At the end of yesterday's debate on the Gulf, at 7 pm, Mr. Speaker, I asked the occupant of the Chair whether the Government would be ready to make a statement today. I wondered whether you had been given any information about that. The events of last night have led to unofficial statements by the President of the United States, the Prime Minister and others. Given that so much is at stake, I thought that the Government might have said that they would make a statement today before a decision is made about the Soviet peace offer.

I have received no such indication. I may hear something before 10 am. The Patronage Secretary is present, and will have heard what the right hon. Gentleman has said.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

We in this country are rightly proud of our system of justice and our democratic institutions, which are among the finest in the world. That does not mean, however, that they do not need to change with the times, that they are incapable of change or that they ought to be set in stone. What man does not change for the better, time—that great innovator—will change for the worse.

My modest measure aims to improve both our democratic institutions and our system of justice. It seeks to make improvements, rather than radical changes, and to do so only through measured trial and research. It does not seek change for the sake of change; it seeks change principally because I believe that the passage of time has made change desirable. It seeks to change for the better those things that the great innovator, time, has changed for the worse.

It may come as a surprise to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to learn that one of the two major issues addressed in the Bill has never before been debated in this place. Whatever the outcome of today's debate, it is clear that the subjects that it will raise demand parliamentary scrutiny. I hope that the debate itself will provide some of that scrutiny, and that, having listened to what I and others have to say, the House will see fit to give the Bill a Second Reading. Above all, I hope that those who oppose change, and who wish our judicial system to be set in stone, will not seek to prevent further discussion in Committee or to prevent the research, testing, experimentation and trial that the Bill facilitates.

Before I tell the House what the Bill does, I will take the unusual step of explaining what it does not do. Most of the arguments against it seem to be based on grave misconceptions about its intentions. I will deal first with two of those misconceptions. First, the Bill does not seek to introduce television as a permanent feature of our courts; it seeks to do something much more simple—to test the arguments for and against it. The testing of those arguments may, of course, lead to the conclusion that cameras should be allowed into certain courts and for certain purposes, but it may equally lead to the conclusion that they ought not to be allowed into courts in any circumstances. Today's debate essentially concerns whether the arguments for and against television in the courts should be tested—it is not about whether television should be a permanent feature.

Surely the ultimate purpose of the Bill is the permanent televising of the courts; otherwise, there would be no point in introducing it.

That is not true. My purpose is to test the arguments. The televising of the courts is banned by legislation enacted 11 years before commercial television was available. It has not been debated or given a fair trial.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I will when I have answered the last intervention.

I have already said that the experiment on televising the courts may lead to the conclusion that television should not be allowed in the courts.

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, particularly given the peremptory way in which I tried to intervene. Is he not being a little unfair to my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Summerson)? Many of these arguments were debated when we considered televising the House. There was no doubt that once television was introduced it would stay to cover all our proceedings. Is that not a legitimate fear about the Bill?

In some respects it is a legitimate fear, but the trials—the Bill does not suggest how the trials should be conducted—will be conducted under the proper supervision of the Home Office, the Lord Chancellor's Department and the presiding judge. They must ensure that the experiments are conducted fairly and reasonably. The trials may conclude that television should not be allowed in our courts. The Bill tests the arguments, nothing more and nothing less.

We rightly say in this country that justice must not only be done but be seen to be done. Anyone who genuinely believes in that principle should not stand in the way of an experiment that would test whether justice can be seen to be done to a greater extent. I have heard arguments against the Bill based on the possibility of the sensational coverage of trials, such as the showing of rape victims or children. Such coverage is prohibited by other legislation and by the rules of court. The Bill poses no danger in that respect.

Will my hon. Friend confirm—if not now, then in Committee—that the Bill will not continue the absolute bar on cases involving children? There is considerable concern—not only in my constituency, I suspect—that the balance in cases involving children, especially those involving the sexual abuse of children by adults, is weighted too heavily in favour of the authorities representing the child. That may be redressed only if an adult can be seen to put the adult's case in public, albeit in carefully controlled conditions. I am asking my hon. Friend not to consider making a massive change, but, perhaps at a later stage of the Bill, to consider whether that absolute barrier is appropriate.

My Bill does not deal with those matters, which should be considered in places more appropriate than this. It aims only to amend legislation to allow an experiment. I wish neither to support my hon. Friend nor to oppose him. Those matters are not within the scope of the Bill.

If television were to become a permanent feature of our courts, it would have to be only for appropriate cases. It should have to conform with tightly drawn rules and always be under the supervision of the trial judge. Television should never be allowed in our courts if it could act against the interests of justice.

The Bill does not remove the statutory ban on the interviewing of jurors. It makes a limited exception to that rule, because it allows the merits of interviewing jurors to be weighed only in approved research projects. I would argue against the unbridled questioning of jurors, but I am not saying that jurors should never be questioned for any purpose. However, the purpose of the Bill is not permanently to introduce television in our courts or to facilitate the unbridled questioning of jurors.

The Bill aims to modify statutory restrictions which, in absolute terms, are no longer justified and are not in the interests of an open system of justice. I refer to section 41 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925, which prohibits photography in courts, section 9 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981, which prohibits sound recordings in court, except for the purposes of assisting the official written transcript, and section 8 of that Act, which prohibits the interviewing of jurors. The Bill would amend the law in England and Wales not by removing those restrictions but by making certain and limited exceptions to them to permit approved pilot projects and research.

The Bill would enable the arguments for televising the courts to be tested in strictly controlled conditions. It would allow the resulting evidence to be assessed before a final decision was taken on whether court proceedings should be permanently broadcast. We cannot rightly take that decision without the evidence. My Bill seeks to introduce and weigh that evidence.

The Bill would enable the merits of interviewing jurors for approved research to be weighed to see whether the administration of our criminal justice system could be improved and the task of jurors better facilitated.

The background to the proposal to televise the courts begins in 1988, when the public affairs committee of the Bar Council established a working party under the chairmanship of Mr. Jonathan Caplan. Its objective was to report on the desirability and feasibility of televising court proceedings in England and Wales. It took a year to complete its task, during which time it assessed the position in other countries, visited the United States to see the televising of state courts, and liaised with broadcasters, lawyers and other interested parties here and abroad. It found that in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the United States and the European Court of Human Rights, there was some—albeit limited—experience of televising court proceedings.

The working party's report was published in 1989 and covered four matters: first, the background to the parliamentary ban on court photography, which was enacted in 1925; secondly, a countrywide analysis of the televising of courts; thirdly, the arguments for and against televising courts; and, finally, an assessment of recent technological developments and discussion of how television in the courts might be arranged on a strictly controlled basis.

The report presented eight principal conclusions. First, the absolute ban on cameras was no longer justified. Secondly, pilot projects in appellate and trial courts should now take place, but only under the aegis of the responsible departments—that is, the Lord Chancellor's Department and the Home Office. Thirdly, potential broadcasters must apply in each case to the trial judge or the court for permission to cover the proceedings. Fourthly, the trial judges should have the discretion to allow or refuse applications, but refusal should be subject to the right of appeal.

The report's fifth conclusion was that, even if the application were allowed, the trial judge would retain the power to exclude the camera from any part of the proceedings if he felt that it was right to do so in the interests of justice. The sixth conclusion was that any such exclusion during the trial should be subject to the right of appeal but that the proceedings should not be delayed while the appeal was in progress. Penultimately, the report concluded that broadcasters should be subject to strict rules of coverage inside the court regarding what they may or may not film and the manner in which they film it. Finally, it suggested that, like the printed media, televising should be subject to the law of contempt so that only fair and accurate reports of proceedings made in good faith could be published. [Interruption.] Does my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell) wish me to give way, because I can hear a great deal of what he is saying?

No, not at the moment.

In February 1990, the Bar Council universally endorsed the report's recommendations for pilot projects in courts. It then decided to seek an amendment to the law to enable such projects to take place. In September 1990, the annual conference of the Bar Council organised a workshop in conjunction with the Canadian Bar Association, at which English, American and Canadian judges debated the issue of the televising of court proceedings. At that workshop, there was widespread support for such pilot projects.

Many people support the principle of televising courts and there are many arguments in favour of it. I shall advance 10 of the principal arguments this morning. Many more exist, but I do not wish to detain the House too long and I wish to give all hon. Members who wish to speak the opportunity to do so. I also hope to give other hon. Members a chance to introduce their Bills today.

To date, the experience of laywers abroad in jurisdictions where televising courts is allowed has been overwhelmingly favourable. Technology has advanced so much in recent years that it is possible to achieve broadcast quality without intrusive apparatus. Furthermore, very few people have the time, resources or will to attend trials, even assuming that the courts could accommodate them. The vast majority of people rely for their understanding of what happens at trials on second-hand reports in the media, on television, on reporters speaking to cameras outside courts, on dramatic reconstructions and on the notorious artist's sketch which must be made outside the court and from memory. In essence, those are second-hand reports of what happens in court and they are no substitute for personal observation. Provided that it is in the interests of justice, it must be right that people should be given the maximum opportunity to see justice in action.

The ban on photography in courts enacted in 1925 was never intended to apply to television. It concerned sensational still photography. The briefing note that was given to Ministers at the time of that debate said that the

"object of this clause is to prevent the objectionable practice of publishing sensational photographs of prisoners in the dock, in court or leaving court".

At the time of that debate, television was not available. The first BBC television service was not launched until 1936 and it was not until a year later that the first outside broadcast took place—the coronation of King George VI. The 1925 ban was simply extended to television without debate once television became available. That extension was an unforeseen consequence of the 1925 legislation. In reality, Parliament has never had the opportunity to consider the issue of televising our courts. I believe that it is unreasonable to have an effective ban on cameras in court when the issue has never been debated in this place. Unlike those in some countries, our courts are not televised not because the issue has been properly considered but due to an unforeseen consequence of previous legislation.

A further reason for the introduction of cameras is that television is now by far the most important news medium. More than 70 per cent. of the population rely on it as their principal source of information on current events. It must surely be questionable to ban the use of a medium on which such a large proportion of the population rely. It is important that people should have confidence in our judiciary and legal system, and that can best be achieved by allowing the public to see judges, lawyers and the police at work and to see how courts make their decisions. Many court rulings, particularly High Court and appellate court rulings, are as important to daily life as the legislative decisions that we make in this place. Why should the public not be able to see how decisions are made when those decisions have a profound effect on their lives?

Television has an informative and educational value, which would be enhanced if it were allowed into courts. Many young people have never been into a court room. For them to see justice at work would increase their respect for legal processes and the rule of law. Moreover, if the camera were allowed into criminal trials,, potential offenders might be deterred by what they see on television. If we are concerned, as we should be, to educate and interest young people in the workings of the legal system, it is absurd to ignore the most popular medium of mass communication.

We should also consider the fact that we now have television in this place and in the other place. Most people outside now regard the televising of Parliament as a success. Many arguments were advanced against televising Parliament and they are principally the same arguments as those that may be advanced against the televising of courts. Many hon. Members who were originally opposed to televising the House now accept that it has been beneficial. The other place took a lead in the experiment and I hope that this House will take a lead in the televising of courts. The public has a prima facie right to see how laws are made and administered. The televising of courts in the appropriate circumstances can make that right a reality.

The televising of courts may raise standards by highlighting inefficient procedures, shaming inarticulate advocates or unfair judges. It could open up procedures and practices to more public gaze, thus increasing pressure for higher standards.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the principle that justice should not only be done but be seen to be done means that there is a presumption in favour of open justice. Unless courts are sitting in camera or in chambers, they are not private places. By their very nature, they are open to the public and must be so if justice is to be seen to be done. In reality, the space available in the courts means that they are open to only a few people. A limit is imposed not by principle but by the space available. Therefore, allowing people to see on television what they could see if they could attend extends the principle of open justice. That must be right, provided that it does not interefere with the course of justice.

Those are the principal arguments for televising our courts and a spacious case based on those arguments could be made for changing the law now to allow cameras in certain courts. I do not seek to make that argument and neither does my Bill. I am not suggesting that those arguments are conclusive; my Bill merely removes the restrictions that prevent those arguments being put to the test.

Some people are deeply suspicious of what would happen if we allowed television cameras in our courts. Some believe that television, by nature, is more concerned with entertainment than with education. Others believe that television would trivialise court proceedings. Some of that may be true, but entertainment is not the only function of television—it also has an educative and informative function. The American judge Justice Moore recently said:

"That which is carried out with dignity will not become undignified because more people may be permitted to see and hear it".

Others argue that television can be obtrusive and disruptive. The television cameras that may be recording you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and me at this moment are so diminutive as to be scarcely noticeable. Cameras of that type could be used in our courts.

Perhaps the most important argument against allowing television cameras in our courts is that they might deter potential witnesses from attending or might affect their testimony in some way. If that happened, would not support televising our courts and would consider them only for the appellate courts, where witnesses do not appear. However, the evidence from most countries that have experimented with cameras in the courts does not support that argument.

In the late 1970s, the supreme court of Florida authorised a one-year experiment in televising all its state courts. During that year more than 2,750 people took part in televised trials either as the judge, attorney, juror, witness or court official. All were asked to provide a report of their experience and to complete a questionnaire. The principal results of that experiment showed that the presence of the camera had little effect on the dignity of the proceedings. It was found that the presence of cameras disrupted a trial "not at all" or "very slightly". The participants' awareness of the camera averaged between slight and moderate. Jurors and witnesses thought that the presence of the cameras made them feel slightly more responsible for their actions and the ability of jurors to judge the truthfulness of witnesses was not perceived to be affected. Jurors deemed that they did not find that the cameras had a distracting effect, while witnesses and attorneys found that that effect was only slight. There was no significant difference in participants' concern about appearing on television as opposed to their names appearing in newspapers. The court personnel and attorneys perceived that the presence of cameras made participating attorneys' actions only slightly more flamboyant. The evidence from Florida suggests that the presence of cameras does not adversely affect the quality of justice or distort the legal process.

In 1981, after the conclusion of the experiment, the supreme court of Florida put the argument for televising courts most succinctly. It stated:

"Courtrooms were intimidating long before the advent of electronic media. Trials with considerable public interest had always resulted in courtrooms full of spectators, news reporters and sketch artists, all of whom add to the intimidation of the courtroom atmosphere. In our view, the single addition of the camera in the courtroom in these circumstances should not increase tension significantly, given the fact that electronic media will report the proceedings whether or not its camera is actually in the courtroom."

I do not seek to rely on the conclusions of the Florida experiment, but we should test the arguments for televising our courts in the same way as they were tested in Florida. Whatever the outcome, it is clear that some trials would not be suitable for inclusion in the pilot projects that would result if my Bill is passed. Whatever pilot projects were allowed, they would have to be subject to serious restrictions as to what could or could not be filmed.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the great care that he has taken to try to persuade me that his Bill is right in the first place. My hon. Friend has just referred to electronic media reporting a trial in any event, but he will agree that that would not apply in this country. I do not know whether there are radio broadcasts of proceedings in Florida, but I do not see how that argument applies here.

I am not seeking to use the evidence from the Florida experiment to try to persuade hon. Members that our courts should be televised. I simply mentioned that experiment to show that it is possible to undertake such an experiment and to judge the results. I believe that we should undertake similar experiments and then decide whether to televise our courts on the basis of experience. I mentioned the Florida experiment merely to demonstrate that it is possible to have trials and to come to conclusions. I do not suggest that our conclusions would be the same as those reached in Florida.

Even if pilot projects were undertaken, however, they would have to be subject to serious restrictions. One might state that there should be no visual coverage of the jury or of any witnesses whose identity is protected by law. It might be decided that there should be no visual coverage of any person if such coverage is liable to endanger his safety. It might be decided that there should be no coverage of proceedings in chambers, in camera or in respect of any order under the Contempt of Court Act 1981. It may be decided that no visual coverage should be given to documents or to the advocates' benches. Any conferences in court between lawyers and clients might be exempt from audio coverage.

I do not suggest that those restrictions should necessarily be applied in this country—I am merely suggesting the type of restrictions that could be considered. My Bill does not propose any such restrictions as I believe that they should be drawn up by the proper judicial authorities.

The Bill does not propose that television should be a permanent feature of our courts. It does not specify the type of court that would be suitable for any experiment or the restrictions to be applied. It merely facilitates the testing of the arguments for and against as a result of well-managed and constructed experiments. Such experiments could be undertaken only by making exceptions to section 41 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925 and to section 9 of the Contempt of Court Act 1981.

My Bill does not argue for a permanent change in the law, but merely for the opportunity to test the arguments for and against televising our courts under strictly controlled conditions and judicial supervision. The real arguments for and against televising can then be considered on the basis of objective evidence—the same evidence that the courts seek when deciding on the facts and cases before them. That evidence is not available today. Those hon. Members who regularly practise in our courts should not deny to people wishing to see our proceedings televised the same trial of evidence that they demand in courts when using those courts on behalf of their clients.

The second and equally important provision of the Bill relates to jury research and would allow carefully controlled research on how juries reach decisions. In 1981 Parliament prohibited all interviewing of jurors about their deliberations in the jury room. Hon. Members will recall that that prohibition was imposed after some sections of the press probed the secrets of the jury room in certain celebrated cases. The main principle behind that ban was correct, but unfortunately it has had some undesirable consequences. By preventing the improper questioning of jurors, we have also prevented the questioning of jurors for proper purposes.

My Bill does not alter the rules against publicising how a particular jury voted or approached its task in a particular case, but it attempts to enable approved research to take place—always without publicly identifying particular trials. The Bill would facilitate the interviewing of jurors for certain specified and approved research projects only.

The jury is the cornerstone of our criminal justice system. It is important for us to consider, for example, how jurors might be aided in their task and how well juries follow the evidence. Do juries in particular cases feel that the legal issues have been put into simple and clear focus? How important is the judge's summing up at the end of a trial? How does a jury feel that its task might have been made easier? In effect, how could justice be done better? Those are just a few of the possible questions. We do not know the answers because we are not allowed to ask the questions. Are juries to be the only institutions deemed incapable of improvement? We should constantly seek to improve and refine our system of justice, but we cannot do so if we are not allowed to ask relevant questions.

That point becomes even more important as jurors are asked to grapple with increasingly lengthy and complex fraud trials. The present Lord Chancellor, when he was Lord Advocate, said:

"The jury system, great institution that it is, surely can stand up to properly conducted research."

If the motive of those who are against interviewing jurors is that we may be disturbed by what we discover, the sooner we lift the veil from the jury room, the better. If there is something fundamentally wrong with our jury system, we should expose it and correct it rather than try to conceal it.

We have an excellent legal system in this country. It is the envy of much of the world, but that does not mean that it is incapable of improvement. The jury is the cornerstone of British justice, so we must constantly ask whether we can improve the operation of the jury system. Our courts cannot and should not he set in stone. Their efficiency should be tested. As with any other institution, their operations should be improved wherever possible. We are all proud to live in a free, democratic country, but we need to do more than simply proclaim that fact. All that is required for evil to prevail is that good men do nothing. There is a responsibility on all of us constantly to seek ways of updating and improving our democratic system, including our courts.

I present to the House a Bill which has at its roots the aim of improving the British judicial system. Its aim is to make the judicial system more open. Open justice. like open government, is desirable and achievable. My Bill will change nothing of itself—it will merely allow questions to be asked, trials to be made and arguments to be weighed. It will allow a fair trial of the evidence, just as the courts seek a fair trial of the evidence in the cases that they try.

As I said at the beginning of my speech, this is a modest Bill, but it is a good Bill which deserves the support of the House. Just as there needs to be a trial of evidence in our courts, there needs to be a trial of evidence about our courts. I hope that those hon. Members who support proper trials of evidence in our courts will not try to prevent a proper trial of evidence about our courts.

We owe it to our electorate—70 per cent. of whom rely on television as the main source of their information on current affairs and any of whom may be called to serve on juries—to test whether our courts can be made more open to them and whether their potential task as jurymen can be better facilitated. That is what my Bill would achieve—and nothing more. I ask hon. Members to bear that in mind. It is a good Bill which deserves a Second Reading.

Of course, I declare my interest as a practising criminal lawyer, but my interest probably moves in two ways. The Bill has been backed by my trade union, the Bar Council. It is in favour of the Bill; I am not. Therefore, one can see that the declaration of my interest does not necessarily diminish the strength of my argument.

This is an excellent topic for debate, particularly on a Friday. I take very much to heart the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmore Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock) pointed out that the subject had not been discussed and aired before in the House. I believe that it should be and I pay great credit to my hon. Friend for introducing this important Bill.

