Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential impact of Operation Soteria on the prosecution of sexual offences.

The new Centre for VAWG and Public Protection, which launched in April 2025, has brought together three existing victim orientated policing programmes, including Operation Soteria, to oversee the response to all forms of VAWG and child sexual abuse. This will ensure that this expertise can be harnessed and put into practice in forces across the country, intensify cooperation and enhance intelligence sharing.

Through Operation Soteria, we are supporting police and prosecutors to deliver a step-change in how they investigate rape. The Home Office invested £9.4 million to develop a new National Operating Model (NOM) for the investigation of rape. This model was developed through Operation Soteria, which brought together frontline policing from across 19 forces and academics from a range of disciplines to test new tools and techniques. All police forces in England and Wales are now implementing this new approach to rape investigations.

It is not possible to link changes in metrics solely to Operation Soteria, as they are likely to be the result of various changes introduced to improve outcomes in adult rape cases however, there have been positive improvements in some key metrics since forces began implementing Operation Soteria – such as prosecution volumes.