Why David Lammy’s Jury Reform Proposals Risk Failing Victims of Modern Slavery

David Lammy has announced new proposals to remove the right to trial by jury in cases likely to receive three years or less. The aim is to speed up the court system and ease the backlog. This might appear to be administrative, a technical fix to a practical problem, but for victims of modern slavery, particularly children exploited through county lines and coerced into offending, there are serious risks involved.

Our concerns arise from how the criminal justice system already treats exploited children: through racialised assumptions, limited understanding of trauma and inconsistent engagement with expert evidence. Removing juries from sentencing risks entrenching these problems.

Jury Trials Are Where Exploitation Is Best Understood

In jury trials where exploitation is a factor, juries play an important role in evaluating the full factual context in which an allegation sits - including the credibility, meaning and weight of evidence surrounding exploitation, and whether the prosecution has proved guilt beyond reasonable doubt in light of that context.

Where a child or young person may have been exploited, that assessment often depends on the jury being willing and able to engage with evidence that can be complex, uncomfortable and highly contextual, including:

• How exploitation operates in practice, and how it shapes a young person's choices and behaviour
• The realities of duress, coercion, grooming, control and dependency 
• Developmental maturity, trauma responses and the impact these can have on memory, affect and communication
• How safeguarding failures and gaps in protection may have contributed to vulnerability and criminalisation

These are factual issues (as much as they are legal ones) that require narrative, explanation and careful understanding - not only of what happened, but why it happened and what realistic options were available to the child at the time.

The diverse life experience and community perspectives juries provide help ensure openness to understanding the lived realities of exploitation. Judges alone, operating under time pressure, do not always engage with this complexity.

Increased Risk of Racial Bias

Lammy’s own 2017 review highlighted stark racial disparities throughout the justice system. Yet these new proposals would risk creating exactly the conditions he warned about.

Across our work, the majority of judges we encounter in youth and criminal courts are white, middle-class and male. They are also susceptible to racial bias (either conscious or unconscious) which influences:

• How credibility is judged
• How “streetwise” a child is perceived to be
• How easily coercion is believed
• How blameworthy a young Black boy is assumed to be

Removing juries removes a critical safeguard by concentrating power in a judiciary that is still not representative of the communities it serves.

Training alone will not compensate for this. A short programme cannot undo decades of structural bias or equip judges with the specialist knowledge required to understand grooming, coercion, trauma or child cognitive development.

Pressure to Plead and Weakening of Section 45 Defences

If the CPS predicts a likely sentence below three years, defence teams may face increased pressure to encourage early guilty pleas since “the judge can deal with the exploitation at sentencing”.

This would risk undermining Section 45 defences and discourage exploited children from contesting cases where they were acting under coercion. It creates structural incentives to plead guilty even when exploitation is central to the offence.

This mirrors trends seen in jurisdictions with plea-based systems in which the desire for efficiency is prioritised over fairness and justice.

Expert Evidence at Risk of Being Side-lined

One of the most troubling dynamics in modern slavery cases is judicial inconsistency around expert evidence. In magistrates’ courts - where juries are absent - we routinely see judges:

• Claim they have the necessary knowledge to assess exploitation
• Reject expert evidence as unnecessary
• Limit or restrict the scope of expert reports

These decisions routinely harm young people who cannot explain their exploitation without specialist support.

Expanding judge-only sentencing risks transferring this pattern into the Crown Court. Where judicial culture treats modern slavery expertise as optional, miscarriages of justice follow.

And with fewer opportunities for juries to hear the exploitation narrative, there will likely be more appeals, more delays and more system costs - the opposite of what the reforms intend.

Disproportionate Impact on Migrant Children and Those Navigating Immigration Systems

Exploited migrant children already face systemic disadvantages:

• Language barriers
• Precarious immigration status
• Trauma-related memory gaps
• Fear of authorities
• Lower trust in statutory agencies

Their credibility is routinely questioned in both asylum and criminal proceedings. A judge-only sentencing model risks harsher outcomes for these groups.

Also missing from Lammy’s proposal is how sentencing judges will meaningfully engage with trafficking indicators or the NRM framework.

Judicial Drift: Today’s Three-Year Threshold Won’t Stay at Three

History shows that once a principle is accepted - in this case, that juries are optional in certain cases - thresholds expand. What starts with offences under three years can, over time, include more serious violence, knife crime or drug trafficking. The populations caught in criminal exploitation sit right at this boundary.

A reform introduced to reduce backlogs today could grow into a wider restructuring of criminal justice that removes community oversight from decisions about children’s lives.

Better Alternatives Exist

You can support reducing the backlog without sacrificing fairness, legitimacy or child rights.
There are credible, practical options:

• Mandatory specialist training for judges before any reform is implemented
• Dedicated modern-slavery and exploitation judges
• Statutory requirement to consider expert evidence where exploitation is alleged
• Enhanced early safeguarding and NRM decision-making
• More youth-specific trauma and development specialists in court
• Investment in legal aid and youth offending services
• Proper funding to tackle delays rather than procedural shortcuts

Efficiency must never override justice - particularly for children who are victims before they are defendants.

Conclusion

When the state gets it wrong, the consequences are life-altering and the route to correction can take years or decades. From the Post Office Horizon scandal to the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and the wrongful convictions of the Cardiff Three, recent history is a reminder that institutional confidence is not the same as institutional integrity.

That is why removing juries from modern slavery cases is dangerous. It would disproportionately harm the children and young people most vulnerable to criminal exploitation, while concentrating interpretive power in a judiciary that lacks diversity, often lacks specialist training and already struggles to engage meaningfully with modern slavery victims.

If Lammy’s reform goes ahead without robust safeguards, the consequences for exploited young people will be predictable and severe: unsafe convictions, reduced recognition of coercion, fewer genuine opportunities to run Section 45 defences and a further weakening of child-centred justice.

Reform is needed – but not at the cost of fairness, not at the cost of racial justice, and certainly not at the cost of the children the Modern Slavery Act was designed to protect.