Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to Recommendation 6 of the Joint Inspectorate’s Phase Two report into the police and Crown Prosecution Service response to rape, published in February 2022, what steps he has taken to gather quantitative and qualitative data on the use of special measures in rape cases; and if he will publish data on the (a) number and (b) proportion of rape cases prosecuted in England and Wales where special measures have been used from 1 September 2022 to 30 June 2023.

We recently published a process evaluation of the implementation of the pre-recorded cross-examination special measure (also known as section 28) for complainants of sexual and modern slavery offences on gov.uk. This was a qualitative evaluation which explored witness and practitioner views and experiences of section 28 to understand whether the provision was working as intended.

Ministry of Justice analysts are currently scoping an impact analysis of section 28 which will give us further qualitative data on if the measure influences the outcomes and delivery in these cases or impacts on the functioning of the courts overall.

The Ministry of Justice currently holds limited quantitative data on the use of special measures in rape cases, however we expect this to improve following the rollout of the Common Platform, a digital case management system which will be able to record special measure applications. As such we are currently unable to publish data on the number or proportion of rape cases that used special measures. However, on the criminal justice delivery dashboard we have published data which shows 433 witnesses in adult rape cases gave evidence using section 28 between January 2021 and December 2022.