I am currently sitting in a jurors' lounge surrounded by people who are similarly doing jury service and waiting to be selected for a trial. As a mother of a young child and a self-employed professional, I am shocked by how few of my peers from these categories are present in the room.
Jury service is like the chickenpox vaccine; in a perfect world all children other than your child would be vaccinated. Vaccinations aren't without risk, so your child wouldn't be placed in harm's way while also not being able to contract the disease. For jury service, the perfect scenario is that everyone else does it, creating such a broad cross-section of society that you don't have to join in.
We all recognise the central importance of having a cross-section of society as a pool of potential jurors. This is supposedly achieved through random selection from the electoral register. However, despite being mandatory, many people are allowed to defer, or be excused from, their duty. The result is aan unrepresentative sample of people in the jurors' lounge.
Two main issues result in many valid deferrals being issued, leaving the pool heavily weighted towards adolescents, students, retirees, public servants and the unemployed (in my lounge at least). Namely, those issues are loss of earnings and childcare.
I propose two simple solutions.
For those not working for employers allowing paid leave for jury service, loss of earnings is capped at £63.12 a day. In the current economic climate, it is fair to say that people simply cannot afford such heavy loss of earnings. The court system understandably cannot afford to pay in excess of this amount. If all employers' insurance, business insurance and/or various types of personal insurance had to cover loss of earnings due to jury service, then professionals, the self-employed, small-business owners and others in similar financial predicaments would have no excuse for deferring their civic duty. Approximately 180,000 people serve on juries each year. Insurance is a feasible way of ensuring earnings with minimal effect on monthly premiums.
Until a few weeks ago, childcare costs were paid at the minimum hourly wage. On arriving at court today, and having arranged care for my son, I was informed that this was no longer the case. The courts now pay £2.50 a hour. No childcare is available at this rate, let alone of an adequate standard. Effectively, mothers are being forced to put their hands into their pockets to pay for the privilege of sitting on a jury. Mothers of pre-school children are tacitly encouraged to apply for a deferral or excuse from their duty.
It would make better financial sense for courts to employ a childminder to be available in the jurors' lounge. Most jurors spend significant, if not most, of their time in the lounge, either waiting to be selected or during aspects of the trial when they are sent out of the courtroom. The childminder would presumably have very few children to look after at any one time. Indeed, the summons papers could include a form indicating childcare needs in order for the right number of childminders to be available each week. Alongside saving the courts money, providing this service would enable mothers of young children to perform their civic duty without being out of pocket or having to defer until their children reach school age.
Juries are integral to the legal system operating in England and Wales. Asking jurors to pay for the privilege of performing this duty, through loss of earnings or childcare costs, encourages deferrals. If defendants have the right to trial by peers drawn from a broad cross-section of society then we must end the culture of deferrals. Enforcing the mandatory aspect of jury service requires finding solutions to the problems that this civic duty raises for certain categories of people.