I hope that my hon. Friend will not think me even remotely patronising when I say that his case was excellently argued. If ever he gave up this place, he would have an excellent future as an advocate in our courts—whether he would want to be an advocate after these experiments have been concluded is a different matter. I am a little sad that my hon. Friend has not put his undoubted ability and talent to use on a Bill with more chance of securing wide support throughout the country and one that would do more to benefit British society. I am afraid that the Bill, if it ever reaches the statute book, is unlikely to do that. If one were to test the amount of interest that this important subject commands among all groups of opinion in this place, one need only look at the serried ranks of interested people on the other side of the Chamber.

My hon. Friend argues, beguilingly, that justice should be more widely seen to be done. I agree, but not if justice is to be turned into a media circus, for the harm done to justice by that step would far outweigh any good that would come. If people want to see the courts at work, they have only to go there. If they want to read what goes on in court, they have only to read the newspapers and the books. Plenty of evidence is available. There are few occasions when one cannot get into the public gallery of a court.

It is true that there are some sensational trials on which public attention is riveted because they involve particularly titillating sexual matters, with connotations of great interest to the public, or child abuse, murder or serious personal issues. But those are precisely the trials in which my hon. Friend envisages tight controls and exclusion. The cases that he believes should be televised are cases where members of the ordinary public, if they are interested in the way in which our legal system operates, would have no difficulty in getting into court.

My hon. Friend said that television would foster a better understanding of the legal process. I have no doubt that it would, but there is no point in that happening if the legal process is made worse by the measure. It is more important that the legal process should be good than that more people should see a less good legal process in operation. All one needs to do to understand the legal process—if it is possible to understand it—is, after reading the books, to go to the courts, which are open to all.

My hon. Friend said that television would create confidence in the legal system. It might, but it might not. If it becomes a worse system, confidence would be diminished. If it became a worse system because television was in the courts, it would weaken public confidence, not strengthen it. My hon. Friend said that the system would be rather like the televising of Parliament, which has turned out not to be so bad, although there are differing views about that. That is a thoroughly bad argument. Parliament debates issues, not the private lives and thoughts of individuals.

Parliament exposes its participants to television because they want and are prepared to be exposed to it. It is a voluntary process. If we did not want television, we should not have it here. If we do not like appearing on television, we need not speak. Will the defendant, the witness, the counsel or the jury have any choice once television is brought into the courts? At the beginning of a trial, will the counsel, the potential witnesses, the jury and everyone involved be asked whether they are happy to have a television camera in court? If so, our courts will never be televised and the Bill will have been a total waste of time. If not, televising will be obligatory if the judge considers that it is proper. That is very different from what happens in this place.

The most important point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston is that the Bill is intended only as a trial, an experiment, a pilot scheme, an approved project and research. He said that it was a "modest Bill" and merely a test. Anyone who believes that that is all that the Bill intends must be very naive. No television company would invest substantial sums of money in pilot schemes, approved projects, tests and research unless it hoped that the benefits would redound in the company's coffers.

There are two types of television company. One is privately owned and funded, and has shareholders who wish to know whether the money being invested—and money was very expensively invested in this place as it would have to be expensively invested in the courts—is producing a reward. The second type of company is subsidised by the state and paid for by the taxpayer. The taxpayer is also concerned that there should be a reasonable return on his investment. Both types of company have a financial interest in the success of projects. They must satisfy their shareholders or the taxpayer.

Once a pilot scheme has been set up, at considerable cost, the pressure will be on for permanence. That is the true comparison to televising Parliament. I remember the arguments about the pilot scheme for televising Parliament. We asked for a test, a modest pilot scheme,—a properly controlled and properly researched scheme. Once we had that, we had permanence. There was no going back after that approved project and research. We are the volunteers who live by the performances that we give. We are actors, prima donnas, ballerinas and public performers so we took the media to our heart. We thrived on it and so the scheme has become permanent. What was once a pilot scheme and a research project—a properly controlled experiment—has become permanent.

My objection to pilot schemes, approved projects and research is that they are the thin end of the wedge. They are the most slippery of slopes. If the experiment failed, it would be the most costly waste of money for which we, the shareholders and taxpayers, would have to pay.

It is interesting that some of those arguments were used in this House to keep people out of the Strangers' Gallery when people were sent to prison for publishing reports. Such arguments are a diversion from the points made by our hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock) in his powerful advocacy. I know that my right hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General agrees. The question is whether the Bill would help justice. Knowledge of what happens in our courts is outside the experience of two thirds of the population. It is not a question whether it costs a bit of money or whether, if people get used to it, it will continue, but whether it will help people to understand what justice is and whether that information will help justice in the round.

My hon. Friend is too impatient. I shall address that point. The issue to which he referred in his question is not whether the experiment would be of educational interest to the public, but whether it would lead to an improved system. They are the two important central items in the argument.

I do not wish to rubbish the arguments used by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston. I believe that my counter arguments add up to a pretty strong condemnation of the Bill. But the Bill gives rise to far more worrying matters, all of which would have to be dealt with by my hon. Friend, by the Bar Council and by those who support the Bill. None of those worries has yet been answered satisfactorily. They may be dealt with during the debate, but none is likely to receive a satisfactory answer.

How would my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston guarantee that our courts of law were not turned into media circuses? Television is for the entertainment of the masses. That is its principal purpose and its raison detre. Education is the price that television companies pay for entertainment. No television channel could afford to run on education alone, so how would my hon. Friend guarantee that the court would not be turned into a place of entertainment? How would he ensure that the participants would not be merely players, with their heartbreaks, their peccadillos, their hatreds, their jealousies, their meannesses, their dishonesty, their violence and their insensitivities exposed for the ghoulish and lascivious to see? The cinema-goer goes to the cinema to see those elements portrayed and the theatre-goer goes to the theatre to be excited by the performance and the show of those elements, which are part of society and of the way human beings behave. The courts would become another cinema, another theatre, another place where the weaknesses and frailties of humanity are exposed for all to see. Is our legal system to be so trivialised and degraded by television?

Even if I am wrong, or if it is thought that that could never happen or that it would not matter if it did, I draw attention to the harm that could be done to the judicial process by the television camera. Let us consider the effect on witnesses. It is difficult enough to persuade witnesses to come to the criminal courts to give evidence, for all sorts of reasons; they do not like being identified or they do not like being known as someone who has given evidence against someone else as they have to continue to live in their own community. They are reluctant to give evidence. One of the reasons why guilty men go free is because of inadequate evidence when witnesses will not come forward.

And perhaps because of the hon. and learned Gentleman's help in representing them.

That is another reason, but all those whom I have defended who have gone free have been innocent and so the court has decided.

Witnesses who come forward are often unable, through fear, to take the oath properly. Will that fear be lessened if they know that television cameras are on them? What will happen with the witness who does not want his private life, his idiocies, his idiosyncracies or his dishonesties exposed not for 50 people in a court to see or for 50,000 people to read about in a newspaper, but for 10 million people to see on television? Will such people want to come to give evidence? If they give evidence, will they have to fear that when they go back to Acacia avenue in their suburban part of the great city, all their neighbours will be at their windows, pointing and waving, and saying, "There is the liar" or "There is the grass" or "There is the cheat" or "There is the dishonest person" or "There is the two-timer" or "There is the person who could not give a straight answer to a straight question."? Yes, the show-offs would love such an experience. The witnesses who go to perform in a court of law would welcome the cameras. But what is the use to justice of such witnesses?

I entirely agree with my hon. and learned Friend's present argument. However, one point troubles me and it has been raised by our hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock). In America, it has been suggested by various questionnaires and polls that witnesses may not have been put off by this procedure. I am wary of those questionnaires and polls. Would my hon. and learned Friend comment on that?

I shall come to that a little later. I do not think that comparisons with other countries can be made easily, especially not with the United States. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston referred to the Florida experiment and he said that one conclusion was that television had little effect on the dignity of the proceedings. How much dignity is there in the proceedings of an American court of criminal law? Anyone who goes to America and watches how criminal justice is dispensed in many criminal courts there would not wish to see that here. Comparisons are not easy. Many of the ideas have not been tested. The Florida experiment and somebody else's experiment have produced many conclusions. We cannot confirm such conclusions because we have not carried out such an experiment. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston called for such an experiment, but, because we have not carried it out, we cannot compare and criticise with the care that may be required. We cannot assume that the American experience is evidence on which we should base changes in our society. I have merely touched on the effect on witnesses as I do not want to take up the time of the House unnecessarily.

Let us consider the effect of television on jurors. They would have television lights and cameras on them all day, every day. When we started the experiment here, we were told that it would have no effect on the lighting because modern cameras were so good that they would not require brighter lights. Hon. Members should look at it. I am not complaining, because one tends to get used to it. However, there is no doubt that cameras and lights—and I have seen them in American courts—are obtrusive and they would be focused on the jury all day every day. It is no use saying that juries would not notice that intrusion into the courts.

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that most people who go into court for the first time are wholly unprepared for the surroundings with which they are presented? The lights are a trivial matter for the jurors, who may be going into a court of law for the first time, or for the witnesses. There are many more important issues than the cameras or the lights for anyone going into a modern court of law.

But why make it worse? Why increase the number of distractions? Why increase the number of obstacles to the pure concentration on the facts of the case on which the jury has to come to a verdict?

Jury men may be frightened of being identified and, in serious cases, of being followed, of being attacked, of being threatened or of their families being threatened. It is precisely because of threats and fear that we do not have juries in the Diplock courts in Northern Ireland. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston would say that we should not have television cameras in courts in Northern Ireland and that such courts would be excluded from a research project or from a narrow test. However, the line has to be drawn at some stage. Jury men are sometimes frightened when they have no reason to be, simply because it is a criminal trial and not because it is a case involving violence or because a substantial sum is involved. It might not be a case in which jurors were justified in fearing what might happen to them. If jurors fear what may happen to them, a disservice is done to jury trials.

We say to jurors—and this is an important part of our criminal system—"When you go home tonight, be sure not to discuss this case with anybody because if you discuss it with somebody who has not heard the witnesses and seen the evidence, he may influence your mind and your thinking. It will be unfair and unjust because he has not heard the whole case." Juries nod in agreement because they see the sense of that. When they go home, they do not discuss the case with their families and their friends. However, if we televise a case and if we put it on the news at 9 pm or 10 pm while the family and friends are gathered around and saying, "My God, was that your case? Look at that liar. Look at that man's face. Could you honestly believe a word that man said? Well, I know what I think about it", it will become almost impossible to be able to send juries home at night. The risks of such discussions taking place would be great. If we had to send jurors to hotels every day that they were involved in a criminal case—which could go on for days, for weeks or for months—it would interfere with our jury system. The alternative is to expose the system to the ill effects of people outside being encouraged to influence the decision to which the jury will have to come, although those outsiders have not seen the evidence. Surely the effect of television on the jury is the strongest argument against televising our criminal trials.

What is the difference in principle between the jury in a case that is well publicised in the popular press, such as the Ripper libel case or the Jeffrey Archer libel case, and a jury in a case that may have some television coverage? I can see that there may be difficulties, but what is the difference in principle?

There may be no difference in principle, but there is an enormous difference in practice. I suggest that a television camera on the face of a witness may form several seconds or even minutes of television time later in the evening. People around can say, not from having seen a "mug shot" or from having heard a report, but from seeing the man or woman giving evidence, "There's a liar," or "There's an honest person." The practical effect is far more considerable.

Television cameras will have an effect on juries and on witnesses, which answers the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley) about what harm television would do to a criminal trial. What about the effect upon lawyers?

My hon. and learned Friend is advancing arguments in the way that advocates usually do. He has described what he thinks may be a risk and he has said that there will be effects upon jurors. However he has not demonstrated that there is an effect. One of the arguments for a trial period is to judge whether there is. For example in the Archer and the Ripper libel cases there was massive television coverage from outside the court, giving an interpretation of what was happening. We should be slightly more generous about the skills of the listening and reading public, as they can interpret for themselves what reasonably paid reporters would otherwise interpret for them.

As regards my hon. Friend's latter remark, when the House was to be televised it was argued that it would be better if people could see what was being discussed in the Chamber, live, as there would be no need for all the awful studio interviews afterwards, when people advanced arguments but no one had seen what took place in the House. What has happened? Snapshots of debates in this place appear, followed by hour after hour of studio interviews. Therefore, we will not avoid a reporter standing outside the central criminal court with a television crew, or discussions of the case afterwards with solicitors, barristers, witnesses or defendants merely because there is television in the court. Obviously I am not arguing my case very persuasively and so I shall repeat it again—there will be an adverse effect, as the proceedings will be filmed and people will be able to form judgments about the behaviour of a defendant, a witness giving evidence or of an advocate. Witnessing their behaviour affects the viewers' thinking. I cannot pull rank upon my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham, but I have been practising in the courts for 29 years and I know how important appearance and judgments based upon a person's behaviour may be. They have an effect upon counsel, and I am sure they have an effect upon juries.

I must advise my hon. and learned Friend that two minutes ago I received a message to telephone BBC Radio Humberside to talk about my speech during the debate on the Bill today. I suggested to Radio Humberside that since the House is broadcast on radio it would be able to carry the exact words that I uttered in my speech if it waited. However it was intimated to me that that was not quite what was wanted. The radio station wanted an interview about what I intended to say. As a result of broadcasting the proceedings of the House people do not merely get the live debate. Radio Humberside will not plug in at 11.15 am or 11.30 am, or whatever time you call me, Mr. Speaker, and interrupt its programme to broadcast my speech live. Will not that also be a danger with witnesses, lawyers and all the other assistants in a courtroom drama? The media authorities may approach them in the morning for a line on what they intend to say. Consider the problems that that poses for contempt of court.

I am not at all surprised that my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Cleethorpes (Mr. Brown) is considered to be a media idol in Humberside, or anywhere else, and that he is in constant demand. What frightens me is that my hon. Friend might turn his talents to being an advocate if we televise the courts and the media would have an even greater chance to publicise his great abilities. That brings me to the point that I was about to make—the effect of televising the courts would be to make lawyers media heroes. The defendant might well decide upon a media hero to defend him—a famous man, such as Michael Brown perhaps. The defendant might say, "I don't want Ivan Lawrence because he's not a media hero. I want Michael Brown to defend me." Michael Brown may be much better than Ivan Lawrence but he may not be. He may be chosen merely because he is a media hero. The effects of television upon advocates' performances in the United States of America can be seen. The US advocate—perhaps this was true before television but it is even more true now—has a flashy suit, a flashy smile, has probably been to an orthodontist to have his teeth straightened and has great charm——

What about stiff collars?

I shall come to them in a moment. The US advocate has a flashy presence and a flashy argument and that might not be good for justice.

Yes, stiff collars are important. The reason why barristers dress up in silly clothes with wigs, stiff collars, bands and black gowns is so that they all look more alike. Instead of concentrating upon the personality of the advocate one tends to concentrate upon the personality of the defendant—the victim and not the messenger. If one does away with wigs and collars, people will identify the advocate more easily and he will become more of a media idol. Our justice would not be as centred upon the accused as it is in the British courts at present.

My hon. and learned Friend's arguments are powerful and interesting. How does he react to the present reporting on the BBC news at 9 o'clock or the ITV news at 10 o'clock, when people describe the very things that he denigrates television for showing, because he says that it highlights them, such as people's style of dress and so forth? Also how does he view artists' impressions, which take away people's right to judge for themselves what is going on in the courtroom. Instead they are fed the views of reporters on the news.

I am dealing with the effects of television upon participants in a trial and not its effects upon the public. The public may see a sketch of counsel in court but that does not affect the jury man. However the jury would be affected if the public were to see moving pictures of the way in which witnesses behave, because friends and relatives would then gather round and tell them their views. There is a difference.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Cleethorpes, the matinee idol, who I notice is no longer in the Chamber—perhaps he has gone off to perform yet again——

He is a star.

Yes, he has gone to star in some other medium. He might make it more difficult for someone like me to get a look in, in the courts of law where I have to practice. I see that he is over at the other end of the Chamber, and that makes my point. My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Cleethorpes is doubtless sitting there because of his knowledge of how television operates in this place. He realises that one particular camera over there, angled across the Chamber, captures him at his best, whereas here, beside me, the cameras are at the wrong angle and catch him full frontal. That is precisely what someone who wants to perform well on television will have in mind. The advocate may want to stand here on the other side of the red line—[HON. MEMBERS: "Out of order."]—rather than here on this side, and that would be out of order. I am talking about that sort of distraction. Advocates, juries and witnesses must consider the effects of television upon the defendant.

The defendant may think that the world is looking at him and if the cameras are there, it will be because it is an interesting trial and much of the world may well be looking at him. He will be stigmatised as never before because millions of people will see him and be able to identify him. Every television viewer and jury man arguing for or against his case will have the defendant's face in his mind and the arguments will continue long after the case is over.

In our criminal courts 50 per cent. of those who plead not guilty are acquitted. They are found to be innocent according to our system. They should be expunged from the record. Can we imagine the stigma caused by a false accusation, which was found to be false, when the face of the innocent man who was wrongly accused was seared into the memory of millions of people? People would continue after the case to dispute whether the acquittal was justified.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston referred to John Bodkin Adams. How many people would have ignored Adams in the street five, 10, 20 or 30 years after his case if the case had been televised? People in Eastbourne would not have done that, although people in Crawley might have. People in Sussex and elsewhere in Britain would have recognised him. The courts found Adams innocent, but if the proceedings had been televised, his life would have been destroyed. Everyone who had seen the televised proceedings would have pointed a finger at him. People would have said that he was wrongly acquitted because of the excellence of his counsel or because the prosecution evidence was not good enough or because a prosecution witness lied. They would think that he was guilty and had murdered many people. What kind of justice is there in a society in which that can happen? That will happen if there are cameras in our criminal courts.

Is my hon. and learned Friend aware that our late and greatly lamented friend Ian Gow, the former hon. Member for Eastbourne, was regularly mistaken for Dr. Bodkin Adams even though that trial was not televised? Is he also aware that although Dr. Adams used to send our late friend £5 at every general election for the Tory party fighting fund, which used to cause our late friend great embarrassment?

I did not know John Bodkin Adams, but I did know our great and revered friend. Dr. John Bodkin Adams would have had to have been a very great man to match up to the calibre of Ian Gow.

If a defendant in a criminal trial is subjected to public attention in the way that I have described, would that be justice? Would it give justice a chance? Should it be weighed equally in the scales with the benefit of improving the interest and understanding of our legal system?

The defendant does not exist for the legal system—the legal system exists for the defendant and to ensure that there is a fair trial. Television would not necessarily make trials fair or honour reputations after a trial. The Bill would allow a pilot scheme and research, but that pilot scheme and research would reveal that it would be well nigh impossible for rules of court or any other rules to keep adequate control over the way in which the televised material is broadcast.

A momentary look of disbelief on a judge's face might be broadcast later on the "Nine O'clock News" or "News at 10". No one could prevent that. From day to day there are inadvertent outbursts of inadmissible evidence in our criminal courts. The judge must decide whether the trial should continue or to stop it and so waste the court's time and the hundreds of thousands of pounds that the case has cost. The judge can decide that there was simply a moment's inadvertence which during the course of the trial will be forgotten. However, if that moment is enshrined on television and the point is seared into the minds of the jury men who may watch the broadcast later that evening—and if the moment is recorded on video and is seen on many occasions—how can proper control be exercised over such inadvertence? What expense, catastrophes and calamities might occur if trials are stopped and restarted, involving the agonies for witnesses and defendants simply because of inadvertent televising over which no one has control?

Any control would be imperfect and expensive—[Interruption.] I noticed that the Chamber is filling up although I suspect that that is happening not through interest in this Bill or support for it, but for other reasons.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston said that rules could be made to ensure that there is no visual coverage of the jury, of witnesses, the accused, documents, advocates' benches or of contacts between lawyers and clients. If those existed, no one would want to watch a programme about that case and the television companies would have wasted their money. The television companies want those visual contacts to be displayed on television screens and that is why there is pressure for the Bill to introduce, even by the thin end of the wedge or the beginning of the slippery slope, television intrusion into court proceedings.

If there are television cameras in courts might people conclude that some advocates are too long-winded?

That was a very unkind cut. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will have a long time to deploy his arguments. The long windedness of counsel is unlikely to be covered by television because that would make the programme too boring. However, we are debating a subject about which many points must be made. If the hon. Gentleman does not want me to make those points, my speech will be shorter. However, those points must be made and considered and if that takes a little time, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me. If I appear to stray outside the scope of the Bill, no doubt Mr. Speaker will stop me.

Perhaps my hon. and learned Friend's points will increase support for the Bill. If we argue that television may influence justice, is that an argument for excluding barristers who occasionally make mistakes which can affect the results of a court case? We must decide whether television has a worse impact than gossip, newspaper reporting or other forms of discussion. That is the crucial test and we will not know until we try it.

