HISTORY

The governmental desire to bring the perpetrators of serious frauds expeditiously and effectively to book found expression in the estab­lishment by the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary, Mr Douglas (later Lord) Hurd, of a committee in November 1983 to examine Fraud Trials under the chairmanship of Lord Roskill, a Law Lord.

Second, before I address other than emotional arguments for and against the change, it is worth a moment’s pause to consider the parliamentary process, from 2003 to 2007, that thwarted the govern­ment’s resolve to make the numerically significant but socially modest change. Section 43 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 was passed through all the stages of the parliamentary process, with the caveat of an affirmative resolution.

Serious Fraud Offences: Whither Their Trial? 177 instead with a second reading in the Lords to implement section 43, without having the need for a further motion. The Bill received a second reading in the House of Commons by a substantial majority. At the Report stage the Government secured substantial majorities and the Bill was duly read a third time. To defy the Commons, by denying the Bill a second reading in the Lords and a Committee stage (where amendments could be debated) constituted a danger­ous inroad upon the Lords’ capacity to adopt such action; it was - and is - a reversal of the report of the Joint Committee on Convention which was approved by both Houses of Parliament. Significantly, that report concluded that in recent years the House of Lords will usually give a second reading to any Government Bill, ‘whether based on the manifesto, or not’. As Lord Tomlinson^[173] expostulated in 2007 on the second reading in the Lords of the Fraud (Trials with­out a Jury) Bill, their Lordships were about to take (and neverthe­less took) ‘the step of voting against a second reading at our peril Perilous or not, the House of Lords flexed its dubious muscle in order to deny the Government its wish to limit jury trials. It is not without significance that section 44 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 was not, likewise, executed. That section, which has been imple­mented on a few occasions since 2003, provided that the prosecu­tion may apply for a trial to be conducted without a jury ‘where there is a danger of jury tampering’.^[174] The fate of section 43 deserves at least a reconsideration of the grounds for proposing an associated reform.