Fraud Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord. Wrinkles are helpful: one should be sensitive to every mark and move in a debate. The noble and learned Lord is absolutely right. Although there was a great deal of reference by government to that after the Jubilee Line case—it certainly came out in the newspapers that one solution was going to be to abolish the jury—I will rapidly accept if he tells me so that it did not come from the Attorney-General’s Chambers. However, it certainly figured in newspaper reports at the time and the Jubilee Line case is an exact example of the kind of case where no one could have suggested that it was the fault of the jury. The highest one could go—even this would be a bad point—would be to say that the fact that one has to explain things to the jury or that one has to argue things in the absence of the jury in some ways complicates the case, but I put it no higher than that. The Jubilee Line case, to have it on the record, was supposed to take 18 months. It was still going on after two years and the prosecution case had not even been concluded. In the last seven months of the case the jury got into court on only 13 out of 91 days. I take those figures from The Guardian newspaper and they may or may not be accurate, but that was what was stated in the public prints; it is quite instructive. Again I have made efforts and I look to the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General to tell us when we are going to see the CPS Inspectorate’s report on the case. One of the things that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said at that time was that he was determined to put an end to fraud cases that took 18 months or longer. Will he in his winding-up speech tell us whether we can have an end to 12-month inquiries into collapsed cases? We are coming up to the anniversary of the collapse of the Jubilee Line case and we are waiting to hear what the CPS Inspectorate thinks about it and to have the opportunity to reflect on its analysis. I close on the key point, to which I return: for 10 years, from 1987 to 1997, I looked at every serious complex fraud case that collapsed. In every case it was a combination of over-complexity, as it was with the Jubilee Line case. The word on the street among my friends at the criminal Bar is that the essence of the Jubilee Line case was corruption and it was complicated by a complex addition of fraud charges. It could probably have been dealt with a great deal more expeditiously and simply. Mr Stephen Wooler and his colleagues will be reflecting on that matter and I am sure they will answer that point among others. The other point is that it is important to have a judge who is an expert in the field. The judge in that case was deeply respected and a fine ordinary criminal judge—by saying ““ordinary criminal”” I do not mean that that is any less clever-clever, or anything else, but it is different from having experience of long and complex fraud cases. She was invited to take on the case in her 69th year—her last case. In the management of such matters one has to be careful who one asks to do things and at what stage in their career, because the combination led to the problem. That is not new; it had happened before in one form or another in all of the serious complex cases that collapsed between 1987 and 1997. The blame should not be laid at the door of the juries, and our liberties, which depend so strongly on the jury, should not be swept aside.