I have already dealt with the argument about trying it. That is the thin end of the wedge as trying it always leads in the end—as it has in this place—to permanence. My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham suggests that it would be better if the whole trial were televised so that everyone could see the trial from beginning to end. However, that is not in prospect. What is in prospect is that just the sexy parts of the trial would be encapsulated in the media and used repeatedly in evening television broadcasts. That will not satisfy my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham, because justice is no more likely to be done with such excerpts than it is likely to be done with a full television performance or with snapshot excerpts, as happens at the moment.

The time is approaching 11 o'clock, and I am about to refer to another point. I do not know whether you would consider that, if I continue for half a minute longer without referring to that subject, if would be an appropriate stage for you to take over, Mr. Speaker. However, I am flattered by the attention. That is another example of proof positive——

(by private notice): To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, if he will make a statement on the latest developments in the Gulf conflict.

As the House knows, last night a Soviet spokesman announced a further set of proposals about ending the conflict in the Gulf.

We have not yet received from the Soviet Government the full text of those proposals. When we do, we will analyse them and consult carefully and urgently with the Governments of other countries whose forces are participating in the coalition alongside our forces.

Such details as were given in last night's announcement in Moscow indicate that those proposals are an improvement on those that had previously been put forward by the Societ Union. We welcome that. But they still contain serious deficiencies. They fall significantly short of full and unconditional implementation of the relevant Security Council resolutions.

It is not yet clear whether Iraq has accepted the Soviet proposals, even as they currently stand.

I thank the Minister for that reply. I note that, no matter how pessimistic we may have been last night, there may be some grounds for qualified optimism. The hon. and learned Gentleman will agree that the cornerstone of our policy must continue to be the cessation of hostilities by an unequivocal commitment to withdraw from Kuwait, backed by immediate concrete steps leading to full compliance with the United Nations Security Council resolution.

Does the hon. and learned Gentleman recognise that the statement requires close and continuing study not only of the details as he receives them but of the talks in Moscow today? Does he accept that there are gaps where the United Nations commitments should be? That may be due to the insertion of some Iraqi points in the list. Is the hon. and learned Gentleman in a position to confirm which of those points may be attributable to the Iraqi Government?

Finally, can the hon. and learned Gentleman shed any light on the change of step that seemed to occur between Saddam Hussein's broadcast yesterday and Tariq Aziz's meeting in Moscow last night? Who is now determining Iraqi policy in this matter?

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the clear way in which he has set out his own position. I find myself in very substantial agreement with everything that he said. We have not, as I said, had a full text of the proposals or a full read-out of how the proposals exactly came to be constructed. Therefore, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I cannot tell him the extent to which the proposals emanate from the Soviet Union or have been adjusted by the Iraqi representative.

As to whether Tariq Aziz or President Saddam Hussein speaks for Iraq, I frankly do not know, but the fact that there is a different tone and emphasis to what they appear to be saying makes all of us extremely cautious.

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that everyone in the House and outside hopes that the talks and other measures that are being taken may lead to our not having to have a ground war? Would not it be essential that, in any agreement that is reached, it must be clear that Iraqi troops must withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait and not be in a position later on to attack it again? Does it not seem, at least from an initial reading, that the so-called terms fall short of that and, in particular, show no sign of Iraq's having abandoned its claim to Kuwait in the future?

My right hon. Friend makes a number of important points. He will of course know well that resolution 678 of the Security Council calls for complete, immediate and unconditional withdrawal by Iraq from Kuwait. He will know also that that resolution provides for the restoration of peace and security in the region. Those objectives remain the objectives of the coalition, and we shall not derogate from them.

Should not we now be adopting a twin-track approach, in which we vigorously pursue the possibility of a peaceful solution that is consistent with the United Nations resolutions, while maintaining military pressure? Does the Minister agree that such a peace is likely to be durable only if Iraq acknowledges the legitimacy of the Government of Kuwait and, indeed, the legitimacy of the borders of that country? Further, will not it also be an important part of any such peace that the United Nations embargo on arms sales to Iraq is maintained and even strengthened?

Once again, I have considerable sympathy with the remarks of the hon. and learned Gentleman. On military pressure, the answer is, yes indeed: military pressure must be maintained until there has been a complete and unequivocal compliance with the relevant Security Council resolutions. The hon. and learned Gentleman made specific reference to the restoration of the legitimate Government of Kuwait. He will of course know that that is one of the important elements within resolution 678 and remains the objective of the coalition countries.

From what my hon. and learned Friend has gleaned so far, what evidence is there that a durable arms control regime is to be put in to place and effective monitoring established? Is not it absolutely crucial that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities be removed and not replaced? Can he reassure the House as to the Soviet Union's role? It has been Iraq's most consistent ally. We have the memory of Nasser and Suez. We should not wish to see a repetition of anything like that—a job half done.

My hon. Friend may recall that, in yesterday's debate, I spoke of a number of important issues that would have to be tackled when this conflict came to an end. One was the ways in which the international community could introduce a more effective arms control regime within the area. That remains a very important issue, of which we will not lose sight.

Is the Minister aware that the proposals emerge not from Tehran but from Moscow? The Soviet Union has supported the United Nations resolutions from the beginning. It is a permanent member of the Security Council and it has an interest in the area due to its geographical position—the fact that it is so near. Really, it is necessary for the proposals to be taken very seriously. It would be quite wrong for them to be rejected out of hand.

I am glad that the Minister has said today that further thought would be given to the matter, because the hopes of the world rest on it—for example, the lives of many British troops, the families here, the Saudis and the Iraqis. Also, there is no prospect of peace and stability in the middle east if the United States sees this matter, as President Bush continually says, as some way of avenging his defeat in Vietnam.

No.

Yes——

Order. This is continuing the debate that we had yesterday. Please put questions to the Minister of State.

I appreciate that, Mr. Speaker, but I speak for millions of people around the world, including the World Council of Churches.

I know, but the right hon. Gentleman fully appreciates that this is a private Member's day and that we cannot enlarge upon these matters today.

I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to put the point that there are millions of people in the world whose hopes rest on a successful conclusion of this matter without mass bloodshed. Will the Government keep that point in mind?

Of course we take the proposals seriously. I understand the right hon. Gentleman's views on this matter, but, as I have already said, we have not yet had a full text of the proposals and nor do we know whether additional proposals may be attached to those that have already appeared in the press. Moreover, we have not yet had the opportunity fully to consult our coalition partners and, of course, the Arab states within the coalition. For that reason, it is not possible for me to go beyond what I have already said, save to stress the fact that we treat these matters extremely seriously, but that our objective is to ensure full and unconditional compliance with the relevant Security Council resolutions.

I welcome my hon. and learned Friend's assurance that there will be maximum consultation with our Arab coalition partners before any decision is made. Is he satisfied with the proposals for the early release of prisoners of war? He knows how sensitive that subject is on the Conservative Benches. Finally, will he please explain why the world should lift economic sanctions from Iraq before Iraq has withdrawn all its soldiers from Kuwait?

My hon. Friend stresses the need for maximum consultation, especially with the Arab countries within the coalition. I can give him the assurance that he seeks. I regard it as very important that there should be the maximum consultation with the Arab countries within the coalition. My hon. Friend will recall that I specifically addressed the question of prisoners of war yesterday, when I stressed the high importance that we attach to an immediate release of the allied prisoners of war and the third-party detainees who are now held in Kuwait. Those are the things that I said yesterday and they therefore need no repetition today.

I welcome the Government's prudent and cautious approach, but does the Minister recognise that regional peace and security is closely linked to total withdrawal, as is implied in the 12 resolutions of the United Nations, and that it would be difficult to understand any decision to allow back into Iraq all the heavy equipment and tanks before Iraq has signed up to concrete measures to ensure that it cannot again become a power which threatens nuclear weapons, long-range missiles directed at regional capitals, and an overwhelming regional military force?

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for expressing his anxiety so clearly. I am sure that he found considerable support in the House.

While I appreciate that the decision on these matters must rest predominantly with our American allies who have contributed most of the power, in such advice as we convey to the United States, will my hon. and learned Friend bear in mind Sir Winston Churchill's verdict on Suez:

"I don't know if I would have dared to start, but I would never have dared to stop"?

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his advice on this matter.

While there are defects and omissions in the Soviet proposals, the Minister is surely right in saying that the Government will give serious consideration to what is clearly a significant advance. However, can he tell the House something more about the status of the proposals? Are we being told that, despite the presence of the Iraqi Foreign Minister in Moscow yesterday, the proposals have not yet been wholly endorsed by the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein?

The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point. We are uncertain about the status of the proposals. To start with, we have not had a full text and most certainly we do not know what the considered response of the Iraqis might be to the proposals. We do not know, for example, whether Tariq Aziz's position is accepted by his President, a point that I made to the right hon. Gentleman's Front-Bench colleague, the hon. Member for Clackmannan (Mr. O'Neill).

I thank my hon. and learned Friend for his meticulous and balanced monitoring of these complex matters. Will he confirm that, while we are waiting for those clarifications, there is no question of coalition or British forces being in any way endangered and that vigilance will be maintained in military terms? Does he agree that, if one reads closely the text of yesterday's speech by Tariq Aziz, one sees more and more evidence of a split in the Iraqi leadership?

The answer to the first part of my hon. Friend's question is that the lives of our soldiers and service men, and of the other service men within the coalition, remain our paramount consideration. There is no question of our relaxing our vigilance. Indeed, hostilities are continuing because there is no reason at the moment why they should be discontinued.

Does the Minister accept that, although the Government are of course entitled to ask for clarification and explanation, there would be a grave danger in following the initially negative line that is coming from Washington? Does the Minister further accept that many of us who have strongly supported the position of the United Nations are extremely anxious to seize on any diplomatic opportunity to settle the conflict without a ground offensive? Does he also accept that the correct body to consider the proposals is the Security Council of the United Nations, under the auspices of which these matters are being pursued? Finally, will he assure us that there will be no precipitate extension of the ground conflict until the diplomatic initiative has been allowed to run its course?

The hon. Gentleman must determine his priorities. He is implying that the avoidance of a land campaign is his priority. That is not the priority of the coalition countries. Our priority is to ensure full and unconditional compliance with Security Council resolutions. If Iraq is not willing to do that, there will be a land campaign.

Will my hon. and learned Friend continue to view these talks with meticulous care, as suggested by another hon. Member, but will he also view them with a healthy dose of scepticism? Is he aware that it is very much in Saddam Hussein's interests to ensure that the talks are as protracted and difficult as they possibly can be? While the talks are continuing, will my hon. and learned Friend confirm that it is the intention of the allied forces to pursue with great vigour the preparation of the battlefield?

My hon. Friend is wholly right. We treat Saddam Hussein with great caution and great scepticism. As I told the House yesterday, it is impossible to forget that right up to the eve of 2 August 1990 Saddam Hussein was assuring Arab countries that he had no intention of invading Kuwait. He lied.

Of course, we shall all rejoice if it is possible to end the conflict without the carnage that will result from a full-scale land war, but what is the Minister's view of the chances of a lasting peace if Saddam Hussein remains in power and with power? Is it not significant that the reports that we have received about the Soviet proposal make no mention of compensating the Kuwaitis, who are, after all, the greatest sufferers from this wicked advance? There is no mention of Saddam Hussein leaving behind any of his weaponry, which he could use again, and no mention of dealing with the stocks of chemical and biological weapons which he undoubtedly has, which he has threatened to use and which he could use again if he decided to make another assault.

The hon. and learned Gentleman has expressed his anxieties clearly, and I am grateful to him for doing so. He will recall that I touched yesterday on the issue of the status of Saddam Hussein, when I said that we would not grieve if Saddam Hussein were persuaded to step aside or otherwise ceased to be the leader of Iraq, but it is not a war objective to displace him. It is not our intent to change the Government of Iraq, for that is a matter for the people of Iraq.

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that one element that appears to be absent from the proposals emanating from Moscow is the idea of compensation for the damage to lives and property suffered by Kuwait and most of the rest of the world? Does he further agree that, without such an element, no peace proposal would be acceptable?

I am once again grateful to an hon. Gentleman for so clearly articulating his concern on matters that are of great importance.

If the Iraqi leadership is prepared to agree to a full and unconditional withdrawal, on a fixed timetable, starting on the second day of the ceasefire—the first three of the eight points—that is a tremendously important development. The Minister said that it is not a Government priority to avoid a land campaign, but he must appreciate that, even on the best case scenario, thousands of service men will be killed if we embark on that campaign. Is it not clear that the world will never forgive President Bush if he kills this peace process by initiating a huge land offensive?

I was talking not about priorities but about paramount considerations. I told the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond), who speaks for the Scottish National party on this matter, that he was making the avoidance of the land campaign his paramount consideration, but that the achievement of a full and unconditional implementation of the Security Council resolutions was the paramount consideration of the coalition countries. If it is necessary to wage a land campaign to achieve that, we shall do so.

Further to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath (Mr. Townsend) said about prisoners of war, will my hon. and learned Friend bear in mind the fact that there are western prisoners in Iraq other than prisoners of war, who are often held on trumped-up charges and for long periods? I am thinking particularly of Ian Richter, our citizen, who is held in Iraq in appalling conditions.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, for reminding the House of Mr. Richter, whose position in Iraq causes us considerable concern.

We all welcome the possibility of peace and believe that this option should be fully explored, but did the Minister hear, as I expect most of us did yesterday, the reports that the Iraqis may have passed the decision on use of chemical weaponry to their battlefield commanders? Will he take this opportunity, while we are discussing peace options, to make it clear to the Iraqis that any use of chemical weaponry against our troops or any other targets during such discussions will be seen as a deliberate and calculate attempt to sabotage them?

It would indeed be so seen. It would be a monstrous thing to do. It would be very much against the interests of Iraq to do so.

Does my hon. and learned Friend see any consistency between these proposals and the speech yesterday afternoon by Saddam Hussein? What is the status of the Soviet proposals? Do these proposals represent an improvement as far as this country is concerned, particularly on prisoners of war? Is that an improvement brought about by representations by our Government? Have the Government made it clear to the Soviet as well as to the Iraqi Government that we regard it as essential that all resolutions of the United Nations should be complied with?

It is difficult to say that there is consistency between the statement made by Saddam Hussein and the apparent position taken up by Tariq Aziz. Much that is done within Iraq is irrational; that being so, I do not always expect to find consistency. My hon. and learned Friend is making an important point when he says that, because of this inconsistency, we should treat the present position with caution.

On the more substantive part of my hon. Friend's question, this is a step forward and a step beyond what has previously been suggested either by the Soviet Government or the Iraqis. For the reasons that I have already set out to the House, it falls short of a full and unconditional acceptance of the Security Council resolutions, and that remains our objective.

Will the Minister assure the House that he does not for one minute suggest that all aspects of all the Security Council resolutions have equal value? Will he assure us that, while he may be prepared to countenance a land war to liberate Kuwait, insistence on compliance with every dot and comma of all the resolutions is out of any balance when weighed against the scale of slaughter that would follow such a battle? In every conflict, there has to be compromise. We weigh the lives of our service personnel in the balance. While they may be prepared to die to liberate Kuwait, they might not feel the same way about every dot and comma of every United Nations resolution. That would not have the support of public opinion either.

The hon. Gentleman will have heard me say from time to time that our objective is to ensure compliance with all relevant Security Council resolutions. The hon. Gentleman has a point here. If he reads the resolutions, he will find that a number of the provisions in them do not impose obligations on Iraq. They empower the coalition countries to do this and that. Therefore, we have to be sure that we are focusing only on the relevant terms.

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that, in view of the approaching weather difficulties in the Gulf, any change that we may introduce should be dealt with with great speed and that we should treat these proposals not only with scepticism but with determination not to allow Saddam Hussein to inject an element of delay?

There must be no delay.

Do not the Iraqi concessions to the Soviets show that the resolve and determination of the allies and the coalition forces is paying off? Would not a liberated Kuwait be entitled to retain all the military equipment that belongs to Iraq but is in place on Kuwaiti territory and to the return of all the billions of pounds' worth of confiscated assets? Is it not entitled to be assured that the minefields that the Iraqis have laid are cleared and to know that there will be peace and security in the region? Do not we want statements from Saddam Hussein rather than from a sidekick whom he sends to Moscow?

Restoration of peace and security to the region is an element of resolution 678 and therefore is one of our objectives. Yes, the progress that has been shown by the Iraqis, albeit wholly insufficient thus far, shows the wisdom of the policy that has been adopted by the coalition.

As my hon. and learned Friend has said, resolution 678 emphasises peace and security in the region. Does he agree that we went in not only to ensure that Saddam Hussein got out of Kuwait but to protect Saudi Arabia, which has been subject to a rain of missiles and Scuds, as has Israel? Therefore, is not it imperative that we make certain that we pursue our determined objectives in line with the resolutions to ensure that Saddam Hussein and his brutal dictatorship achieve nothing out of this dreadful venture?

The security of Israel and of Saudi Arabia are major considerations for the House and for the coalition. They are subsumed within resolution 678, which calls for the restoration of peace and security in the region.

Is the Minister aware that, for ordinary people, not familiar with the details of Security Council resolutions, the Russian initiative represents the last opportunity to avoid the killing? Does he accept that the great fear, not least of the families of British service men in the Gulf, is that, paradoxically, an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait does not suit the Americans now because the military machine has achieved a momentum of its own, they are bent on removing Saddam Hussein and dismembering his military machine and they will not be baulked? Does he agree that, if Paris was worth a mass, the peaceful liberation of Kuwait is worth negotiating on the fine print of Security Council resolutions?

We are talking not about fine print but about issues of major importance, such as a full and unconditional compliance with relevant Security Council resolutions. When Saddam Hussein accepts that fact, the killing will stop.

My hon. and learned Friend will be aware that Ramadan begins on 16 March. May not the confused words coming from Iraq merely be an effort to delay the allied effort until that crucial date? Is it not therefore the more important that the allied effort continues unrelenting?

If the Iraqi Government suppose that they can spin this matter out, they are wrong.

The Minister is perfectly right to read the mood of the House in relation to resolution 678 and peace and security in the region. It is important for the House to consider the future after the liberation of Kuwait. How does that square with point four of the Soviet plan, that two thirds of the Iraqi troops should withdraw and that economic sanctions should then be lifted? If that were the case, would not we see an almighty arms race in the middle east that would further destabilise the area, rather than lead to peace and security?

The hon. Gentleman has put an important point clearly. I have made it plain that we judge these proposals as falling short significantly of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Can my hon. and learned Friend go further than he did in answer to the most important question about chemical weapons? Has he seen the report in The Times today that chemical weapons have been issued widely and extensively to Iraqi forces? Without breaching security, can he confirm whether that is so? If it is so, does he think that that from President Saddam is the language of war, not of peace?

We have always recognised that Saddam Hussein possesses chemical weapons and, judging from his track record, he may well use them. To do so would be a breach of the 1925 convention. It would be a gross crime and it would be contrary to morality and the interests of Iraq.

On the subject of consistency, will the Minister confirm that, on 15 January, the Prime Minister said in a speech that if the Iraqi troops went back beyond the Kuwaiti border, they would not be attacked? Can he confirm that that is still the case and that it is part of the peace treaty that has been announced today? Or is it the case that the Government, in their pathetic responses at all times during this war, must wait for the Americans, and Bush in particular who is leading this American-led mercenary war, as they do not have the guts to respond until the people in America tell them what to do?

The hon. Gentleman will remember that we debated precisely this issue yesterday. Our position has been consistent throughout—that our war objectives are to ensure a complete and unconditional compliance with relevant Security Council resolutions.

While any positive sign of change from Baghdad is to be welcomed, is it not clear that the Iraqi regime is speaking with two distinct and different voices at this time? Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that there is no justification whatever for changing the coalition strategy before we have incontrovertible evidence that all the United Nations resolutions are being implemented in full by Iraq?

I agree with both elements of my hon. Friend's question.

Will the Minister take this opportunity of putting on record the thanks of many people for the efforts of President Gorbachev and the Soviet Foreign Ministry in at least attempting to keep the hope of peace alive when there has been markedly less effort by the British and United States Governments in pursuing a peaceful solution to the conflict?

Will the Minister tell us what are the war aims of the British and American Governments? Do they intend to move the troops on into Iraq? Do they intend to maintain a permanent base within that region? Are they interested in getting peace and grasping an opportunity that is available to us now or do they think that the land war has a momentum of its own? Does the Minister expect the carnage to start this weekend or does he intend to spend the weekend working for a peaceful solution to this awful conflict before any more lives are lost?

