The David Lammy Interview
Newscast
BBC
4.3 • 6.6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, Adam and Chris speak to the deputy prime minister David Lammy about his justice reforms.
He acknowledged the court backlog will continue to rise and may be at the same level as it is today at the next general election despite the government’s planned reforms.
He also said that Labour would be “out on their bums” if they haven’t delivered the change the public want by the time of the next election.
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Newscast brings you daily analysis of the latest political news stories from the BBC. The presenter was Adam Fleming. It was made by Anna Harris. The social producers were Joe Wilkinson and Jem Westgate. The technical producer was Ben Andrews. The assistant editor is Chris Gray. The senior news editor is Sam Bonham.
Transcript
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| 0:28.4 | So Chris, we're here at the Excel Centre in East London, which is a vast, vast, vast events venue. |
| 0:34.4 | It is. Landyards everywhere and people, me included, staring around looking totally lost because they are and then realizing that the whole number, whatever, whatever, whatever, is a quarter of a mile walk away. |
| 0:45.2 | And what we're actually at is an event being hosted by Microsoft with various breakout rooms about AI and technology. |
| 0:50.8 | But the breakout room we're in has just been where David Lammy, the Justice |
| 0:54.3 | Secretary, has been doing a quite big, wide-ranging speech. And he's invited us to have a |
| 1:00.1 | conversation with him about his reforms. But Chris, just the backstory to this is he's putting |
| 1:05.4 | forward a very controversial reform about changing which trials happen with a jury. |
| 1:10.3 | Yeah. And that has provoked some Labour |
| 1:12.3 | MPs to be nervous, and we know the track record of this government when it encounters |
| 1:16.8 | nervous Labour MPs, so do these, does this package of change happen or happen in its current |
| 1:22.0 | format? But the bigger picture thing, I think it's what makes this conversation you're about |
| 1:25.5 | to hear newscast as fascinating, is Labour campaigned on that mantra of change. And the big question for Mr. Lammy, given the scale |
| 1:33.4 | of what he's trying to take on, is how soon can he actually deliver a change that you might |
| 1:39.2 | actually notice? And the reforms he wants to do are letting magistrates pass longer sentences so that fewer cases go to Crown Court, |
| 1:47.0 | letting judges pass sentences without a jury for kind of more crimes, and also taking away the right of some defendants to decide whether they want to go to Crown Court or Magistrate's courts, so that their cases dealt within a magistrate, |
| 2:01.1 | the idea being that eventually you'll be able to cut the number of cases in the backlog |
... |
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