Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether a framework is in place to ensure that the police meet the Rape and Serious Sexual Offences target of reaching a charging decision within 30 days of beginning work on a sexual assault case.

Protecting women and girls from violence and supporting victims and survivors of sexual violence is a key priority for this Government.

In June 2021, we published the End-to-End Rape Review Report and Action Plan. The action plan outlined a robust programme of work to achieve a significant improvement in the way the criminal justice system responds to rape and sexual offences against adults.

Our stated ambition in the Rape Review is to more than double the volume of adult rape cases reaching court over the Parliament, and we are using the Criminal Justice System (CJS) Delivery Dashboards to monitor progress towards this ambition.

On 16 June, we published our second six-monthly Rape Review Progress Update and third national CJS Delivery Dashboard. There are no set targets for the police on timeliness, but the Dashboard showed that in the year to December 2021 the median days from offence recording to the police charging an offender was 374, which was a reduction of 29 from 403 days in the years to June and September 2021.

The Rape Review Progress Update also outlined progress that has been made on key actions to improve the police’s response to adult rape in the year since the Rape Review, including:

• The Home Office is providing £6.65m in 2021-3 to support the expansion into a further 14 police forces of Operation Soteria, which will develop a new national operating model for the investigation of rape for police forces to adopt by June 2023. The Crown Prosecution Service will also expand Operation Soteria into the corresponding areas to those 14 police force areas.
• Running a public consultation on police requests for third-party material, which can sometimes be unnecessary and disproportionate; and

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.