Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to tackle incidences of rape; and how she is monitoring and measuring the impact of her Department's policies and interventions.

Rape and sexual violence are devastating crimes that can have an impact on victims for the rest of their life. The most recent published annual data shows that in the year to December 2021, the volume of police recorded rape offences rose to the highest ever recorded figure at 67,125. We welcome the fact that victims of sexual offences, which are all too often hidden crimes, are bravely coming forward to report to the police.

In June 2021, the Government published its End-to-End Rape Review Findings and Action Plan. The Action Plan set out a robust programme of work to drive improvements in the criminal justice system’s (CJS) handling of adult rape cases. A year on, we have started to see increases in the number of referrals of adult rape cases from the police to the Crown Prosecution Service and in the number of charges.

On June 16, we published our second six-monthly Rape Review Progress Update which sets out the important progress that we have made, including:

o The Home Office is providing £5m in 2022/3 to support the expansion into a further 14 police forces of Operation Soteria, which will develop a new national operating model for police forces to adopt by June 2023;

o Running a public consultation on the police requests for third-party material, which can sometimes be unnecessary and disproportionate; and

o Continuing to make progress towards the target of recruiting 20,000 additional police officers by March 2023. As of March 2022, the Home Office had supported the recruitment of 13,578 police officers, and in 2022/3 we have allocated £550m to achieve the target of 20,000 officers by March 2023.

Accountability and transparency are key to ensuring we achieve our ambition of doubling the volume of adult rape cases reaching court over the Parliament. We developed a CJS delivery dashboard for recorded adult rape offences which brings together data from across the criminal justice system. This is published quarterly, and the most recent national and local dashboards were published on 16 June. By closely monitoring this data we will be able to understand the ongoing impact of our work, drive improvements and share best practice.