Both the Crown Prosecution Service and the Serious Fraud Office prosecute cases of fraud. For the Serious Fraud Office the average length of a contested trial is 54 sitting days—those are days when the court actually sits. Interestingly, in the past four years since 2002, 26 fraud trials have lasted more than six months and eight trials have lasted for more than a year. The CPS, which prosecutes most fraud cases in this country, does not hold information on the length of trials, although it can give information about its success rate.
I am most grateful to the Solicitor-General for that reply. Will he tell the House what the cost of those trials has been, owing to their length, and what proposals the Government have to look into ways of changing the situation? Where a fraud trial is taken by a judge alone, what will be the implications in respect of the right of appeal against the decision of that judge sitting alone?
I cannot give the costs of each of the trials at this point, but I will write to the hon. Lady on that. On her question about our proposals to reduce the length of fraud trials, I should say that their length has been reducing quite significantly in recent years. The Serious Fraud Office has worked hard to ensure that cases are brought before the courts and are able to be tried within a reasonable period, and it has managed to reduce the number of sitting days, but they are still quite long, as is clear from the figure I have quoted. In respect of non-jury trials, obviously a defendant would have a right of appeal in a similar way to a defendant tried before a jury.
Will the Solicitor-General confirm that the conviction rate in cases brought by the Serious Fraud Office is one of the highest for all forms of prosecuting authority? Will he also take this opportunity to tell the House whether it is thought that there would be any reduction in the length of trials if they were to be heard by a judge alone? I understand from speaking to members of the judiciary that they unanimously think that there would not be any reduction in the length of trials as a result of that.
The Serious Fraud Office has an increasingly good record on convictions. However, the main reason we need to move towards having about half a dozen cases a year—the most complex and serious, and the longest running, cases—decided by a judge sitting alone is that, in order to deal with the presentation of oral evidence before courts, prosecutors have in the past had to split trials and to ensure that there were only sample indictments, which meant that only some of the charges were put forward effectively and tried. The result is that the full criminality of some very serious fraud cases is never exposed in court because of the nature of the case—because it is necessary to present oral evidence as there is a jury. As we would be able to expose the full criminality before a judge, some trials may not take less time. There may be a need to go through all the evidence. In some cases there may be a saving in time, but that is not the primary issue. The issue is to expose the full criminality of serious fraud cases.