I invite the hon. Gentleman to read what I said yesterday in the House about war aims. I dealt precisely with the questions that he has been good enough to put to me now. On the first part of his question, the activities of the Soviet Government have given Saddam Hussein yet another opportunity to comply fully and absolutely with Security Council resolutions. We are pleased and grateful that such an opportunity should have been presented.

Should not we remember the Low cartoon in the Evening Standard in 1936, which showed the whole of the League of Nations cowering in a corner in front of Hitler, and what followed three years after that? Is not it clear that Saddam Hussein is morally wrong, a military loser and internationally required to do the opposite of what he said in his broadcast yesterday? While listening to what the Russians and others have to say, let us remember what the man himself said only yesterday.

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is important to remember the kind of man with whom we are dealing. He uses war as an instrument of policy. He is by instinct and by practice a killer.

Which of the eight points of the peace plan are, in the words of the Prime Minister, "not good enough"? The Prime Minister said that despite the fact that, seemingly, he had not seen the text of the proposals. If the text is available, will there be a chance for a statement to be made in the House before we adjourn for the weekend?

As I have already said, we have not had a full text of the proposals. Nor have we had an opportunity fully to consult all our coalition partners, including the Arab states. That being so, it is inappropriate for me to seek to expand on what I have already said.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Today, British Steel announced the closure of the Ravenscraig blast furnace and 1,000 redundancies, while a Select Committee of the House is studying the matter and, apparently, preparing a report which is highly critical of British Steel's management. Does not that amount to a contempt of that Committee and of the House? Are we not entitled to a statement today from the Secretary of State for Scotland to explain what he will do about these acts of industrial vandalism and the scorched earth policy that British Steel is pursuing in Scotland?

I am sure that what the hon. Gentleman has said will have been heard by the Leader of the House, who is present. I do not know anything about that matter.

With these weighty, serious and momentous matters of the Gulf weighing with us, it may sound irrelevant to continue the debate on which we are engaged, but the show must go on and so must my speech, although I hope for not much longer.

I was dealing with the point about the exercise of tight control over the experiments. Great reliance cannot be put on judges spending time controlling television in their courts. Judges must make sure that justice is done in the case before them. If it is a serious criminal case which is attracting public attention, that is all the more reason why the judge should concentrate all his attention on the process of the court and the debate whether the accused is guilty or innocent. He is likely to say, "It is not my job to exercise control over television companies. My job is to conduct the trial, which is not a public entertainment. The most sensible path that I can follow is to have no truck with it. I exclude television." Where would the television company be in that situation?

Let us suppose that the judge allowed television in and there came a point in the trial when he found it necessary to exclude television. Would trials be held up while television companies made representations, in open court and perhaps with counsel, on the reasons why they should not be excluded? When we last discussed anything like this Bill the same question arose. In debating the Contempt of Court Act 1981, as it now is, we discussed the way in which, under section 4, the judge can exclude the press at an appropriate moment.

That causes an enormous amount of ill feeling among media representatives, who feel that they have a right to be there and that the public should know what is going on behind closed doors. Representations are made, publicly and privately, and it is all a waste of time. The amount of time wasted would be even greater if the television companies were for ever pressing not to be excluded from a court of law because the judge was exercising control.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmore Port and Neston argues, on clause 2 and research into the jury system, that the system is so important a part of our legal process that we should examine it with care to see whether it is efficient, can be improved and whether we can present our arguments better. He says that everyone should be able to become acquainted with the way in which our system works, that people should be educated in the subject, that such closeness will make the public heart grow fonder and increase public confidence in the jury system and that opening up juries to the scrutiny of the public will make juries more accountable to the community.

Those are desirable aims, but there are two main flaws in the argument. First, jury research would not necessarily achieve those ends and, secondly, more harm than good might be done to the system. Consider, first, public confidence. Juries are not necessarily rational bodies. The law says, for example, "You must convict if you are satisfied that the accused committed the crime." But a jury may say, "Why should we convict this man? We think that he has suffered enough. We do not agree with this law" or, "We do not think that his breach of the law in the circumstances is important enough for him to run the risk of prison."

I am not sure that it is desirable for the jury to be made into a more rational and more efficient machine, because, at the end of the day, the jury protects the individual accused against the oppression of the system. However benign, tolerant and modern the system may be, at the end of the day what cushions the system and its machinery from the impact on the individual accused is the jury. Although it is irrational, we would gain nothing by inquiring into its irrationality.

Every case is different, every crime is committed in different circumstances, at different times, at different places, with different effects and with different defendants manifesting different characteristics. I am not sure that it would be sensible to generalise research in an area which is so manifestly disparate and diverse.

What harm can be done by such research? I do not want the confidentiality of the jury room broken into. Harm would be done. I do not want juries to be questioned by journalists and others about their decisions. Although that is not suggested, it would not be long before it happened, and once the principle of not questioning jury men was broken down, such questioning would be done by professors, lecturers at university and others. I do not want jurors to refuse to do jury service because they are terrified of being questioned about their decisions or because they fear having to give reasons for their decisions.

I do not want the pressure on the jury man to be greater because of his fear that he might be questioned. Sitting there in the jury box, he should not have to think, "I may be asked afterwards by a professor, a journalist, a lecturer or some other intelligent person why I made my decision, and I may not be sure why I made it. I am just a jury man and it is my feeling. I have given my response and I believe that my decision is right, having arrived at it in that way."

I do not see how control over research or the way in which a researcher would operate can be easy. I do not believe that public confidence in the jury system would grow with research, and that is the rub. Those who do not want the jury system to endure want this research. When my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston says, "Let us lift the veil on the jury system," he really means something else.

Nonsense.

Many of his supporters actually mean, "Let us reveal to the public sight how inadequate, inefficient, wrong and irrational is our jury system. We shall be so shocked by what we find that the system will collapse."

Does my hon. and learned Friend know the position of the Bar in this matter? Does the Bar want to continue its support of jury trials, even if research under the Bill shows that a jury trial is a silly way to decide things, or does it want to continue jury trials only for a short time, until research shows the position one way or another? Alternatively, does he believe that the Bar is signalling to the House that it would like to see the end of jury trials?

I am not the Bar, even though I am the chairman of the all-party joint parliamentary committee of barristers. I believe that there is a division of opinion at the Bar on this issue. Those who advocate and have been supporting, even encouraging, my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston to pilot the Bill—I hope that Mr. Caplan will not object to my saying this—have said clearly that they want the jury system to remain. I do not believe that the system would necessarily remain if we conducted research into the intricate ways in which the jury system works and that would be a deplorable development for the British system of justice.

Many people do not want the jury system to remain. I particularly recall the attempts made in the Roskill report to get rid of the system for long fraud trials. If the system went, judges would judge trials. Many people say, "If we had real judges with real experience, real common sense and real knowledge and application of the law trying criminal trials, fewer of the guilty would get off."

The danger is that the judges are not always right. After many years of service in our courts, I would rather have a jury than judges deciding criminal trials. The jury is the protector of the person who is falsely accused. The jury protects the civil liberties and freedoms of the individual in a way that even our judges cannot do. I do not want anything to happen that threatens the existence of the jury trial. I say frankly and openly that those who would pursue research of the jury system would be precisely, perhaps unintentionally, undermining the jury system.

We are told that the United States and other countries use television and research, and have welcomed both. I am not sure that it is possible to make comparisons in this regard, but it is worth pointing out that some of those countries possess entirely different legal systems and rules. It is possible that, in the case of an inquisitorial system that is bent on discovering the whole truth, rather than an accusatorial system such as ours, there is less objection to the exerting of outside influence on criminal trials. That does not apply to our accusatorial system.

In our criminal courts, an allegation must be proved, or the prosecution fails. Our system discovers the truth, but it does not necessarily discover all of it. Under it, rules of evidence protect the accused in a way in which more open systems do not. Perhaps it is time to change our system. I could go on for hours about the pros and cons; what I know is that we should not be impelled to change it by introducing either television or intrusive research. The system cannot be changed overnight: a decade of work would be needed. The effects of television and research might be very different in an accusatorial system, given the influence that it might have on the participants in a trial, especially the jury. The comparison can best be made with the United States. I do not want to offend any of my hundreds of American friends, many of whom are attorneys, but I would not wish to exchange our system for theirs.

Of course, my observations do not apply to many civil cases. America has jury trials in civil cases; we do not. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston may say that I have made quite a good case for the exclusion of television and research from criminal trials, but that television could prove useful and educational in the civil or appeal courts. I agree: if none of my criticisms and objections apply, there is certainly no reason to oppose such a move. Let us be realistic, however. How much public appeal would there be in televising legal arguments in the Court of Appeal or the House of Lords about, for instance, the interpretation of taxation subclauses in financial legislation? How enraptured would the public be by the sight of the Lord Chief Justice considering to what extent the word "wilfully" implies malice?

Those are not the kind of trials to which the television companies would want to commit massive financial investment. What they want are precisely the kind of trials that my hon. Friend wishes to exclude.

These seem strange arguments, coming from a man who makes his living by the law. My hon. and learned Friend is saying, essentially, that evidence ought to be excluded; he is not allowing for the same trial of evidence that he seeks for the clients whom he represents in the courtroom.

In regard to jury research, is my hon. and learned Friend saying that he believes that our jury system is so perfect that it is incapable of improvement, or is he saying that, although it may be capable of improvement, he does not wish to know its shortcomings, because he would not want to improve it even if he did know them?

I think that it would be dangerous to try to improve the jury system. To examine the working of the system, and to try to make it more efficient and rational, is actually to destroy the essence of that system, which is not necessarily either efficient or rational.

I know that my hon. Friend is a magistrate and has probably presided over criminal trials for many years, but criminal trials at that level are different from those that involve juries. I am not taken in by juries—I do not consider the jury system perfect—but I feel that if we tamper with it too much, there will be pressure for its removal. That would be the most retrograde step that we could possibly take if we want to ensure that justice is done in our criminal trials.

rose—

I must finish my speech: I do not want to stop others from speaking.

Who wants the Bill? Where is the pressure for it? Until it was presented. and until I read the arguments of the Bar Council, I observed no agitation in favour of television—or even research into the working of juries, except on the part of a handful of academics. I may be accused of being an old reactionary backwoodsman for resisting this great advance, although I do not see myself as such, but I am astonished that my own trade union, the Bar Council, should push for it.

This old institution of our courts and legal system, and protector of the interests of the Bar, seems suddenly to want to be modern. It is mutton dressed as lamb: it wants to change its image, like a trendy vicar. I am not sure that much is achieved by trendy vicars, women who dress up as lamb when they are really mutton and others who try too hard to be modern when they are part of an established tradition—pillars of the community, perhaps rather old-fashioned—except incredulity among many of their supporters, such as myself.

Perhaps I am letting my trade union down; perhaps I ought to be for the Bill. It would undoubtedly be very good for the Bar: there would be a great deal of publicity, and many people would make themselves famous overnight. It would be excellent for business—which means that much more money might go into the pockets of the barristers.

Yes: let us have the Bill. It will be good for the lawyers. That ought to kill it.

First, let me declare an interest, as a solicitor and assistant recorder.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Mr. Woodcock) on his excellent introduction of the Bill. He spoke capably and persuasively. I shall not speak for too long, because I know that others wish to speak as well.

It is an impressive experience to look around the Chamber on a Friday and see so many hon. Members who are keeping an open mind and who are here to listen to the arguments. It is to the many who are still uncertain about which view to take that I address my speech and I hope very much that they will agree that this modest measure should be given its Second Reading today and should proceed further.

The Bill is modest. It aims to establish a pilot project on important issues that must be discussed. If it is given a Second Reading, it will not mean that television will be in the courts. We want to proceed gently and gingerly with a pilot project. If, when the evidence is available—this point was made tellingly by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston—we decide that it is right to proceed no further, we are at liberty to take that decision. It is not an easy subject and differing views are held on it. Members of the Bar Council and of the Bar are not unanimous.

Initially, I was hostile to televising the House, because I thought that it would trivialise and lower the quality of everything we do and that right-thinking people outside would not thank us for agreeing to it. I believed that the great orators among us would become stage stars, while the duller ones such as myself would sink into further obscurity and that it would be biased against the ordinary dull chap.

I was wrong to vote against televising the House, but it has taken me some months to reach that conclusion. I held the natural fears that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) expressed, but they were unfounded. Television has enhanced our reputation in the outside world and has helped to educate people about how Parliament works. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston said, 70 per cent. of British people get most of their information from the television.

My hon. Friend said that televising the House had educated the public. Does he think that, because they see what goes on in the Chamber, they know more about the arcane and extraordinary procedures by which this place works?

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. I do not know more whether the public know much more about the procedures of this place than my hon. Friend or I. It is helpful and good in a democracy for people to form a view on national issues such as the Gulf crisis. Without television, they might not form a view.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton argued that televising the courts is unnecessary because they are open to the public. Televising the House has enabled millions of people to see Parliament at work—an opportunity which they would not have but for television. They cannot afford Hansard or to travel to Westminster every day. Televising the House has enabled housebound, poor and disabled people to see the House at work.

I agree with much of my hon. Friend's speech, but will he address the point made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) about the intrinsic difference between the televising of this place, where we perform as volunteers, and the courts, where people do not so perform and where 50 per cent. of those who plead guilty are declared by the courts to be entirely innocent?

I accept that there is a difference between the courts and the House, but, equally, there are similarities, because many of the fears expressed about a pilot project in the courts were strongly expressed about televising the House. Many of the arguments that overcame the fears expressed about televising this place will apply to some of the fears that my hon. Friend mentioned.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton asked how we could guarantee that courts would not become a media circus. He said that television was a form of entertainment and that courts would become a media circus. He is saying, in so many words, that the courts would be trivialised, but there is a powerful argument against that. Television does not change into a circus something that is not already a circus. It does not change the House, wonderful religious services or a sombre, serious issue into a circus. If something already is a circus, television shows it as such.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton spoke of witnesses not wanting their private lives to be exposed to millions. That is a strong point. However, in major trials, the names of witnesses and much of their evidence is revealed to the public by the press or by television reporters. They are not anonymous.

It is a question of degree. Although 1.2 million people may buy the Daily Telegraph, of which a small proportion read the report of a trial, millions of people will see a witness on television.

It is a question of degree, but the more famous the trial, the more widely covered is the witness's name and evidence.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) is quite wrong. He mentioned a newspaper that responsibly reports major trials, but he did not allude to the millions who watch the news on television or read it in other daily newspapers which have a larger circulation and which trivialise those major court cases. Does he agree that witnesses in such trials are not anonymous, because they appear on "News at Ten" or in the mass media?

My hon. Friend makes a telling point, and I agree with him wholeheartedly—as he would expect me to.

We know the names of witnesses in famous trials. A girl called Monica was involved in the Jeffrey Archer trial. Her name is imprinted on my mind because I read it, and her evidence, daily for weeks. Important cases already attract publicity, but trivial cases would not be televised.

I do not want to speak for my hon. and learned Friend, the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), but his argument was not about the extra number of people who watch television, but about the fact that a picture is worth a thousand words. The vividness of the visual image is imprinted on one's mind far more deeply than what one reads and forgets so much more quickly.

This is a difficult area and I respect the fact that there are opposing views on it. Under our present system, however, witnesses and defendants are pictured in the low-quality tabloids. Those papers provide great details of all sorts of people involved in court cases. They provide their names, the evidence they gave and their pictures, and those facts are brought home to millions of people who take those tabloids. I sincerely believe that the worries that my hon. Friends have expressed about more publicity for witnesses and defendants should not stop them allowing the Bill to proceed today.

I have read the report of the working party of the public affairs committee of the General Council of the Bar. I congratulate Jonathan Caplan and my old friends Michael Kalisher and Anthony Speaight on a good report, which has meant that we are able to discuss the matter today.

Let me outline why I believe the Bill should be passed. I do not believe that the legal system and lawyers suffer from too much popularity in certain sectors of our society in 1991. Some people have a lack of confidence in the legal system, but we have a good one, so why keep it private? We have nothing to hide and we should let some of that system be seen by the public. Televising might enhance the public's confidence in, and respect for, the law.

Pilot projects for televising the courts would help to reinforce our long tradition of open justice. We always criticise secret trials and ask why the public cannot be told what is going on. If the Bill is passed, more publicity will be given to our legal system and the public's ability to know what is going on will be greatly increased.

The Bill will enable many people to have a better understanding of how our court system works and some of the burdens borne by leading counsel such as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton. Imagine the prospect of a trial at the Old Bailey with my hon. and learned Friend on his feet eloquently addressing the jury, only to hear the Division bell going at 3.45. Imagine him rushing back to the House—to be seen on television once again.

I do not believe that televising the courts would trivialise them. Such coverage would inform and educate. I do not believe that it would lead to frightened witnesses and related problems. I believe that that coverage would lead to a greater interest in our legal system. A famous foreign court showed a judgment relating to Sunday trading on television—an issue of great national interest—and it was seen by many.

Many of our important civil cases could be televised in part with some advantage. It is vital that there are safeguards to ensure that the jury are not identified, but such issues could be debated later. Today we are considering the main principles behind the Bill.

I understand what my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton said about jury research, but anything we can do to help jurors in their task should be considered. We could ask jurors the simple question: "Is there any way in which you could be helped further?" Perhaps jurors would suggest that there were, so we should give further consideration to such research.

I support the Bill and I hope that it is passed so that we can continue discussions on this important matter of national significance.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock) on his good fortune in winning a high place in the ballot for private Members' Bills, and on his choice of Bill. Today gives us a valuable opportunity to debate in some considerable detail two significant proposals for change in relation to the operation of our judicial system, in particular our criminal justice system.

It is already clear from the debate so far that this subject gives rise to lively and wide-ranging considerations. It is clear that the House has in mind the importance of the issues raised by the Bill. There are arguments both ways and I see my function and duty to the House being to draw to its attention some of the potential advantages of the proposals that have been so eloquently advanced by my hon. Friend, as well as the difficult aspects that must properly be taken into account before we arrive at any decision on the principle of the Bill.

This is not a debate in which the House is likely to be divided on party political lines, but I know that hon. Members will want to reflect carefully how to proceed. My hon. Friend is supported by sponsors on both sides of the House. It is a matter of regret for the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser) that he does not have the benefit of some eloquent sponsors on the Opposition Benches who could take part in the debate. However, they are extremely well represented by the hon. Gentleman and, in so far as the Labour party takes any particular view on this matter, we look forward with great interest to hear what the hon. Gentleman says, should he catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Opinions on this matter vary considerably and the Government's stance is to listen extremely carefully with an open mind to the views expressed by hon. Members.

The first part of the Bill deals with televising court proceedings. It seeks to implement the findings of a working party of the public affairs committee of the General Council of the Bar, on which I had the honour to sit for some years, which reported in May 1989. That report is often referred to as the Caplan report, after Jonathan Caplan who chaired the committee.

The present law is to be found in section 41 of the Criminal Justice Act 1925, which, in essence, was enacted to prohibit still photography. It is interesting to contemplate that it was in 1912 that a still photograph appeared of a small figure, the murderer, Frederick Seddon, being sentenced to death by Mr. Justice Bucknill. That photograph showed the spread of the court—Mr. Justice Bucknill, with his black cap, and his chaplain at his side. That photograph caused a frisson of horror at the time and it was specifically referred to 13 years later in 1925. when the prohibition of photography in court was passed into law.

It seems strange to us today that feelings ran so high just about a photograph, but they did, and that aspect of the law remains unchanged. Today's debate has already demonstrated that, although the medium that causes anxiety has changed, the power of the visual image and the power of sound recording in modern form are still recognised as so great as to make us cautious about their use.

It is difficult today to imagine a world without television, which is now such an important part of our lives, but in 1925 broadcasting even in sound form—"This is London 2LO"—had not even begun. It began in 1926, while television was still some 12 years away.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston that it is significant that this is the first time that the question of television in our courts has been debated. It would not be right to go further on this matter without recording the gratitude of the House for the work done by the working party of the Bar whose analysis of the problems and issues and whose proposed solutions provide a lucid and useful basis for our consideration of these issues. I have read the entire report. It is a careful and well-considered report, which justifies close consideration by anyone interested in this subject, and I shall draw upon it in my speech.

In essence, the report recommended the setting up of an advisory committee to review the arrangements for, and legal provisions relating to, coverage of court proceedings by the media—television, radio, newspapers and still photography—and to report to the Lord Chancellor and the Home Secretary. At this stage, in a sense, the Bill goes a little bit wider even than the report. It removes the statutory restrictions that prevent photography—still, on film or on tape—and removes the statutory limitations on tape recording, provided that those are carried out in accordance with rules of court. That is right. If we are to consider the matter sensibly, we must tackle all those problems. If the House is minded to wish the Bill to make further progress, a number of fairly fundamental changes to its terms are likely to be necessary.

