Speeches by Mullan.

“The Minister was absolutely right to point to the enormous burden on those judges. I should have made a similar observation, and I am happy to do so now. Although I have been critical of some of their decisions, I cannot imagine the weight that sits with some of those people all the time, so I want to put on the record…”

“The Minister has pointed to complaints, and that is an important element, but there is something in between complaints and legal appeal. Again, from my own experience, working extensively on trying to make quality improvements in healthcare, these are incredibly complex things that we expect experts to do. Someone migh…”

“I rise to speak in support of clause 20, which is a technical and geographic provision necessitated by the significant infrastructure developments currently under way in the City of London. As new law courts are developed, specifically at the Salisbury Square site—we mentioned the specialist fraud court earlier in the …”

“In summary, clause 7 represents a substantial recasting of appellate rights that prioritises administrative throughput over the correction of error. We should not trade away, without any evidence of abuse and with little evidence of meaningful efficiency savings, a safeguard that is successfully correcting mistakes in …”

“The justice system depends on the belief that mistakes can and will be fixed. By restricting access to appeals and forcing successful cases back into the summary system, we risk creating a parallel system that simply displaces the backlog, while degrading the quality of justice. We must maintain the automatic right to …”

“It has a few times.”

“I have spent a lot of time working on the issue of victim personal statements, often referred to as victim impact statements, in work on other Bills. We are talking today about someone’s ability to give an effective statement, but the Opposition have also been concerned about restrictions on what people can actually sa…”

““power is also never concentrated in the hands of one individual.””

“I understand the Minister’s criticism that the defendant making the appeal may be perfectly content to have their case reheard in the magistrates, and insisting that an appeal be reheard in a jury trial gives no flexibility in that direction—that is a fair point. In response, we will not press amendments 55 to 57 to a …”

“As we have discussed in debates on previous amendments, the grounds of an appeal may very well relate to an allocation decision. Someone could successfully appeal on the basis that their trial should never have been heard by a magistrate and that they should have had a jury instead. Providing the option for a jury retr…”

“If the defendant is successful at appeal, we might say that they are doubly aggrieved: they have gone through the process and it has not worked for them. Surely we should want to do everything we can to support that group of people, so that they have a route to the mode of trial that they think is fairest, considering …”

“I accept the Minister’s point that to insist on that being the remedy is not necessarily what the defendant would want. We absolutely want to support defendants who have been through the process of a trial and a successful appeal. Where they could have had a Crown court trial with a jury, prior to the Government’s refo…”

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“I hope that I have demonstrated to the Committee that I have a genuine interest in the suggestion that this element is causing an issue. We are open-minded to that. My instinct is that, at heart, this is about the courts, judges and other professional staff making bad decisions and bad judgments. That is at the heart o…”

““the quality and sustainability of his relationships with each parent, the nature of the relationship between the parents insofar as it affects him and the capacity and willingness of each parent to support his relationship with the other parent, insofar as this is likely to further his welfare now and in the future.””

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“I think it is a drafting habit to say “his”, and there is no pejorative element to that.”

“On amendment 37, I have talked about the high rate of error and injustice that is being corrected by the current appeal mechanism, and I have talked about the unrepresented defendants who will have to navigate a more complex and subjective system, such as by reviewing transcripts. On the whole, we do not think that we …”

“As we have heard, clause 15 clarifies the use of pre-recorded evidence for cross-examination and re-examination, which is often referred to as section 28 evidence. Our courts frequently rely on recorded testimony to spare witnesses the trauma of a live trial, so the rules governing the editing and presentation of that …”