Blair says criminal justice favours those facing trial

Civil liberty groups and "liberals" were warned by Tony Blair yesterday to expect radical reforms to the criminal justice system as part of the Government's drive to convict more criminals.

The Prime Minister said some measures introduced to prevent miscarriages of justice were now outdated and should be scrapped to redress the balance in favour of victims.

At a justice conference in London he outlined a series of new laws being considered, including withholding child benefit from parents of children who play truant, and allowing people to be tried twice for the same crime.

Mr Blair said: "Criminal justice systems, born out of a quite necessary and proper desire to protect at all costs the civil liberties of the innocent, seem cumbersome, out of date and therefore often ineffectual in convicting the guilty."

He argued that the criminal justice system had become unbalanced in favour of people facing criminal charges, and told the conference: "Some of our reforms will be controversial. Many rules of evidence and other procedures were introduced to prevent miscarriages of justice for the defendant, and those protections for the defendant have to remain.

"[But] it's perhaps the biggest miscarriage of justice in today's system when the guilty walk away unpunished."

Among proposals expected to be included in next month's White Paper on criminal justice reforms are: the scrapping in exceptional circumstances of the double jeopardy rule, which prevents people being tried more than once for the same crime; the disclosure of previous convictions to the jury; giving prosecution counsel the right to appeal against a judge's decision to stop the trial on technical grounds; and measures to ensure violent and dangerous offenders serve more of their sentence in jail.

Other measures include withdrawing housing benefit from those convicted of antisocial offences, and fining street drunks.

Mr Blair's comments attracted immediate criticism. A spokesman for the civil rights campaign group Liberty said: "In the past 20 years there's been about 85 Acts of Parliament that dealt with the police and criminal justice. Virtually all of them eroded the rights of offenders in some way and yet there is no evidence that they reduced crime."

John Wadham, the director of Liberty, said: "Mr Blair's tough talk is misdirected. Some of his plans are far more likely to threaten fair trials than to actually affect the crime rate."

Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told the conference that the Home Office and the Lord Chancellor's Department should be replaced by a single "super ministry" of justice to bring more co-ordination to the fight against crime.He said fragmentation in the system was leading to offenders being passed between agencies "like a game of pass the parcel".