The bar Council has unanimously endorsed the Caplan report's recommendation for an advisory committee and its ability to devise and monitor pilot projects involving research and the actual broadcasting of civil and criminal trials and of appellate proceedings.

In considering the arguments for and against this part of the Bill, I recognise that a proposal to televise the courts—albeit on an experimental basis in the first instance—has several potentially valuable features. It is a fundamental principle of our judicial system, and one of which we are rightly proud, that justice should be open and should be seen to be done. The requirement that court hearings should be in public is departed from only in rare and closely defined circumstances, and only for compelling reasons.

On the basis that courts are public places to which anyone can go and places whose proceedings can be openly and fairly reported in print by newspapers, books, magazines and so on, there is in a sense a prime facie case that balanced and fair television reporting should also be considered. Television broadcasting—which is by far the most powerful and dramatic way of reporting—would, in principle, enable a wide public to see the process of justice as it is administered in the sort of detail and with an immediacy that other forms of news presentation cannot match. It is argued that members of the public would gain from an ability to see the parties and witnesses and to study judges, advocates and jurors at work, thus gaining a better understanding of the workings of our courts and our system of civil and criminal justice.

The Bar's report sets out to examine the experience in some of those jurisdictions where television cameras are permitted in court at present. The report concluded that the experience in most cases was favourable. It observed that none of those states in the United States that have had an experimental programme of televising courts have later gone on to prohibit cameras. However, the House will wish to know that, in fact, there are not many countries in which courts have been televised—my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston made that point fairly—and in those countries where it is permitted, only limited use is made of the facility.

The major experiences is in 45 American states, where television is permitted on either a permanent or an experimental basis. It is noteworthy—the House should bear this in mind—that television is exclusive to the state courts and has not yet been admitted to the federal courts in any way. The United States has a formidable system of federal courts, which are highly respected throughout the world, but the United States has not seen fit to admit television to such courts, despite the experience of the state courts; nor has the Supreme Court been prepared to admit it.

The Bar's report notes that an experimental programme authorised by the Supreme Court of Florida—this is probably the high water mark of the case made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston—showed that

"the presence of the camera had little effect upon the dignity of the proceedings; the presence of the camera disrupted the trial either not at all or only slightly; participants' awareness of the camera averaged between slightly and moderately; both jurors and witnesses perceived that the presence of the camera made them feel just slightly more responsible for their actions; the ability of jurors to judge the truthfulness of witnesses was perceived to be affected not at all; the distracting effect of the camera was deemed to range from almost not at all for jurors, to slightly for witnesses and attorneys; there was no significant difference in the participants' concern over being harmed as a result of their appearance on television as opposed to their names appearing the print media; and court personnel and attorneys perceived that presence of the camera made the participating attorneys' actions more flamboyant only to a slight extent".

On the latter point, I have my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) very much in mind. The report refers to a number of other experimental projects, which produced similarly benign findings.

All that might seem to make a significant case. I am considering it carefully. As I said at the beginning, it is important to put those arguments into perspective and to allude to several arguments that range against the proposal.

In considering that perspective, I should like to say a little more about those countries where this matter has or has not been considered. Looking down the Bar's list of 24 countries, one can see that television plays a part in only 10. I shall refer first to those countries that are generally against it. In Austria, there is no law against it, but there is judicial discouragement and it has not happened. In Cyprus, there is no law against it and no experience of it. In Denmark, it is totally forbidden. Finland, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland and Turkey have no experience of it. In Sweden, it is entirely prohibited, although sound recordings are permitted. In Germany, it is prohibited by the constitution.

In considering the countries that have some experience of televising the courts, with the exception of the United States, it is important to note how cautious they have been. I put Canada at the forefront because, when the Bar debated this matter at last year's Bar conference, it did so together with the Canadian Bar. The Canadian experience was both path-finding and extremely cautious.

In Canada, television has not been allowed beyond the hallway of court buildings. In 1987, just a couple of years ahead of our Bar, a committee of the Canadian Bar recommended a two-year trial period—a similar recommendation came from the Canadian Law Commission—but that was narrowly vetoed by the Canadian Judicial Council, which comprises the chief justices of Canada and of the Canadian provinces. It has not made progress in Canada yet.

In France in 1984, a commission suggested a two-year experiment, but it has not been implemented except in relation to the national historic archives. There is public access to what has been filmed and recorded after 20 years, and it can be publicly broadcast after 50 years. In Israel, television cameras were allowed into two celebrated and unusual trials—the Eichmann and Demanjuk trials. In Italy, there is no law on the matter, but judges are extremely cautious and have allowed television only into the opening and closing stages of one or two important trials.

In the Netherlands, there is little experience. Television has been allowed to film only from behind in the verdicts in some modern trials and, rather more widely, in the unusual Menten trial about the Nazi collaborator. In Norway, there has been some televising of cases of public importance for educational purposes. I said that I would put the matter into perspective. Other countries are thinking about televising, but they are approaching it cautiously and we are right to approach the matter in that spirit.

In that spirit, the House will wish to pay special heed to the views of our judiciary and especially to those of our senior judiciary. Like their counterparts in other member states of the European Community, our senior judiciary have serious reservations about the televising of court proceedings. It will be recognised that they have an unparalleled knowledge of the workings of our legal system and I know that their views will weigh heavily with the House.

Despite the reported American experience, many commentators—judges, lawyers and lay people here—fear that the presence of cameras would add considerably to the pressures faced by participants in a trial. It is an inevitable feature of trials—not only of criminal trials—that many participants—not only the defendant—are brought unwillingly to court in circumstances of great vulnerability or personal distress. There is a great difference between appearing in court, even before a packed public gallery, and appearing before a television camera with the knowledge that, later in the day, one may be exposed to a television audience of millions or perhaps even of tens of millions.

The effects of television cameras may vary. They may cause an inhibited witness to clam up entirely or at least to face considerable additional personal distress. They may allow the uninhibited to play up to the cameras, which would be equally damaging to the proper conduct of the case. Although I recognise that none of the proponents of the Bill suggests that television should be allowed to record the most sensitive proceedings involving, for example, children or victims of sexual assault, it is worth stating in this context that the Government have done a great deal to recognise the vulnerability of certain witnesses by making provision for them, for example, to give evidence without the requirement that they he present in the court. There is a significant feeling that any move to televise courts would undermine the thrust of proposals in relation to other vulnerable witnesses who are still required to give evidence in person in court.

The Crown prosecution service has expressed to me its concern about the effect of televising on witnesses and, consequently, on the interests of justice. The Crown prosecution services prosecutes 1·7 million cases a year. It has responsibility for marshalling and, to some extent, caring for witnesses whom it has to bring before the court. The service fears that witnesses might be deterred from attending court because of the expected publicity and it fears that that may be true for defence witnesses just as much as for prosecution witnesses.

The service fears that witnesses may feel unable to give evidence in a fair and proper manner because of the camera. It fears that witnesses may be tempted to tailor their evidence to make it more acceptable to the viewing public. We do not know whether those fears are right or wrong, but they are real concerns, which must be addressed by any legislation permitting the televising of legal proceedings.

I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend, whose remarks have been helpful to people in favour of the Bill and those against it. Is he right in saying that those fears need to be addressed in legislation? As I understand it, the Bill allows for rules to be written under the legislation and those rules could maintain controls. As my right hon. and learned Friend rightly says, the Crown prosecution service is concerned about the effect that televising would have on witnesses. Indeed, it would be odd if it were not concerned.

An experiment is needed to see whether it is possible to measure the effects. It is possible to allow television by exception into prison and into other places from which it is normally excluded. Whatever the rules and restrictions, the court room is the only place into which it is impossible to take a television camera and in which it is impossible to record for any purpose.

That is an important argument, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley) may catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, and expand upon it. I have pondered the issue. Essentially, my hon. Friend is asking whether we cannot deal with it by rules of court. If it is the will of the House that the Bill makes progress, we shall give it a great deal of careful thought. The rules committee is largely made up of lawyers.

One of the questions that we must ponder, as this is the first time that we have debated the subject, is whether there might be merit in it not merely being left for the rules committee to deal with, if the Bill makes progress. Perhaps the question should be given wider consideration outside the House. We are much indebted to the Bar for the research that it has done, but there is room here, and in the jury aspects of the issue, for research and consideration by people outside the rules committee. If the Bill makes progress, that could happen before we go further down the road.

My right hon. and learned Friend suggests that this matter could be dealt with by rules of court, but the way that witnesses would react cannot be dealt with by rules drawn up by lawyers. Reactions will differ from witness to witness and it is impossible to predict how a witness who has never thought about this problem will react to the introduction of television.

My hon. Friend rightly brings us back to principle. The House and the other place would have to form a clear view about principle, and I agree with him. We have to make up our minds about that and the Government are listening carefully.

I recognise that an essential condition of any televised reporting is that it should be fair and accurate, but that is not necessarily easy to achieve and it is not for lack of good will. Such is the immediacy of the impact of television that there is real danger, especially in jury trials, that it may distort the conduct of cases and the process by which jurors arrive at their decisions. I am conscious that the Bill proposes only an experiment but—to take another analogy—it is a live experiment, which is to be carried out on the trials of real people and we must bear that in mind.

One of the advantages seen by the proponents of the Bill for its introduction is that television in courts would be valuable and educative. A great deal hangs on this claim, because, in essence, if that were not proved to be the case, there would be little advantage in televising courts at all. I have no doubt that it would, in part, serve such a purpose, and that a good deal of coverage would be balanced and informed. I should welcome that because the more that our system of justice can be understood, the more people will respect it and have confidence in it, and that is an essential feature.

However, I must admit to certain anxieties about how matters might develop after the expiry of an experimental period. I am sure that we should see the educational purpose of televising proceedings at its best during the experimental period, but thereafter I am a little less sanguine, although I do not wish in any way to impugn the motives of broadcasters.

Broadcasters would be under considerable pressure to produce vivid, immediate television and it would be easy to cross that fine line between a fair and balanced report—the educative and public involvement aspects—and to drift over into entertainment, if not sensationalism. It is a difficult balance to strike.

Real trials, especially criminal trials, are in no sense a subject for entertainment and no hon. Member suggests that they are. Courts make wonderful theatre and television, but theatre does not deal with the lives of real people. The issues in criminal trials are intensely serious and often involve the need to recount intimate and all too often tragic personal details.

Although there would no doubt be an effort to provide safeguards to prevent the most obvious examples of potential abuse, it is often difficult, from the very nature of the criminal trial, to predict in advance exactly what will happen or to foresee all the circumstances that might push the televising of proceedings into prurience and sensationalism.

As we debate these matters, our proceedings are televised and they may or may not be shown widely. Consequently, many hon. Members will naturally have regard to a number of the arguments that were made for and against the televising of Parliament. In the event, and after an appropriate trial period here and experience in another place, this House in its wisdom decided that its proceedings should be televised and I do not think that many hon. Members have had legitimate cause to regret that decision.

To some extent, that argument operates in favour of the Bill. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about drawing parallels. As politicians, we come to the House voluntarily and engage in our debates on matters of general principle and public importance. By long usage, we have become reasonably practised in public speaking—indeed, the cynics might say that some of us actually seek out exposure to the media. None of that is true in the process of a trial.

Judges and advocates may of course become used to the cameras, but the witnesses, victims and dependants seldom will. While we are permitted by the nature of our duties to deal in matters of high principle, they will often have to speak of and publicly expose intimate details about their private lives. I do not believe that the televising of Parliament provides a precedent and I am confident that hon. Members will recognise that a different set of considerations largely applies.

Whatever view the House may take about the televising of court proceedings in principle, I think it only right to record that if it is the will of the House to give the Bill a Second Reading, the Government would have to ensure—or do their best to ensure; this is why we emphasise the principle—that a number of safeguards were introduced to reduce the risk of damage to the fabric of the administration of justice.

It would be necessary to ensure that the cameras were physically as unobtrusive and non-disruptive as possible. Technological advances have made that a much easier process than might perhaps once have been the case. The example of this place is a good one because the cameras here are not obtrusive. However, we must recognise the physical limitations of many of our court rooms and of the older court rooms in particular. As the Caplan report noted, many English court rooms are smaller than their United States counterparts.

Very often, particularly in the sort of trials that I suspect would suggest themselves as most attractive to broadcasters, space is limited sometimes even for victims and their families. It would be important to ensure that whatever arrangements were necessary to permit television should not seriously diminish access to the general public. Only a certain number of cameras should be permitted and they should be permitted to show only certain types of shots, so that—here Parliament is a comparable example—the proceedings as a whole were balanced and there would be minimal inducement for people in the public gallery or elsewhere to disrupt proceedings for the sake of additional publicity that television might bring to their antics.

There are also security matters to be considered concerning the televising of certain witnesses.

My right hon. and learned Friend has made the telling point that some of our courts are very small and that space is, of necessity, limited. He makes that case in relation to the availability of space to accommodate television cameras and equipment. However, the fact that those courts have limited space is the reason for having television in our courts. In many respects, space is so limited that only very few people can attend the court. The Bill would allow people to see into courts if they cannot gain access because of lack of space.

Up to a point, my hon. Friend has made a good point. The cameras will allow many people to see a little more of what happens in court. However, we may have to be realistic and admit that the viewer will seldom be treated to a sequential view of what happens in court.

Television time is inevitably limited. There has been discussion of whether we should have a permanent channel fixed on the House. Much of such television would be terribly boring, but it would give a true impression of what went on. I do not think that anyone is suggesting that that could be replicated for court television. One would get snippety highlights of real cases affecting real people. Those matters must be balanced.

Only a certain number of cameras should be permitted. As I have said, the type of shots that they should be allowed should be carefully controlled. I have dealt with security for jurors and witnesses and the importance of not exposing them to increased risk of harassment or other interference.

There are certain courts and tribunals from which we should statutorily exclude television. For example, television should not be allowed to extend into magistrates courts or to most tribunals. We shall have to take careful steps to prevent proceedings involving children, whether criminal or civil proceedings, from being televised. It will be agreed on both sides of the House that any public exposure of the traumas and grief of particularly young and vulnerable victims must be avoided at all costs.

My right hon. and learned Friend has mentioned some of the Government's concerns, in the event that the Bill is read a Second time, and the safeguards that he would want to introduce. For example, he said that he would not wish cameras to be in magistrates courts. Does not that fact alone show our difficulties with the Bill? There is already enough pressure on innocent people sometimes to plead guilty in a magistrates court because at least there is the certainty of a more minimal fine or prison sentence, whereas they are disinclined to expose themselves to the risk of going to a Crown court.

Does not that prove that even more innocent people will be inclined, on the advice of their legal advisers, to plead guilty in a magistrates court because they would be exposed to the rigours of television cameras if they take a chance and plead not guilty in the Crown court?

There is something in my hon. Friend's point. I should not want to carry it too far, because one does not need to plead guilty in a magistrates court in order to avoid going on to the Crown court. One could plead not guilty and have one's case tried out, and not go on to the Crown court. My hon. Friend would have a point if that were to prevent somebody from taking trial by jury, which otherwise they would wish to do. That is a factor to be weighed, but I would not put it much higher than that.

We should also have to ensure that no televising could take place without the express consent of the trial judge. That is one of the suggestions that have been made. The trial judge is responsible for the conduct of proceedings in the court over which he presides, and his own assessment, from a uniquely knowledgeable position, of whether in a particular case the risks of allowing televising would outweigh the possible educational advantages must be decisive. I do riot think that it would be right in any circumstances to permit the televising of proceedings in circumstances in which the trial judge did not consent to it.

There are also other questions relating to consent, some of them touched on by the Caplan report—whether, for example, the consent of the parties should be required. The Caplan report concluded that it should not, but I should like to reflect carefully upon the matter if the Bill were to make further progress. We are talking about experimentation.

I think also that it would be an important safeguard to give the Lord Chancellor a final decision on whether any particular proceedings or class of proceedings should be televised. Only he, as the Minister responsible for the provision of the higher courts, can take an overall view of the effect of television and, again, I am sure that the House would think it right that he should have the final say in those important matters.

Does my right hon. and learned Friend consider it remotely likely that any television company worth its salt in this country would want to go in for something requiring such expensive investment which was dependent on the whim of judges, Lord Chancellors or anyone else?

The answer is probably yes, someone might very well want to do it. If not, no progress would be made one way or the other. There would be expense and those involved would argue, with some force, that, having gone to that expense, they should be allowed to show a reasonably wide range of television. That forces us to say that we cannot hedge this around with too many safeguards, because that would be unreal. We must weigh up such matters before deciding on the matter of principle. However, I cannot agree with my hon. and learned Friend that no people will come forward to ask for that.

I do not pretend to have exhausted either the full range of safeguards that would be required or, more importantly, the full range of issues of principle that should be considered before the House decides upon this important proposal, but I hope that I have said enough to indicate how seriously the Government take these proposals and how carefully we have sought to evaluate the potential advantages and disadvantages of this aspect.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston rightly emphasised that the proposal was to be only experimental and that there must be strict safeguards, but before we proceed, we must remember that these would be live experiments on the cases of real people. Before we proceed, we must be satisfied that the safeguards have a real chance of of being effective and that we do not have to hedge the privilege about so tightly that any benefits are outweighed by distortion. The Government wish to know the views of the House on that matter and, as I said, approach it with considerable caution.

The second aspect of this interesting Bill relates to jury research, I should like to ask the House to consider a number of interesting questions relating to whether the deliberations of the jury should be laid open to academic, and, thus, public scrutiny.

I have no difficulty in starting from the premise that the institution of jury trial is one of the great protectors of our liberties—I believe that passionately—and a means by which we can ensure public involvement and, therefore, public confidence in the trial of important criminal cases. I go as far as to say that, for serious offences, the right to jury trial must be high on anyone's list of those rights which underlie our system of the administration of justice.

I should like to quote the words of Lord Devlin in his book on this subject. He is a most distinguished judge, whose name, I am proud to say, is still the top name on my own chambers. He wrote:

"In a democracy law is made by the will of the people and obedience is given to it not primarily out of fear but from goodwill. But just as important as the frame of the law is its application. The jury is the means by which the people play a direct part in the application of the law. It is a contributory part. The inter-relation between judge and jury, slowly and carefully worried out over several hundred years, secures that the verdict will not be demagogic; it will not be the simply uninhibited popular reaction. But it also secures that the law will not be applied in a way that affronts the conscience of the common man. Constitutionally it is an invaluable achievement that popular consent should be at the root not only of the making but also of the application of the law. It is one of the significant causes of our political stability."

The right to trial by jury, to trial by our peers, is a very ancient right and is regarded by many, myself included, as one of the foundations of our liberties. It commands great public confidence. It seems to work well. In those circumstances, many who have misgivings about jury research warn strongly against meddling with a successful system. They argue—with force—"If it isn't broken, don't mend it."

This does not mean that we can be complacent about the institutions that serve as the basis of our liberties, and I do not criticise my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston for raising this subject. Their continuing good function and health should be the proper subject for scrutiny and the Government have not been slow to make alterations to the working of the system to ensure that the interests of justice are secured. Changes have been made, for example, to the age eligibility of jurors. That is right because people live longer, remain alert longer and have longer in their lives to play an active part. Changes have been made to the right to peremptory challenge and to the proper reasons why citizens should or should not be disqualified from jury service.

Nor should we expect, in the context of some 50,000 jury trials a year, that the workings of the jury in every individual case will always be perfect. There will be occasional lapses. There is anecdotal criticism of the way in which the jury system works. Some of it, no doubt, is misguided or based on prejudice or partiality of one form or another. Most research will be well placed, but it is an essential part of our system that, where juries convict in circumstances that are unsafe or unsatisfactory, those errors can be rectified by the appellate process.

My hon. Friend and those who promote this Bill do so from the very best of motives. They argue that it is essential that an institution of such importance should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and that scrutiny can be sound in its method only if it is based on an ability to look at exactly what happens in the jury room. Those arguments were summarised incisively by my right hon. and noble Friend the Lord Chancellor in 1981 when, as Lord Advocate, he said:

"The jury system, great institution that it is, surely can stand up to properly conducted research".

A similar point was made by two English academic writers, who said:

"An institution which represents the very cornerstone of the English legal system and is central to the protection of the liberty of the subject ought to be open to reasonable scrutiny and public accountability, one part of which is responsible research."

