Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many convictions there were for rape in each year since 2005; and what the conviction rate was in the same period.

This Government is committed to improving the criminal justice system’s response to rape. In 2019, we commissioned our end-to-end Rape Review, publishing this in 2021 alongside a clear Action Plan that committed to delivering sustained improvements for victims. In this Action Plan, we set ourselves stretching ambitions to return the volumes of adult rape cases being referred by the police, charged by the CPS, and going to court back to 2016 levels by the end of this Parliament.

We have exceeded each of these ambitions ahead of schedule. In practice, this means we have more than doubled the volumes of police referrals, charges, and cases reaching court compared to when the Review was commissioned in 2019.

Increases to conviction volumes or conviction rates were not included as ambitions for the Rape Review. The right to a fair trial means that juries should rightly make decisions independently and based on the facts of the case.

Whilst not being a Rape Review ambition, the Ministry of Justice does hold data on convictions for rape offences.

Published data for calendar years (from 2010 to 2022) can be found in the following tool: Outcomes by Offence tool: December 2022.

The most recent published data available, providing data for the years ending in June from 2011 until 2023, can be found in the following tool: Outcomes by Offence tool: June 2023.

The full calendar year for 2023 will be available in the next update of the Outcomes by Offence tool, expected in May 2024.

This can be accessed by navigating to the ‘Prosecutions and convictions’ tab and using the Offence filter to select the following offences in the Outcomes by Offence data tool:

• 19C Rape of a female aged 16 or over
• 19D Rape of a female aged under 16
• 19E Rape of a female child under 13 by a male
• 19F Rape of a male aged 16 or over
• 19G Rape of a male aged under 16
• 19H Rape of a male child under 13 by a male

To cover the full period requested, previously unpublished convictions for rape offences from 2005 to 2009 have now been provided in Table 1.

It is not advised to use this data to calculate conviction rate (the number of convictions as a proportion of the number of prosecutions). This is due to the Court Proceedings Database counting two separate records at two separate stages (one for prosecution, one for conviction). We cannot track the defendant throughout their court journey and an individual may appear at each court in separate years, or for a different principal offence at different stages. As a result, this rate is not an accurate measure of the proportion of prosecutions that result in a conviction.

However, the most accessible published data for conviction rates is in the quarterly data summaries for the period 2019/20 onwards published by the CPS in the CPS quarterly data summaries | The Crown Prosecution Service. Furthermore, convictions rates 2007/8 to 2013/14 are available in the CPS Violence against Women and Girls crime report 2013-2014.