Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, with reference to paragraph 1.37 of the report entitled The Independent Review of the Metropolitan Police Service's handling of non-recent sexual offence investigations alleged against persons of public prominence, published 4 October 2019, how many of the 159 cases of false allegations of rape or domestic violence were prosecuted; and how many of the (a) referrals and (b) subsequent prosecutions were related to (i) rape and (ii) domestic violence charges.

The Metropolitan Police Review refers to 159 cases of false allegations of rape and/or domestic violence made between January 2011 to May 2012. These were cases that had been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for a charging decision. The Review erroneously refers to the period as being between 2013-14.

The 159 cases were reviewed by the DPP and the Crown Prosecution Service published a report of these cases, entitled ‘‘Charging Perverting the Course of Justice and Wasting Police Time in Cases involving allegedly False Rape and Domestic Violence Allegations’ in 2013.

Of the 159 cases referred for a charging decision,

• 121 related to an allegedly false allegation of rape – of these 35 were prosecuted; 25 for perverting the course of justice and ten for wasting police time;

• 27 related to allegedly false allegations of domestic violence (the term in use at the time) – six were prosecuted for perverting the course of justice and one for wasting police time.

• 11 related to allegedly false allegations of both rape and domestic violence – three were prosecuted, all for perverting the course of justice.

During the period of the review there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape and 111,891 for domestic violence by the Crown Prosecution Service across England and Wales.