So, is the rule of confidentiality of jury room discussions as important as we believe? Secondly, could it be maintained in the face of research? Today, the answers to those questions are not really in dispute. It is fair to say that it is accepted by the House and supporters of the Bill as well as by opponents that confidentiality of the jury room is important and that, even if research is allowed,

"publication of any fact or opinion relating to any matter which occurred or was alleged to have occurred in the course of the deliberation of the jury in any legal proceedings in such a manner as to identify the particular case, any party, witness or circumstances"

would remain prohibited and a contempt of court.

I have no doubt that this is wise. because I equally have no doubt that confidentiality is profoundly important. It enables frank discussion. It allows a full consideration not only of the broader issues but of the nuances that are so important to the administration of justice. The confidence of the jury room allows jurors to express and perhaps thereby to exorcise prejudice and views or to ventilate anxieties that they might well not wish to raise or discuss publicly. No worry of libelling anyone even begins to arise. It makes it easier for a juror to change his or her mind, an essential attribute in the give and take of the jury room, and it makes it easier to draw upon and give instances from one's own experience to influence one's fellow jurors.

The question is how far would research inhibit or damage these benefits of confidentiality. How successful would be the strict proviso about non-disclosure and non-publication of any identifiable fact, person or detail? Much would no doubt remain entirely confidential, but it is hard to believe that there would not be leaks. If high-profile cases were the subject of jury research, it might be surprising if there were not leaks and if some were not used to cast doubt on the verdict or on the system. Fears that views and attitudes may become public may themselves hinder and distort the juries' deliberations. Those are the important questions on which we must focus and form a view.

Those who support the Bill will argue that if the jury has flaws, it is better to know of them than to allow them to remain concealed. There may be advantages in learning the view of jurors on a number of matters in order to be able to assist the operation of jury trial. For example, are cases presented generally in a way that is clear and accessible to jurors? Are documents of assistance to the jury? Are visual aids of value? By and large, can the jurors hear witnesses and counsel clearly? That is a fundamental question. To what extent are they helped by the judge's summing up? Should summings up be longer or shorter? Are lengthy reviews of the evidence by the judge of value to the jury? It may be illuminating to have answers to more fundamental questions, such as how seriously, carefully and rationally most jurors approach their task, even if the answers to such questions are awkward.

I have never sat on a jury—some hon. Members will have done so—but I have frequently addressed juries, both for the prosecution and the defence, as an advocate and, as a recorder, I have watched them intently, guided them and given them my summing up. It is my impression that the great majority of jurors take their duties very seriously. They appear to listen carefully, to demonstrate considerable alertness to the key points and to do their very best to be just and fair. They appear, rightly, to dislike prosecutions for trivial matters, even if the evidence is sufficient. That is of value. Above all, they are genuinely good judges of the key matter of honesty and dishonesty.

On the whole, to express a personal view, I am inclined to think, with the Lord Chancellor, that the system would not be seriously threatened by properly conducted research. There would need to be strict guidelines, which would need to be argued through.

That brings us to the question: what is properly conducted research? Here we know less than we are entitled to, which to some extent makes me think that the Bill is premature. What evidence is there that sufficient ground work has been done by way of other aspects of jury research to justify the prize of the secrets of the jury room? Forbidden fruit is often the most enticing, but, until information drawn from jurors themselves is placed in the context of more general research, it may be premature.

It is worth focusing on what kind of questioning should be permitted. The Bill proposes that the research may be conducted in

"a manner approved by the person giving authority, into any specified matters affecting trial by jury".

The matters are no doubt to be specified in the rules, which it is suggested should be rules of court. If that is followed, the issues will be considered by the rules committee.

There may be an advantage in having the kind of rules appropriate to the proper control of research considered by more public discussion, perhaps by careful consideration by a committee similar to that which has considered the matter of televising the courts either by the Bar, the Royal Society or a committee of academic researchers interested in this subject. I do not want to go on too long, so I shall draw my remarks to a close and illustrate just one aspect of that.

An article in The Independent of 1 July 1988 by Mr. Sean Enright, a barrister, raised some genuine questions. He suggested a searching line of questions to be carried out by researchers:

"We need to know, for instance, how well juries are applying legal directions relating to proof, corroboration, previous convictions and accomplice evidence. And if necessary we need to know what steps we can take to better communicate legal concepts to jurors."

The last matter about good communications is a comparative general point, but the earlier questions would need to be explored in considerable depth if the answers were to be of any value.

I ask myself whether the jury are the right people to ask about the way in which they have applied directions about proof, corroboration and so on. If there is genuine doubt on those matters, is not the place for such doubts to be explored the Court of Appeal? In a case where corroboration is required, a jury will have been directed by the judge about what was capable of being corroboration and what was not. If the jury find the case proved, they will presumably have been satisfied that there was corroboration.

That type of question would seem to be better researched by an examination of the transcript of the hearing, considerations in summing up, discussion perhaps with the prosecution and defence lawyers, and a consideration of any proceedings in the Court of Appeal. To ask a juror after the event to look back and to analyse his mind on such a matter would seem to require extremely detailed and intrusive questions, the answers to which might not be easy to evaluate and might lead to misleading conclusions.

In the United States there are no such restrictions. Jurors, in a sense, can be asked questions by almost anybody. The judges much disapprove of it, but there is a conflict in United States law concerning the first amendment, which allows publicity and publication of almost anything, unless there is a clear and evident danger, which virtually means danger of military attack almost related to the Gulf, or something of that nature.

The Americans have suffered from juries being considerably harried by litigators, parties to the case and, to some extent, researchers. Little research has been carried out, but there was an occasion in 1955 when the Senate judiciary committee castigated some researchers for the use they made of their research. Yet careful and balanced research, which would be available in the United States, does not seem to have been carried out, and that raises questions about how quickly we should proceed in the matter.

We have not suggested that the type of questions to which my right hon. and learned Friend referred are necessarily the right questions to be asked when doing research with jurors. We think that it would be appropriate to address those questions that would enable the juryman to perform his role better. We object to the absolute ban on jury research. We are not suggesting ghat there should be a free-for-all in jury research, but simply that it is inappropriate to say that never for any reason should a juryman be questioned.

I appreciate my hon. Friend's point and I have indicated a certain personal sympathy towards it. It is an important subject and it is right that we should not be afraid to address the difficult questions to which I referred.

The House will recognise from what I have said that the Government keep an open mind on both issues, but that there are real questions to be answered by the proponents of the Bill before they can clearly be said to have established the principle of change. The Government wish to listen carefully on these matters to the views of the House.

This is a short Bill, but as is often the case, the length of the speeches has been in inverse proportion to that of the legislation.

I support the Bill. This is not a matter on which we take a party line, but my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Aberavon (Mr. Morris), my fellow legal affairs spokesman, agrees that we should adopt a constructive and helpful attitude. The Solicitor-General claimed to be neutral on the matter, but it seemed a rather obstructive kind of neutrality.

I shall speak as briefly as I can. The hon. and learned Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) argued that television trivialised and sensationalised the facts and would therefore be inappropriate in the courts. It does, of course, trivialise on occasion, and is sometimes in extraordinarily bad taste. It could have other damaging effects: the mere fact that about two thirds of our population get their news from television tells us something about the decline in reading standards.

None the less, when it comes to examining human rights and freedoms, television has much to commend it. I do not think that the recent peaceful revolutions in eastern Europe, and the trend towards democracy and freedom which, although tragically halted in China, is still progressing in the Soviet Union, would have been possible without television: it has provided both a projection of human rights and the advancement of democratic and just institutions. It has played an invaluable part in the emancipation of eastern Europe and other parts of the world. We should consider the positive aspects, as well as the negative aspects mentioned by the hon. and learned Member for Burton.

Televising the courts would, of course, be an experiment. There is a precedent in the televising of the House of Commons. I was a member of the Select Committee on televising as long ago as 1967; some 22 years elapsed between the publication of our report and the launching of the experiment. Even 24 years ago, we saw no insuperable technical problems. Cameras could be small, unintrusive and unintimidating—as they have turned out to be. Lighting, which is frequently complained about, need be no stronger than the lighting required in offices, factories and other premises to comply with the law.

Nor have there been any problems in relation to editing restraint and balance—and the courts will have much greater powers than the House of Commons over editing and exclusion of material. Much as I respect you, Madam Deputy Speaker, it is not open to you to edit any part of this morning's proceedings or to complain about balance or about what can be broadcast; it is, however, open to a judge to exclude evidence when conducting a trial. It is extremely unlikely that any trial will be carried live; that would involve great dangers, and I do not think that anyone has advocated it. The power to edit and exclude, however, is inherent even in existing legislation.

The most important reason for allowing the televising both of Parliament and, experimentally, of the courts is that people are entitled to observe the workings of the institutions that govern their lives and liberties. They have the right to be present—if only electronically—to assess those institutions and to change them if need be. No matter how high and grand such institutions may be, they are not ultimately intended to be sacred or mysterious; they are intended to act as the servants of the population, not the masters. The same sentiments apply to television, but that is another matter.

For centuries, the axiom has been that justice should not only be done but be seen to be done. In practice, few people would want to sit through the unedited proceedings of a court. I must declare an interest as a lawyer. Unless I have been an advocate in a case, I have never had any great interest in attending a trial. My boredom threshold is quickly reached and most members of the public would find it difficult to withstand the boredom of a trial. However, they have a right to see a balanced and edited version of how our institutions work.

Television can illuminate the working of the courts, as it has illuminated the working of the House. It can increase people's respect and understanding of our legal system and bring a public lay focus to bear on its workings. It will enable the public, in appropriate cases, to witness matters of interest and concern to them and how the law is being administered.

If I have the right to walk into a court and view its proceedings, why should I not have the right, subject to proper safeguards, to view that through a camera? I should have that right, unless my exercising it diminishes the rights of others, principally the defendant whose case is in issue before the court. I have a right to view, but the defendant has more right to a fair trial without his or her rights being interfered with by the cameras or by my viewing the case. That balance must be struck. In the long term, however, the exercise of my right to view and to reach a judgment may enhance the effectiveness of the administration of justice and the rights of others.

We cannot judge whether televising the courts will, in practice, diminish or enhance the rights of others or remain, like the Solicitor-General's speech, neutral until there has been an experiment and research—hence the justification for the Bill. If research shows that televising the courts is unviable, it can be dropped, but it is worth while to begin research under the rules of court and under the supervision of judges and the Lord Chancellor. Those are immensely powerful safeguards against abuse of such research.

I do not deny that there are problems and that the worst problems will occur in criminal trials. There is bound to be disproportionate punishment and injury to a defendant, regardless of whether he or she is convicted or acquitted. If proceedings relating to a minor case of indecent exposure were televised, the damage done to the defendant would be the same, regardless of whether he was convicted or acquitted, and his suffering would be disproportionate to the gravity of the offence. That is a good argument for not televising magistrates courts.

Juries are told by judges that they must not be influenced by other people or discuss the case, but if it has appeared on television there is a risk of discussion. There is a risk to jurors if their faces are seen on television. However, those matters can be dealt with. The jury should never appear on the television camera. Moreover, the problems of televising trials can be compared with those experienced by jurors when a trial is discussed extensively in the newspapers. I have no problem about imposing reporting restrictions, because widespread restrictions on the press already exist. Without the consent of the defendant, it cannot report on committal proceedings, and there are restrictions on reporting trials for rape, blackmail and other matters.

Although I could list the difficulties involved, there is a strong case for experimenting with cameras in court and not concentrating too much on televising criminal trials. It is possible to exaggerate the difficulties involved in allowing the public access through television cameras, but in many judicial venues it would be almost impossible to imagine interference in the conduct of justice. For instance, I do not see how there could be prejudice in the occasional televising of the Judicial Committee of the other place. If the Chamber of the other place is televised, I see no problem about televising members of that Chamber when sitting in a committee room giving judgment or deciding an appeal. After all, they give their judgment in the Chamber. It would be ludicrous to say that there is no prejudice when the Law Lords are seen legislating, but that there would be prejudice when they were seen passing judgment in a Judicial Committee case.

The hon. Gentleman's remarks touch on an important question, which I asked my right hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, but to which I received the wrong answer. First, does the hon. Gentleman consider that television companies will have much enthusiasm for televising the courts if everything is to be "cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd" by all those restrictions and limitations?

Secondly, the difference between televising the courts and televising Parliament is, I believe, that the state pays for the televising of Parliament. I doubt whether television companies will want to invest in the expenditure required for permanent coverage in the courts.

My answer is exactly the same as that of the Solicitor-General—yes. However, to take the matter a little further, the Bill is not an exercise for the benefit of televison companies. They must decide whether televising court trials will be commercially worth while. They may decide that it is not, just as running a newspaper may not be commercially worth while, but that is a question for them and not for us.

The Judicial Committee of the other place deals with some fairly important matters. That would have been appreciated if the conduct and judgment in the Hammersmith swaps case had been recorded on television. That case was not merely of municipal importance but of massive financial importance for this country and internationally. I happen to believe that the legal precision of the judges in another place was not preferable to the Court of Appeal's rather more pragmatic and commonsense approach, but other people might have looked at an edited version of that trial in the Court of Appeal and the conduct of the appeal in another place and formed their own judgment. I mention that case because it is one of worldwide and not just municipal importance. There will be considerable interest in recording such a case as it would show how our courts work. Such coverage would not mean any possible prejudice to the people involved.

What about judicial inquiries into the building of nuclear power stations? Most members of the public would find it impossible to attend an entire inquiry, which would take many months, but such inquiries are of major importance to specific localities. Why should people not have the opportunity to see an edited version of the conduct of those proceedings? Such inquiries may also cover subjects such as whether county hall should be a municipal building or a hotel. I see no prejudice in those events, particularly if the proceedings are edited. I can think of many other examples of non-criminal proceedings which could properly be recorded for television.

On criminal proceedings, I recognise that there is a danger in having trials of first instance televised, but what about the forthcoming appeal of the Birmingham Six? That case generates transnational interest and the workings of the appeal system are under scrutiny. I shall say no more about that case, as it is before the courts now, but the televised proceedings not just of that case but of others on appeal would generate great interest as they would highlight the workings of the appeal system.

We shall not know whether I am right or, indeed, whether anyone else is until we have had an experiment. However, there are many instances where the cameras could go into a court unobtrusively to reveal the workings of the legal system without prejudice or embarrassment to those involved in that process.

At present it is impossible to interview juries even for the purpose of helping them to do their job better. I believe that there should be a controlled, supervised, anonymous and confidential mechanism to enable questions to be asked of jurors. That would reveal how well they follow the evidence and the documents presented to them. One could also learn how effective was the summing up on their decisions. The Solicitor-General gave a list of questions that could be asked in the course of research on juries.

No one in the House doubts that juries are the cornerstone of our criminal justice system. We do not know how long we have had juries. Some people argue that juries existed before 1066, but it is certainly beyond doubt that they were introduced for criminal trials in 1166 by Henry II. They have the enormous advantage of giving the public confidence in the verdicts delivered. It is odd that people have more confidence in the judgment of laymen than ever they have in the judgment of experts. It is when an expert tells us that something is safe, or something cannot happen, that we need to be on our guard.

There is great confidence in the judgments and verdicts of our peers, and long may that be so. As the Solicitor-General said, juries provide a safeguard against trivialising the law and against unjust laws—in that context, perhaps, one is allowed to mention section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911. Certainly juries provided protection at a lime when people could suffer capital punishment for the most trivial offences because in those circumstances juries refused to convict. I am sure that that led to a change in the law when less punitive offences were introduced for those engaged in what would now be regarded as minor acts of dishonesty. At one time causing criminal damage to trees was subject to capital punishment.

It is extraordinary that no one has ever been able to carry out research into the way in which juries function. Some may say that the function of the jury is not in doubt and the Solicitor-General said that there is no need to mend something that is not broken. However the report of the Roskill committee, which looked into serious fraud, posed many questions about the function and effectiveness of juries. Although its remit was in relation only to complex fraud trials, many of its, remarks about questioning the effectiveness of the function of the jury have equal application to other complex cases involving, for instance, complex scientific evidence as opposed to complex accountancy evidence.

The Roskill report states:

"We doubt whether the public at large appreciates the characteristics of a complex fraud case"—

one could substitute the words "complex criminal case" for "complex fraud case"—

"or the difficulties which face an average juror. World financial markets are becoming more complex, more integrated and interdependent, more competitive and more automated … We see now a few cases of fraud where the evidence is so complex and the alleged dishonesty so deeply buried, that even a trained business mind cannot easily encompass the case and all its ramifications."

The report concluded that some fraud trials should have not a jury but a special kind of serious fraud tribunal. I am glad that the Government and the House rejected that proposition, but that does not take away from us the responsibility—as we have chosen to say that even in the most complex cases juries should continue to govern the verdict—of ensuring that juries are better able to discharge their functions. We have confirmed and ratified that responsibility.

I hoped that the hon. Gentleman would say that some trials are so technical that a lay jury is not the right body to adjudicate upon them. That is completely different from questioning whether juries should be put through an inquisition to find out whether they are up to the job, which undermines the principle of having a jury.

I am not arguing, and I did not argue during the Roskill inquiry, that there are cases so complex that a jury is not fit to discharge its present function in them. I have never argued that. The verdict of the House is that we should continue with the jury system and I do not want to undermine that. Having decided that juries should continue to give the verdict in serious fraud trials, we need to sustain their ability to understand and properly to discharge their function. If we do not, there is a danger that guilty men will go free simply because the jury cannot follow the proceedings. If that is so of fraud trials, it must be so of other trials. My argument would be sustained if one removed the word "fraud" from the Roskill inquiry and considered just the word "complex". A passage in the Roskill report sums that up:

"When the case eventually comes to trial the juror is faced with many difficulties. He is initially likely to be unfamiliar with the procedure. There may be many defendants, and multiple charges against each."

That goes for other than fraud trials. The report states:

"He may have difficulty in remembering who's who and who is accused of what. The background against which the frauds"—

one could say other crimes——

"are alleged to have been committed—the sophisiticated world of high finance and international trading—is probably a mystery to most or all of the jurors, its customs and practices a closed book."

That is true of other crimes. The report continues:

"Even the language in which the allegedly fraudulent transactions have been conducted will be unfamiliar."

The report states:

"A knowledge of accountancy or book-keeping may be essential to an understanding of the case. If any juror has such knowledge, it is by chance."

The Roskill committee considered the problem of examining documentary evidence and said:

"The evidence before the jury may run to hundreds, or even thousands, of documents. Sometimes these are presented in huge, ill ordered bundles. Little attempt may have been made to summarise or simplify the evidence."

That criticism is true of many other trials. The report continued:

"Sometimes the tactics of the lawyers will seem designed to obsecure rather than to evince the truth".

I am sure that that will interest the hon. and learned Member for Burton.

The report went on:

"Although the taking of notes by jurors and questions to the judge are both permitted, a juror serving for the first time may not know whether either practice is welcome or useful: a brief, explanatory leaflet which is provided for everyone summoned for jury service falls short of encouraging note-taking, and positively urges restraint in the asking of questions."

The telling paragraph is paragraph 8.33, which says:

"Because direct research on jurors' comprehension of actual fraud cases would amount to a contempt of court, we commissioned a research project of a more indirect nature from the MRC Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge."

One cannot ask the jurors because of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. The Bill would give us the chance to ask the people involved instead of having to make assumptions about the way in which they regarded these matters.

The House decided to confirm the use of jurors in all complex cases. That does not do away with the issues raised by the Roskill committee which have a wider application than fraud trials. I believe that research would sustain the jury system and, even more importantly, help us to work more effectively.

The Bill would provide for two forms of research. One would allow greater public access to the working of the court and one would help the jury system to work well and to be based on fact rather than on speculation, guesswork and respect for tradition. We are grateful to the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock) for introducing the Bill and for the helpful report presided over by Jonathan Caplan.

Television is more controversial than the reform of the law on jurors. We have been asked only to authorise research. A hundred reasons may be advanced against television in the court, but those reasons are usually rationalisations against making changes. There are certainly strong reasons for not diminishing the role of juries, but we are not being asked to change anything. The Bill merely provides for a factual basis on which we can make judgments. There is no single reason to oppose the proposition.

I am pleased to support my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock). The Bill is an important but modest measure. I congratulate my hon. Friend on his excellent and vigorous speech in which he defended and explained the proposed measure. Unlike most of the participants in today's debate, but like my hon. Friend, I am not a lawyer. I am neither pro-lawyer nor anti-lawyer. I support the Bill not only as a sponsor, but as someone who recognises that it deals with an issue that is important not only to lawyers, but to many professions and to society in general.

