Ministers may force through act to curb jury fraud trials

The government is poised to use the Parliament Act 1949 to force through a law allowing the most complex fraud cases to be tried without a jury.

Ministers are expected to reintroduce a bill providing for fraud trials to be tried by a judge alone after three previous attempts to legislate failed, and to invoke the Parliament Act, if necessary, to get it on the statute book.

The act, sometimes called parliament's "nuclear deterrent", gives the Commons power to bring in legislation despite opposition from the House of Lords.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats oppose non-jury trials, but it would take a big Labour revolt in the Commons to stop the measure becoming law if ministers invoke the Parliament Act.

The original Parliament Act, passed in 1911, curbed the powers of the Lords to reject bills. The act laid down that if a bill had been blocked by the Lords in three successive sessions within two years it could receive the royal assent and become law regardless. The 1949 Act reduced the number of sessions to two and the time period to one year.

Since 1949 only four pieces of legislation have been brought in over the heads of the Lords, three under the Blair government.

Ministers have been trying for five years, against opposition from the Tories, Liberal Democrats and some Labour backbenchers, to introduce a power for the most complex fraud cases to be tried by a judge alone. They say some fraudsters are evading justice because their cases are too complicated to put before a jury. In other cases charges have to be watered down to make them manageable for jurors.

A power for a judge to sit alone if a case was considered so lengthy or complex that it would be burdensome for a jury was enacted in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, but was so controversial that it has never been brought into force.

To get it on the statute book ministers had to agree that the measure could not be implemented without a vote of both houses of parliament. An attempt to bring it into force, opposed by the Tories and Lib Dems, was withdrawn by the government in 2005, after it acknowledged it faced certain defeat in the Lords.

A spokesman for the attorney general, Lady Scotland, said: "Ministers are still considering the detailed content of the bill."

Dominic Grieve, Conservative shadow attorney general, said: "The government should listen to what the House of Lords clearly indicated on the last occasion rather than precipitate a constitutional crisis."

Lord Thomas of Gresford, shadow attorney general for the Liberal Democrats, said his party maintained its "implacable hostility" to the change.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil liberties group Liberty, described the measure as "the thin end of the wedge" for jury trial.

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