Jury trial restrictions in the Courts and Tribunals Bill face their strongest challenge yet from inside government. The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, spoke in Sheffield on 31 July 2026. He said he wanted to look at the proposal in detail. His instincts, he said, were to “find ways of not reducing access to jury trial”.
What did Andy Burnham say?
Burnham spoke at a community centre in Sheffield on Friday 31 July. He said he had concerns about the plan to restrict jury trial. He tied that reluctance to his own campaigning over Hillsborough, which he has called a major miscarriage of justice.
He stopped short of a decision. Nobody has tabled an amendment. No minister has addressed the House. The Bill’s contents are unchanged.
The context is a change of leadership. Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026. He removed David Lammy from the Ministry of Justice in his first reshuffle. Work on the legislation had already paused in early July, before the handover.
What would the jury trial restrictions do?
Lammy set out the plan in December 2025. Defendants facing a likely sentence of three years or less would lose the right to a Crown Court jury trial. Those cases would go to a new tier of judge-only courts, presented then as Swift Courts.
Two further measures travel with them. Defendants could no longer elect trial by jury in either-way cases. The automatic right to appeal a magistrates’ verdict to the Crown Court would go.
The package drew on the review by Sir Brian Leveson, the retired Court of Appeal judge. He had recommended an intermediate tier between magistrates and the Crown Court, pitched at offences carrying up to five years. The government’s version went further in some respects and narrower in others.
Ministers paired the announcement with money. They offered £550 million over three years for specialist victim support. A further £34 million targeted recruitment of barristers into criminal work.
Why does the Crown Court backlog matter here?
Because it is the whole justification for the reform. Roughly 78,000 Crown Court cases are still waiting to conclude. That is more than double the pre-pandemic figure. Government projections put the caseload above 100,000 by 2028 without further action.
Around 1.3 million prosecutions start in England and Wales each year. Roughly one in ten reaches the Crown Court. About three in ten of those end in a trial. Lammy argued the new courts would clear cases a fifth faster.
That figure is contested. The Institute for Government put the saving at about 2% of Crown Court time, not the 20% claimed. The Criminal Bar Association opposed the plans. Thirty groups working in the violence against women and girls sector wrote jointly urging ministers to drop them.
The Crown Court backlog sits at roughly 78,000 cases. The Leveson-derived reforms were the government’s main answer to it. If the restrictions go, firms planning for judge-only trials in fraud and financial crime need to reset their assumptions. The backlog question then reopens with no policy attached to it.
What happens to the Courts and Tribunals Bill?
Unclear, and that is the honest answer. Reporting suggests ministers could strip the jury measures out so the rest of the Bill can proceed. That would preserve less contentious parts, such as widening the role of associate prosecutors.
Nothing is confirmed. Until an amendment appears or a minister speaks, the Bill as drafted still contains the restrictions.
Treat the position as live rather than settled. Criminal practices have modelled listing assumptions on a judge-only tier. Financial crime teams have planned around trial mode. Both now have a planning question rather than an answer.
The reform sat alongside the government’s other main response to justice system pressure. That was the automatic release rules in the Sentencing Act 2026, which the Prime Minister also paused in July. The Legal Brief covered that decision in its report on the Sentencing Act review. It set out the wider legislative programme in its King’s Speech 2026 round-up.
The House of Lords Library has published a briefing on reform models elsewhere, Jury trials: international models and reform proposals.