In a democracy, it is absolutely essential to have an impartial and open system of justice. "Open" in this day and age—when even the proceedings of this House are televised—must mean open to scrutiny by a much wider public via television.

I listened with considerable interest to the two halves of the speech made by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence). As a practising and successful lawyer, he has much to offer the debate. However, his argument was fatally flawed because he failed to take into account the real issue which some of us have raised or will raise today. The media already have wide access to the courts. They report the spectacular court cases on television and in the newspapers.

The witnesses and the legal performances are already analysed on the news at 9 pm and at 10 pm. We often have comments on the participants and witnesses, and on what was and what was not said. We have artistic impressions on the television screen depicting the court room during the day. We often have trivialised and graphic accounts in the mass media of what has happened in major court cases. At present, the public are denied the right to make their own observations in appropriate cases because they are denied direct access to the courtroom. The public get everything secondhand from journalists and from legal experts on television or in the newspapers. The Bill examines that fundamental issue and calls for change and experimentation so that the public can have wider access to what is going on in the courtroom rather than such matters being presented to them by experts on television. I immensely enjoyed the speech by the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser), especially when he said that whenever experts agree, they are invariably wrong. I believe that we should discount experts.

I want to make three observations about the Bill—on the role of society and television today, on education and on juries. Legal proceedings are a serious business. If one reads history books, one finds that in a different era courts were treated rather like theatres and played to packed audiences. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston said, the Criminal Justice Act 1925 ensured that there was a more sombre mood in the reporting of court cases. We have moved on into the 1990s.

Television is the communication medium from which the majority of people derive information. It is easy to be superior about television, to take intellectual stances and to criticise television programmes, but it is a fact of today that television is important.

I was surprised when my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton suggested that television was coming into people's sitting rooms purely for entertainment. Many people use television not for entertainment, but as a means of gaining information, of education and of keeping in touch with areas of society and the world that they have never visited and to which they cannot get. That is important when we consider televising the courts.

It is all very well to say that anyone can go into a court. That is, of course, the case as long as there is enough seating for people to watch the performance and to enjoy or to learn about what is going on. We know that the seating in Parliament is limited and that only a certain number of people can watch the House each day. People cannot come to the House and watch the proceedings as often as they would like. Television has given them that opportunity and television would give people the opportunity to watch sections of court cases so that they could be informed about what goes on. Hon. Members cannot say that everyone can walk into any court. It is not practical in terms of space in the public gallery and people cannot get from one side of the country to another or to the capital to see a trial at the Old Bailey because of the expense involved.

The thought that the presence of television would inhibit courtroom performances by witnesses or would encourage laywers to perform to the cameras and to star nightly on the news is too ludicrous for words. There is already theatricality in legal proceedings. We know that from observing court cases ourselves. In my university days at the London school of economics, I took a legal institutions course and I went to various courts to see how the legal system worked. Televising the House has not altered the performances of individuals. Most of us do not know where the cameras are and do not notice what they are doing because we have a point to make, a job to do and issues to raise. We do not look at the recording of this or that occurrence or of a particular debate. We consider the issues and we tackle the job that we have to do.

People in court—lawyers, judges, recorders and whoever else—will continue to do their jobs irrespective of who may be in the public gallery, drawing a sketch or writing notes on the performances or the events of the day. We can discount the argument that television would change or inhibit court proceedings.

I do not understand why television should be feared. It should be welcomed and encouraged because it has advanced society and the lives that we lead. There was a long debate in opposition to televising the Chamber. I intended to ask my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton whether he was against televising the House, because if one closed one's eyes and listened to him, one would have realised that many of his arguments were those that were advanced by opponents of televising the House.

Television is not the horror that it is made out to be by those who oppose televising the courts. However, I accept the arguments that the Solicitor-General made in a very balanced speech, although it was a little too neutral from my point of view. Hon. Members supporting the Bill recognise that televising the courts will have to be done carefully and that we shall have to be cautious in certain cases. However, we should not dismiss the opportunity to televise certain court cases merely because we realise that it would not be sensible to televise others.

Like my right hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, I have never been a juror, but a number of my constituents have come to see me because they are worried about serving on a jury. They have no courtroom experience and are frightened of what lies before them. They are not lawyers and fortunately they do not have any experience of courts from their private lives. Therefore, they are uneducated in the workings of a court, of how cases develop and of what they are expected to do. There is no training for jurors. They are summoned to serve on a jury and they are presented in a rather intimidatory fashion with the job that they have to do. Televising trials would give people the opportunity to understand what is going on and to see a courtroom for themselves before they become jurors. That is an important aspect of the educational role offered by television.

Television and videos have become important means of giving wider experience to our children at school. We may all regret that the button on the television at home is not turned to the off position more frequently, because our children, and society in general, watch too much television. Nevertheless, televising the House has given people an interest and an education in certain aspect of how Parliament works and television could do the same for the courts. If courts are televised at least when people become jurors they will have some idea of what a courtroom looks like and of the roles and duties of the people who perform in courts.

Does my hon. Friend agree that he is talking about only one part of the problem? Like him, I have constituents come to me when they are summoned to jury service because they are worried about what they will have to do. However, they are not so worried about courtroom procedure, which they are reasonably familiar with—after all they can go to a court and look. People in ordinary jobs are worried about finding themselves in the jury room at the end of a six-month trial having to decide upon a complex fraud case. At the moment that is a totally closed experience to anyone who is summoned to serve on a jury. Does he agree that the type of experiment that we have been discussing may help to remove some fears about that end of the experience?

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. He has described succinctly the fears that have been expressed by our constituents about the difficulties and complexities of being a jury member. The fear of being in court and on a jury and not being able to understand the complex issues has led jurors to tell me that they were relieved to get back to work and to leave that job which they recognise is invaluable in our society. I passionately believe in the jury system and I do not want it to end. Removing juries would be a disservice to our country.

We must not be afraid of experimentation. We must not be put off by the difficulties involved in research into juries or of having cameras in courts and the initial problems that might arise. We must make progress. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton referred to trendy or liberal vicars. I had not imagined that a supporter of this Bill could be described as liberal in the sense of doing something just because it was fashionable. However, I must admit that even the Church has used modern media to promote its cause effectively.

The Bill offers an opportunity to expand education and knowledge and also to make the system more effective so that justice is done and seen to be done. I support the Bill in the interests of justice in an attempt to improve justice. Our legal system is first class. It is the best in the world and I say that as a non-lawyer and someone who is proud to be British and part of the British judicial system. However, that does not mean that the system cannot be improved. It would be regrettable if Members who are prominent lawyers tried to kill the Bill by speaking at such great length that we do not have the opportunity to take the Bill to Standing Committee to discuss the difficulties and problems to which reference has been made in this debate.

Killing the Bill would not be in the interests of justice and it would certainly not be in the public interest. People will be disappointed if they do not have access to the courts via their television sets with the restrictions described wisely by my right hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General.

People do not love lawyers or politicians. However, as a result of the televising of our proceedings, more people have been able to hear and see at first hand what we are saying and doing instead of having to rely on experts on the television telling them what politicians have or have not said. By turning on the television, people have an automatic opportunity to see what leading members of the Government or the Opposition are saying.

My hon. Friend referred to people watching us on television. Does he agree that that can be misleading because people tend to believe that we do everything in the Chamber?

I do not agree with that. I am a member of the Select Committee on Education, Science and Arts. Our proceedings on that Select Committee have been televised and people have written to me after watching the broadcasts. If people were to see the Chamber today and on other occasions when it is three quarters empty, they would wonder what on earth we were up to. Fortunately most of us receive a great deal of constituency correspondence. Our constituents know that we spend much time answering their letters. My hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Mr. Summerson), who has an excellent constituency record, writes many constituency letters. His constituents know that when he is not in the Chamber is is elsewhere looking after their interests.

If the broadcasting of court proceedings is shown to promote public understanding of the legal system without impeding the administration of justice—that is a very big rider—a significant reform will have been accomplished by the Bill.

Several of my hon. Friends will seek to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker. As we have only 36 minutes left, I shall try to keep my remarks rather briefer than I had intended. I had wanted to make a large number of points. I listened with great care to the powerful and eloquent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock). I was deeply sceptical, but my hon. Friend changed my view to mere scepticism.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence) went to the heart of the matter. The point about whether television would foster better understanding of the courts, which was at the heart of the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston, was not effectively made. The idea that the televising of courts would be an experiment is patently absurd. We all know perfectly well that once television cameras are in the courts they will be there to stay. Anyone who supports the Bill should not attach any weight to the idea that it would remain an experiment. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton wondered whether it would become a media circus. He said with great percipience that education is the price that television pays for entertainment. That is right. There must be a serious and legitimate concern about the possibility of our courts being degraded.

The case for television as a possible weapon in the army of deterrents was not well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston. There is clear evidence that television coverage can deter potential criminals. One needs think only of the amount of time that was recently spent in the House condemning badger baiting and urging that the law be changed. I say that because my hon. Friend the Member for Boothferry (Mr. Davis) is on the Government Front Bench. I know of his deep concern about the future of the badger. There is no doubt that if the public, who are already revolted by badger baiters, were to see a trial on television and the evil people in the dock, it would certainly reinforce the deterrent effect of the law.

My hon. Friend leads me to my worry about the Bill. I am not sure whether he is on to a very good point. The type of people who are likely to commit the offences that are to be outlawed under the Badgers Bill, if it receives Royal Assent, are disagreeable. However, for them to get into the courtroom, which might be televised, and for them to be convicted they would need witnesses to give evidence against them. Might not those witnesses, by the very presence of television, be intimidated and not give evidence on the ground that, when they leave the court room, they might fear for their own safety? That is my concern about the Bill.

My hon. Friend is on to an extremely good point about the effect that television would have on witnesses. Were it not for the time, I would have spent some time dealing with the effect of television on witnesses appearing in court and on witnesses being willing to testify. I imagine that that is an extremely frightening experience. I am at one with my hon. Friend on that point. I used the badger example purely because I noticed that my hon. Friend the Member for Boothferry is on the Treasury Bench and that is one area in which the case made by the proposer may have some justification in that the proposals might have a deterrent effect.

I read with great interest the Bar Council's extremely interesting and well-written report. There is no doubt that barristers like taking part in public affairs, but the report must be seen in context. It makes the case for television. It does not seek to give an impartial view of whether television would be a good thing. It seeks to put the case for the Bar Council that television would be a good thing.

The report contains a number of flaws, of which I shall refer to two that have already been mentioned briefly. First, the report refers to the example of the United States. However, television cameras have been allowed only into the state courts, not the federal courts. There is no evidence that permission would be given for that. Secondly, the list of countries that allow cameras in their courts is not all that impressive. The case for television in court has not been made in several of our Community partner countries. Furthermore, the list of senior judges who have come out in support of television does not in any way make the case that many judges are in favour of the proposals.

Therefore, although I read the report with great interest, I did not find it compelling. Television would inevitably focus on the sensational and the salacious. In many senses, television is the great trivialiser and it would not be a benefit to justice.

There are other reasons for opposing the proposals. The Bar Council recommends that broadcasters apply on a case-by-case basis, but presumably some cases could be excluded. The Bar Council states that a judge could decide to exclude the cameras halfway through a case. What about the position of the defendant? That is a cavalier approach to what would be a major change to the current system of justice. Why should some cases be broadcast and not others? Where is the justice in that?

My hon. Friend is not being as serious as he often is. At the moment, we allow the press to decide which parts of a court case to pick and which cases to attend. Allowing television the same discretion, even on a research basis, is not a difference of principle. The key point is whether my hon. Friend is arguing the historic negative—that we cannot do something in a new way because it has not been done that way before. Or is my hon. Friend arguing that things are so self-evidently right that there should never on any account be any research on jurors or any television trials for whatever purpose? I could understand that, but to say that because we have not had the experience, we cannot say that something is a good thing strikes me as the argument for abolishing this place, because we tend to change things.

My hon. Friend is behaving like a barrister—he is knocking down a case that I have not even put. If he reads Hansard carefully, he will see that I was making neither of those two arguments. It is interesting that there has been no discussion of whether radio should be allowed in the courts. There is nothing about that in the Bar Council's report. As I have said, it left me with the feeling that members of the Bar like to take part in public affairs. They have a view about life and want to pass it to a wider audience.

I should like to read to the House some of the eight reasons given in the Bar Council report in favour of what it is seeking. The report refers to

"the experience of our legal colleagues abroad. The televising of their courts has been overwhelmingly favourable."

I did not see any evidence for that view in the report. Television may or may not be good for justice, but the evidence is not in the report.

The report also states:

"The 1925 ban on photography in court was intended to apply to sensational stills photography and was simply extended without debate to television when it became commercially available. Parliament has never considered the issue of televising the courts."

Again, all that may be true, but that is an observation, not a reason in favour of what the Bar Council is proposing.

The report continues:

"Television is today the most important news medium. Over 70 per cent. of our population rely upon it as the principal source of their information."

So what? Will the processes of justice be enhanced as a result?

As I said, I read the report with great interest, especially its seventh conclusion, which states:

"Televising the courts would have an informative and educative value."

But that is not what the courts are for. It is a clever and interesting document, but, although it is deeply thought provoking, it does not make a strong case.

I shall not examine the effect of television on the witnesses, but I shall look at the effect on the jury. A number of my hon. Friends have told us whether they undertook jury service. I did undertake jury service, on one occasion and shortly before I was elected to this place. I went to the Old Bailey and was part of a jury—indeed the foreman—on a two-day trial. Although the experience was deeply educational, it did not make me feel that the jury system was in need of enormous improvement.

One improvement has been made since that time. On the first day that I arrived, dressed in a suit, very much as I am now, I could not understand why, in every case in which I was presented as a juror, there were shouts of "object" from the defence barristers. I rang one of my friends in the legal profession—I have nothing against lawyers and some of my best friends are lawyers—to ask him about this phenomenom. He explained that I was not correctly attired for going on to a jury. He advised me to turn up in a pair of jeans, a pair of suede shoes, a roll-necked jersey and a pair of those Leon Trostsky glasses that were very much favoured by my hon. Friend the Member for Elton (Mr. Bottomley). Immediately, I was on trial the next morning. The piece de resistance was the rolled up copy of The Guardian that I had under my arm.

Does my hon. Friend think that the reason why he had so much difficulty getting on to the jury was the colour of his tie, which appears to be a political statement?

Fortunately, the problem did not arise when I turned up on the second day wearing a roll-necked sweater.

There is no doubt that the effect of television on jurors and potential jurors would be substantial. When they have a break, juries are told not to discuss with anybody else the case that they are trying. That important principle would be undermined if television were allowed into the courts. I am sure that some jurors would want television and others would shun the very idea. It would lead to pressure and could change the verdict. That point should occupy us most in our discussions of this matter.

I have exceeded my self-allotted time limit so I shall not make many of the other points that I could make. It would be a mistake for the provisions of the Bill to be enacted. I apologise to the House because I shall not be here at 2.30 to vote, but, were I here, I should vote against Second Reading. The Bill would not enhance the process of justice and such enhancement should be our key aim.

Many of the arguments for and against the Bill have already been well covered and I shall concentrate on just a couple of specific points. We are going through not a crisis—that is too strong a word—but a period in which the role of our courts and the facilities with which they dispense what most people accept as justice is under deeper question than I can ever remember their being during the whole of my adult life.

I wish to explore whether the advent of even an experiment of televising part of or all our court proceedings would assist members of the general public in deciding whether what they regarded as justice was being dispensed in the courts. On balance, I come to the view that the exposure of many of the arcane procedures of our courts would be of assistance in determining whether those procedures were as acceptable to the public of the 1990s as they were, one assumes, to the public of the 1890s.

My initial reaction to the Bill, in so far as the measure is purely experimental, is to welcome it. The courts will gain from such exposure, even if it is merely experimental. Unlike my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), who expressed doubts, I believe that once the experiment has been conducted the courts, the legal professions and legal departments may well decide that the experiment has been sufficient and that we need go no further down the road of constant exposure of our courts to television.

How often do all of us in our surgeries and going around our constituencies come across ordinary people on middle incomes who believe that justice is no longer for them, while people on low incomes have access to the courts through legal aid and people on high incomes or with considerable wealth have access to the courts through their own resources? Between those two extremes are people for whom any contact with the legal process is a disaster. If they are accused of an offence of any sort, whether guilty or innocent, they believe that they are broken before the process starts.

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It was suggested earlier that the introduction of television into the courts was likely to increase public confidence in our legal system. The public confidence that does not necessarily exist in our legal system is absent not because of a lack of visibility of our courts system, but because of the cost of court proceedings and the delays involved in the judicial system. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not because television cameras are not there?

I understand my hon. Friend's point, and he is right in part. The existence of television in court would help not so much to increase knowledge of the system as to throw light on those parts of the system that could be susceptible to change, given sufficient pressure, to make the courts more open to the ordinary individual. The fear of the legal process—fear is the only word to describe it—may be heightened when people see a six-month fraud trial on television. Any one of us could stand accused of fraud in our day-to-day dealings. I am sure that that does not apply to my hon. Friend, but it does apply to most of us. We would then have to face a trial which, if the Bill were enacted, would be seen on television. The fact that it would be on television would increase public pressure for a more user-friendly system of courts and of access to justice. That would deal with some of the present problems. I accept that the problem is not directly one of knowledge, but indirectly knowledge would aid in changing the system.

I intervened in the clear exposition of the purpose of the Bill given by my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock). Any hon. Member who has experience in constituency work of the most deeply felt cases involving the physical abuse of children will know that that is where the fear of the judicial process is greatest. Any adult accused of abusing a child in any way will find that, however fairly the system is conducted, it seems to be biased against the adult.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock) said that the system would not necessarily alter the absolute bar on televising or the use of photography in cases involving children and I accept that in cases involving children who are asked to take the witness stand, whether in front of or behind a screen, he is right. But I wonder whether the fear of the judicial process might be eased if the cameras were allowed, on an experimental basis, in that part of a case involving a child when an adult was giving evidence or otherwise appearing in the case. In my experience of such cases—unfortunately, in the county of Avon, where there tend to be a number of such cases, I have had exposure to some of them—adults frequently need an opportunity to justify themselves in public. Too often that opportunity is not available under our present courts system. The experiment that would be initiated as a result of the Bill might increase at least the perception of justice in such cases.

Because of the lack of time, I will raise just one final point concerning the jury system. I have never served on a jury. Apart from being a Member of this place, I was previously in a profession in which it was rare that I was not able to put to the court a case for saying that my profession did not allow me to be a juror because of the risk of the length of time that I would be away from my work. In the 1970s when I was a parliamentary candidate, having been called as a juror at the central criminal court, the fact of being a candidate debarred me from every jury available at the time because I could not tell the court in all honesty that my profession enabled me to be on a trial of the length that that court anticipated.

Many of my colleagues in the accountancy profession are in a similar position. They are potentially liable to jury service, but the fear of what that service could do to them in their professional or business activities means that their first reaction on being called is to look for excuses to avoid serving. In part, I suspect that such pressure is unavoidable, certainly for so long as we submit jurors to trials of the length to which we have referred today. In part also, however, the reason why so many people try to avoid jury service as soon as they are called is ignorance of what being a juror involves. Again, the experiment that the Bill would permit could help to break down that fear of jury service. For that reason, I commend the experiment to the House.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell), I apologise for the fact that, because I have to catch a train to my constituency, I may not be present if a Division is called at the end of the debate. Meanwhile, however, I wish the Bill well.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock) on the way in which he introduced the Bill. Unlike some others, I did not parachute into the debate with a prejudice one way or the other. Debates of this type in the House prove the advantage, as has happened on other occasions in the recent past, of listening to the arguments on both sides. It is then possible to be conscious of some of the issues, but to reach a view on which side to take.

In this case we must decide whether the broadcasting and recording of trials should take place at some stage, and under what conditions that should occur. I come to the conclusion at the end of the debate, having listened to as much of it as any hon. Member present—perhaps with the exception of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Mr. Ground), who has listened to all of it, even though he may not have an opportunity to speak—that broadcasting and recording should at some stage be allowed, and I believe that the way that is recommended in the Bill would be the right way to do it. I think that it is better for strict controls to be available to the courts and the Lord Chancellor than for us to try to write regulations into primary legislation.

Research into the jury system and jury experience is, I believe, worth while. I do not think it essential for the Bill to be passed this year, although I shall support it enthusiastically if it comes to a vote, but I certainly feel that we sometimes disregard important points.

First, the experts are not always wrong—being in possession of the facts often helps people to reach judgments. I hope to demonstrate that point next Tuesday in relation to the legal implications of mass random breath testing. Only if we have the facts can we improve things. Government and Parliament tend sometimes to ignore the importance of commissioning effective research, the conclusions of the research that we do commission and, finally, the fact that we should do something about the system.

