delays. It seems that efficiency is being used to justify a fairly hastily put together Bill, and that the Government do not recognise the possibly unintended consequences of its provisions in order to get their business through. The best way of addressing those issues, and accepting that there might be loopholes and unintended consequences, is to give genuine due regard to amendments tabled in good faith, on this occasion by the shadow Minister, to improve the lawmaking process and the Bill. The amendment does not seek to drive a coach and horses through what the Government are trying to achieve with the Bill, even though we disagree with some of it; it seeks to improve, to perfect and not to allow unfairness to creep into the Bill. I am sure that the Government do not intend the Bill to be unfair, but time and again they risk allowing it to be so.