At Lib Dem party conference in Spring 2007 Jeremy proposed an amendment to the party’s proposed new crime and justice policy which would have changed the system to allow people to offer to perform their jury service at a time convenient to them – reducing problems for them while also making the composition of juries fairer.

This is the speech he made to propose his amendment.

Conference

I’m passionately committed to the idea that each of us has a duty to play our part in the legal system, as jurors. If the right to jury trial – which the Liberal Democrats have done so much to defend – is to mean anything, that means 12 of us, for every case, being willing to give up our time to hear the trial.

I want to strengthen the system so that our jury system, can be as fair as possible, and this amendment seeks to do that.

Let me tell you about 2 problems with the way the system of composing juries works at the moment.

Firstly, you can be called to sit on a jury at almost any time in your adult life. Now, if you’re relatively young, independent, you don’t have any dependent relatives – and if you have a fairly good and sympathetic employer – in fact if you‘re in a situation quite like my own at the moment! – then that’s probably fine. It doesn’t really inconvenience anyone else, your employer can cope without you for a couple of weeks – and it’s probably OK for you just to drop everything and go and spend 2 weeks in a courtroom at whatever time happens to suit the courts service.

But imagine you’re not just able to drop everything. Imagine, for example, that your full-time role is looking after, perhaps, two small children. Can you just drop everything? Are you going to ask your partner, perhaps, to disrupt their employment and just take two weeks off from their job? Perhaps you’re bringing up your children on your own. The courts service does not, alas, offer for you to leave your children with the court attendant to look after for a fortnight.

Or imagine perhaps that you work very limited hours so that you can spend a lot of your time looking after a relative or friend who needs help with their care. Are you gong to make potentially severe disruptions to their life by upping sticks for a few weeks?

Or imagine that you’re not in a permanent job working for an employer who’s read their Corporate Social Responsibility handbook. It is against the law to prevent an employee undertaking jury service, but if you’re in a casual job, are you really going to believe that your job will still be waiting for you when you come back after a few weeks’ absence?

There are all sorts of reasons why it might not just be inconvenient for you to drop everything and spend 2 weeks on a jury, but caused serious difficulty for others, and potentially endanger your job.

That isn’t right – we’re all surely committed to the principle of playing our part in the legal process – but there’s surely no particular fundamental principle involved in saying that that has to be at a time that’s inconvenient for you.

But hold on, you may say, isn’t it possible, for just this reason, to defer your jury service, if you’re asked to do it at a time that’s particularly inconvenient for you?

Well, that brings me to the second problem with the way the system works at the moment.

In principle, yes, it’s possible to ask the court to allow you to defer your jury service. But there’s a problem here.

Some people are much better at persuading the courts service that they should be allowed to defer their service, than others are. The evidence shows – alas – that people from a middle-class background are much more likely to be successful in gaining a deferral, than others are.

Now that quite obviously isn’t fair. But worse than that, it means that the composition of juries is distorted, and that certain groups of people are under-represented, and others over-represented, on juries. That undermines the whole principle that juries should reflect society as a whole.

‘Middle-class dropout’ is a well-established phenomenon affecting the composition of juries. So the courts system has responded by changing the rules to make it more difficult to gain a deferral. So that makes it more difficult if you have a real problem with just dropping everything to do jury service;.

But it is still possible, however, to gain a deferral, so the risk of distorted juries remains. We have the worst of both worlds.

This amendment seeks to address these problems.

Let met set out clearly what the amendment envisages.

Firstly, the central point remains that juries should be representative of the whole of society.

The amendment doesn’t suggest – as someone asked me last week – that members of the public should be able to volunteer to be on juries on a regular and repeated basis – a bit like a slightly ghoulish alternative career!

Each of us can normally be expected to be called for jury service no more than once in our lifetime. This amendment doesn’t propose a change to that – simply that you should be able to offer to perform the jury service that anyway would, in a period of time that is more convenient to you.

Quite obviously, you couldn’t volunteer for a particular case, which obviously would be completely inimical to the whole concept of a fair trial.

But I think you should be able to say that over a period of time – a year, perhaps, or two years – that you expect to be more available for an outside daytime commitment like jury service, and it would be likely to be convenient for you to be called.

Whether the courts take you up on this has to remain up to them. But they might want to do so. Putting together juries can take some time, and putting into the mix of potential jurors people who have specifically said they would be likely to be available, would make the task easier for the courts service.

If we want to have a representative cross-section of society sitting on juries, then we need to find some solution to the problems of ‘middle-class dropout’ and reducing the inconvenience to jurors, which are distorting juries today.

I believe this proposal does that, with a sensible, practical, proposal that will both make juries more representative, while also reducing the burden on potential jurors – so that more of us can play our part in the legal system without unreasonably causing problems for ourselves for others.

I hope you will feel able to support it.

On an extremely close vote, in the end the proposed amendment was lost.