Secondly, we underestimate the competence of broadcasters. I agree with what has been said about the relevance of radio as well as television, but I think that that would be better discussed in Committee. In general, broadcasters write guidelines for themselves and if those guidelines are observed, they will ensure our safety and their competence. I have read the BBC guidelines, although I have not read those of ITN or the regional commercial television companies, and I congratulate the BBC. If followed, those guidelines can get rid of most of the controversies. For instance, I believe that the problem involving the programme "Real Lives" resulted from the BBC's failure to follow its own guidelines. If he is responsible for them, Will Wyatt—who has just become managing director of BBC television—should also be congratulated on the guidelines. They can be bought for £5 at the BBC bookshop.

If broadcasters write their own guidelines they can discuss them in advance, which is better than the assumption that, because a broadcast has proved embarrassing, the broadcasters are all wrong. Broadcasters have editorial discretion, in that they cannot be told what to broadcast, but they can decide for themselves—and, if necessary, be told by the rules of the courts—what they cannot broadcast. That, surely, is right.

Nothing is necessarily intended from the beginning to be permanent. Permission for the construction of the Eiffel tower was granted only on condition that it was taken down immediately afterwards; yet it now symbolises France, as justice symbolises Britain. We cannot claim that our system of justice is perfect; if it were, we should not have a cascading appeal system. But we know that we must play by the rules and seek what is right.

I am not a lawyer, but I will tell two stories that are doubtless common currency at all lawyers' dinners. The first is of Lord Denning being told that the House of Lords had upheld one of his judgments. His response was, "I still think I was right." The second is of a judge meeting a friend outside the High Court. The friend asked, "Going back in to dispense justice?" to which the judge replied, "No; my job is to play the game by the rules."

Concern has been expressed about the effect of televising on witnesses. For a witness, the most intimidating aspect of a case is being told by a barrister, "I put it to you that…", followed by a series of claims which may not be true. The witness then has to find his way out of a web that has often been woven by someone who has read a book called "The Art of Cross-Examination", explaining how people can be tripped up and tested almost beyond breaking point. I do not think that the addition of televising will do much damage.

Our first aim should be to have less crime, and understanding the court process might help with that. We also want less conflict ending up in the civil court. Although I do not believe that we should be frightened of the law or of courts, I believe that we should reduce the number of cases that come to court. We should search for a better system of justice, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern) pointed out, we should aim for a cheaper way of administering justice effectively. We do not want cut-price, ineffective justice, but we want justice to be both more efficient and more ecnomical. I think that commissioned research could be helpful in all those respects.

I do not think that the Bill would necessarily lead to the permanent televising of cases, although that is possible. I believe, however, that if we allow the law to remain the one forum in which, without primary legislation, no one can record for research or broadcasting purposes, we shall be holding ourselves apart from the radio and television age. It is, after all, through the broadcast media that most people find out what is going on.

The Bill should be given a Second Reading. If it is not, I hope that the Government will consider the debate and see whether some form of broadcasting can be allowed in the courts.

(Brigg and Cleethorpes): I told my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Dr. Woodcock) yesterday that I should like to speak for perhaps 20 minutes or half an hour. It is clear that I shall not be able to speak for long.

I commend the way in which my hon. Friend presented the Bill. We have had a worthwhile debate. My hon. Friend's motives cannot be challenged and I admired the way in which he put his case and the arguments that he used to support it.

I was persuaded by the speeches of my right hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General and of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), who said that although the intentions of the Bill are honourable, if we were to give it a Second Reading we should be opening a large can of worms.

I am concerned about the long-term impact of the Bill. I accept that it proposes an experiment, but, as supporters of the Bill have said, the aim of the experiment is to prove that televising courts will be worth while. That is the objective of the Bill and I do not complain about it, but we cannot say that it is simply a dispassionate experiment to prove or disprove the proposal. It is being proposed on the basis that there is a case for having television cameras in the court room.

I am concerned about witnesses being intimidated by television cameras. I spoke a couple of days ago on clause 25 of the Criminal Justice Bill, which lists categories of sexual offences. The careers of witnesses or defendants are often ruined by appearing in court, with all the attendant press publicity. I am trying to imagine the effect of the Bill if the experiment were to become a permanent feature of our judicial proceedings—

rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.

Object.

Object.

Not moved.

Object.

Object.

Second Reading what day?

On the proposal of my hon. Friend the Member for York (Mr. Gregory), who is in charge of the Bill, Friday 1 March.

Not moved.

I am grateful for the opportunity to revert to my constituency role and to raise a matter that is of considerable concern to several thousand of my constituents who are tenants of Livingston development corporation. The matters that I will raise are common to the other four new towns in Scotland. The House will understand why I will confine my remarks mainly to Livingston, which I represent and which I know best.

Until last month, the future arrangement for the houses in the Scottish new towns was unsatisfactory from our point of view, but it was at least clear. Since last month, the position has remained unsatisfactory, but it has now become confused as well. There are two matters of contention that I want to raise, and I suspect that the Minister has anticipated the points around which I shall weave the argument.

First, what happens to the stock of the new towns when they are wound up? Until 1987, as the Minister will be aware, the position was fairly clear. It was anticipated that the housing stock would transfer to the appropriate district council. Indeed, a working party under the Scottish Office sat for two years and carried out considerable work on the management and financial arrangements for the transfer.

In 1987, a White Paper, without consultation or explanation, entirely reversed that position with the following flat statement:

"the automatic transfer of the entire housing stock to a local authority can no longer be regarded as consistent with the Government's aim of increasing diversity and choice."

The Government have a mega-problem in reconciling that statement with the consistency that they seek in their housing policy. The mega-problem is that, for years, Ministers have promised tenants of new towns and elsewhere tenants' choice and they have made great play of that issue. Unfortunately for Ministers, all the evidence is that the tenants in the Scottish new towns who wish to continue to rent houses overwhelmingly wish to do so in future from the district council. That is the most popular choice of future landlord for those tenants.

The most recent survey was carried out by the Scottish local authorities for new towns in May 1990. The survey found that three quarters of tenants across the five new towns would choose the district council if they had to do so now, and two thirds of them gave a clear indication that they would choose the district council when the wind-up arrived.

The Minister comes to the debate with a fresh mind and a clean sheet. I will not seek to hang around his neck the mistakes of his predecessors. I trust that he will apply to the issue the clear thinking that we can expect of someone who is unencumbered by recent history. However, I warn him that his predecessor in the matter was on occasion forced to adopt a rather inelegant posture as he tried to find a position from which he could not see the clear majority.

When the matter was debated last year during the passage of the Enterprise and New Towns (Scotland) Bill, the Minister, who is today Secretary of State for Scotland, referred to the Government's own survey of the opinions of tenants in the new towns. That survey was carried out before the survey whose figures I have just quoted to the House. During the debate, the Minister said that the Government's survey showed that barely 50 per cent. of tenants would prefer the district council. There is a thin dividing line between "barely 50 per cent." and a clear majority. Without quibbling over how to define it, I must point out that the figure was 58 per cent. who said that they would choose the district council if the new towns were wound up now.

Not only is 58 per cent. a comfortable working majority with which both I, and I suspect yourself Madam Deputy Speaker, would be content in the forthcoming general election, but it was twice as high as the total figure for all other landlords quoted for anyone else in the survey. It would be an outrage if the tenants who voted by such a large majority for the district council to be available to them as an option, were denied that option. It would also most certainly be inconsistent with the Government's policy of tenants' choice.

Since that debate, an even more pointed inconsistency has emerged. Since the House debated the Enterprise and New Towns (Scotland) Bill on Report, regulations were laid down last year by the parallel department with responsibility for new towns in England, which provides for the winding up of English new towns. Those regulations clearly and explicitly provide that every tenant of a new town house has the right to choose their future landlord, and that that choice shall include the local authority with housing responsibility. Nothing less will do for the tenants of Scottish new towns and there is no way in which he, or any of his colleagues in the Scottish Office, will be able to defend such a glaring inconsistency in Government policy as not to offer the tenants of Scotland what has already been offered to tenants in England.

We have moved a year on from that Report stage. When the Minister responds to the debate I hope that he will give us some sign of how the Government have reflected upon this matter and developed their thinking in the year since we last debated these matters in the Chamber.

Secondly, I wish to press the Minister on the matter that prompted today's debate. What makes it disappointing that Government thinking has not moved further on the future of the housing stock in the past year is that the Minister has found time for a dramatic change of policy on the management of the housing stock in the interval between now and the winding up. In anticipation of the winding up of Livingston new town, the development corporation formed its housing department into a non-profit making company. That was achieved in autumn 1989 and it was registered as a non-profit-making company in that year, so that the housing department, as a new legal entity, could take on a legally binding contract for management of the Livingston housing stock, with the clear intention that, when winding up arrived, that company would be available as one of the competing offers to provide for the ownership of the housing stock as a new landlord for tenants of the new town.

I have never made any bones about the fact that if the district council were not an option for tenants, probably the best solution would be if the present housing department were to continue as a company, with its own standing, but maintaining the public service standards at present available. I say this to their credit that those people who took the initiative to register that company, to reconstitute the housing department in Livingston, have always made it clear that they would welcome the district council as one of the options to tenants in the new town, and that they were willing to take their chance on tenants choosing them rather than the district council, provided that that choice was available.

It will be clear from what I have said that we are not discussing a new proposal this afternoon. The proposal that the housing department should become a legal company, and that it should then enter a legally binding contract with the development corporation, has been around for a year and a half. During that time, considerable management work has gone into preparing the way for such a contract. Significant expense has been incurred in the process. Great effort has been made to inform and to involve the staff of the enterprise, and I understand that the staff of the housing department have been unanimous in backing the initiative, and that real steps have been taken to communicate the proposals for the development to tenants. I do not suggest that tenants have necessarily been in overwhelming support of the proposal or that they have been unanimous in their agreement to it, but every tenant has received a letter explaining the proposal. It is inconceivable that the Scottish Office did not know what was being proposed during that year and a half of activity. Indeed, it is inconceivable that the Industry Department for Scotland did not approve of the proposal.

The rules were changed suddenly last month. We have been told that it will be possible for the development corporation to place a contract for the management of the housing stock with the housing department or anyone else only if the contract is put out to open tender and if any private landlord or developer can bid. That might involve Quality Street. Mackay's flat agency or Wallace Mercer and David Murray forming a company.

It has been suggested that a reason for that insistence is the unfortunate publicity about the formation of the Waverley Trust which has embarrassed the Scottish Office. If that is so, that is a rather perverse response, because the Waverley Trust can, if it so chooses, put in a bid for the contract to manage the housing stock of the new town.

There is a grotesque conflict between the requirement that I have described and repeated promises by Ministers of tenants' choice. Ministers are insisting that on wind up, the tenants should choose their landlord. They will not be allowed to choose the district council, but they may choose any other landlord. However, in the proposal to transfer the management of everything in the housing stock except its ownership, Ministers insist that it should be settled by competitive tender. That cannot be squared with tenants' choice, because it could result in the management contract going to a developer or landlord who is flatly the reverse of what the tenants want.

To the housing department's credit, it has said that in those circumstances it does not propose to go ahead and develop negotiations for a contract for the management of the housing stock. It believes that it would not be fair to the tenants to proceed if the only basis on which it is allowed to proceed is to open the doors to bids from private developers who might be wholly unacceptable to the tenants.

I attended a meeting with the Minister when those points were discussed with the councillors from the five new towns. In his response to those discussions, the Minister said that he believed that in the circumstances the housing department should press ahead with its bid for the contract and beat off the competition. I can state candidly that if that course were followed the housing department would win the contract. However, if the Minister is certain of the outcome, why have the farce of open and competitive tender? If we cannot be certain of that outcome, how can we ask the housing department and Livingston development corporation to run the risk that the process might open the door to any outside developer?

Perversely, the credibility of the housing department with the tenants of the new town has never been higher, because the department has been seen to put the interests of the tenants before its own wish to secure a contract for the management of the housing stock. That credibility will be at risk if the housing department and the development corporation insist on taking a step that will open the door to all corners.

The Government's recent intervention and the imposition of competitive tendering as the basis for such a contract have stopped all progress. That must be perverse from the Minister's point of view. As I understand the preference of Ministers, they want to promote plurality of landlords in the housing stock. They want alternatives to local authorities, but on this occasion they are effectively stopping a new player entering the housing scene and widening the alternatives available to the tenants.

The new towns also have a real practical problem. How do they retain staff in the new circumstances? That problem extends beyond the housing department. Agency contracts have been discussed in four other sections of the Livingston development corporation. In the architects department, direct labour and legal services, there is a proposal either to form a new firm or to merge the present staff with an existing professional firm on the strength of agency contracts with the new town. All those measures are also now blocked by the parallel requirement that they must go to competitive tender. That will not only inconvenience staff but potentially inconvenience the people who live in the new towns if the new towns are unable to retain the staff who have made those new towns such a success.

I demonstrate the problem by reference to the housing department. It will come as a surprise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to hear that every member of staff of the Livingston housing department is younger than I. That is not such a stiff test as it used to be, but it is a clear sign that we are dealing with staff who cannot be content to wait for wind-up and the prospect of taking early retirement. They all wish their careers to continue beyond wind-up. With the collapse of the possibility of a management agency giving them security of employment beyond wind-up, there must be a real risk that those people will now necessarily look for careers outside the new towns.

In strict managerial terms, the Government's change of heart has been incompetent. The residents will be most affected if services cannot be maintained. Several questions arise from that change of policy. I fully appreciate that the Minister may not be able to answer than in this forum immediately, but I should be content if some were answered by letter.

First, when did the Industry Department know of the proposals for a management agency? Secondly, why did it take so long to make it clear to the new towns that the process would have to go through competitive tender? Thirdly, is the same requirement of open competitive tender being made to Scottish Homes in the many cases in which Scottish Homes is now involved in coming to a management agreement with its staff? How could one possibly justify having two different standards of test applied to the new town housing departments as opposed to Scottish Homes? Fourthly, if competitive tendering is to be required, how can we reconcile that with tenants' choice and how do Ministers propose that tenants will be consulted?

Fifthly, if competitive tendering takes place—it will be obvious from my observations that I doubt whether that is an appropriate way in which to proceed—will the local district council be entitled to put in a bid as part of that process? Sixthly, when the Government arrive at wind-up, may we have an assurance that they will not insist on competitive tendering when they dispose of all the housing stock? I hope that the Minister agrees that that would be intolerable and unacceptable, but what possible logic is there in insisting on competitive tendering for the management of the stock which will not be subject to competitive tendering when its ownership becomes available?

It is evident to me and, I hope, to the House that Ministers have made a mistake that has caused immediate and serious problems for the new towns and for tenants. I am a reasonable man who is seeking to apply my mind to the matter as a constituency Member, not as a partisan politician. I therefore do not press the Minister to admit that there was a mistake. I should be perfectly happy if he chooses whatever form of words to conceal the fact that he made a mistake. However, I ask him to find a way quietly to reverse that mistake. I hope that the debate will assist in prompting the Minister to think again about a policy on which his predecessor should have consulted before making it. I hope also that the Minister will listen to the arguments for reversing it.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) on providing this opportunity to consider Scottish new towns housing. He obtained the debate by acting speedily when one of his colleagues withdrew the original topic on the Order Paper. I shall carefully consider all the points that the hon. Gentleman has made. I shall reply in general terms, but I assure him that some of the detailed questions that I may not be able to cover in the time available will be answered by letter. The recent record of housing in the five Scottish new towns is one of outstanding success and it deserves recognition by the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues. The general prosperity arising from the success of the new towns corporations has provided some of the healthiest local housing markets in Scotland in recent years. The demand for housing to buy has attracted private house builders in strength and, without exception, all the towns can boast major housing developments which only a few years ago would have been impossible or difficult to anticipate. That is true of all the new towns. Home owners are now in the majority in all the five Scottish new towns —in some, such as Cumbernauld, home ownership is running at over 60 per cent.—so home ownership has a convincing majority.

The second major contributory factor leading to increased home ownership has been the sale of corporation housing to tenants. That is another outstanding success story. One in every two new town development corporation houses will have been sold to its sitting tenant by the end of this financial year. The five corporations now own fewer than 35,000 houses.

The purpose of the hon. Gentleman's debate is to look ahead. Tenants will continue to have the choice of home ownership through right-to-buy and through the voluntary sales schemes, including our rents-to-mortgage scheme, which brings home ownership within the reach of yet another group of potential purchasers, as well as the private sector itself.

It is in the context of a varied and constantly evolving housing market in each of the five towns, each with distinctive characteristics, that we must consider the future arrangements for housing. As the hon. Gentleman told the House, the Government set out their policy in some detail in the 1989 White Paper. Prior to the publication of that White Paper, the consultation documents that preceded it raised the option of transfers to other landlords instead of to the district councils following wind-up. That White Paper stated that building programmes would be continued and that we would aim to accelerate completions of corporation housing developments. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the corporations have devoted substantial resources to housing capital programmes, both to modernise old stock and to undertake new building.

On the issue of housing for rent, on which the hon. Gentleman focused, as he properly stated, the White Paper made it clear that the corporations would be expected to continue to promote diversification of rented tenure in the towns. They may do that by seeking to attract other landlords to develop in the town, but the main opportunities revolve around the corporations' own housing stock. The White Paper gave an undertaking that no tenant would have to change landlord in the period before wind-up, but there has been good scope for initiatives to be taken within that undertaking. Corporations have been exploring the scope for diversification. There have been local initiatives involving the transfer of stock to housing associations and the creation of a housing co-operative in the hon. Gentleman's new town of Livingston. It is within that general framework of diversification that we intend to consider the future of each corporation's stock as wind-up progresses. On the issue of what happens at wind-up, the White Paper gave an undertaking to consult the interested parties once that process is well under way.

The hon. Gentleman referred to a number of surveys. He will not dispute that the independent survey of tenants before the publication of the White Paper confirmed that a clear majority of tenants agreed that the right time to take those decisions is much nearer the wind-up date than we are at present. We are not expecting the wind-up in the hon. Gentleman's constituency to start until 1995. In the meantime, the Government, with the assistance of the corporation and of Scottish Homes—the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that the difference between the Scottish and English circumstances is that there is no comparable organisation to Scottish Homes south of the border—will try to ensure that a realistic range of options is available when the time comes to take those decisions.

The hon. Gentleman has referred to the widespread view among tenants that they would like to have their district council as one of their options. He suggested, and I should not disagree, that that is often how the view is expressed, but in practice tenants are saying that they want the transfer of their house to be to the district council. It would not be in line with the diversification if substantial portions of a corporation's housing stock went to enhance the existing stock of any other major landlord, whether public or private. We remain committed to expanding the contribution of housing associations in the new towns and to using the private sector to bring back into use those limited parts of the housing stock where improvements are needed. That has a lesser role in the new towns than in the older cities.

Equally, the Government have said that we shall first examine the scope for other initiatives. As the White Paper said, the residual stock of each corporation will be transferred to Scottish Homes with a view to pursuing further diversification. However, I should stress that the Government have said that we shall first examine the scope for other initiatives, including whether there should be any transfer to district councils—a point on which the hon. Gentleman has focused.

At the moment, we do not know—none of us can—just how many houses each corporation will have left when the closing stages of wind-up are reached. We also cannot know the location of their houses or their type, the needs and circumstances of their tenants or whether they are best served by a local authority or some other landlord. These decisions need to be taken much nearer the time. However, I hope that I can reassure the hon. Gentleman and his constituents on two points. First, the criteria that we would consider applying in the search for alternative landlords would include the ability of those landlords to preserve the high standards that tenants have come to expect from development corporations. I give tenants that clear assurance.

Secondly, the hon. Gentleman referred to the meeting that we attended. I have invited the district councils for the new town areas, through their representative organisation, Scottish Local Authorities with New Towns, or SLANT, to elaborate on the argument that they put forward at a recent meeting, that the Government's objective of diversification could be achieved while still allowing the district council to be a choice for which tenants might opt. I am grateful to SLANT for responding positively to the suggestion that it expands on that in any paper that it is preparing.

The hon. Gentleman also referred to the proposal from Livingston development corporation to establish a housing management agency from its own staff and to award it the contract for managing the corporation's tenancy stock. Let me make it clear that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I welcome this initiative as one which appears to be entirely satisfactory for the tenants. However, there is a need to show that this is the best arrangement for tenants, and more generally. I hope that there will be a way to get through the problems to which the hon. Gentleman referred. I give him the assurance that I will be happy to consider further with the corporation precisely how we might achieve that.