Criminal Justice Review: Response to Rape

Robert Neill Excerpts

Tuesday 25th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I completely appreciate the hon. Lady’s righteous anger about this situation. As I said in my statement, this is not a matter about which any of us are particularly pleased or proud, and it is a source of regret that the investigation and conviction of rape has been declining for some years. It is a difficult offence to deal with at the best of times, but the significant declines that we have seen in the past few years are absolutely what we wish to address.

However, against that background, I am sorry that the hon. Lady seeks to politicise what should be a cross-party issue, not a Labour/Conservative issue. There are many Members on the Government Benches for whom this has been a significant issue for some time. As Mayor of London, the Prime Minister himself published the first ever violence against women and girls strategy in this country and, indeed, in any major city around the world. This is an issue that has been close to his heart, and indeed mine, for some time.

I should also point out to the hon. Lady that, notwithstanding the fact that there is a document that requires publishing—as I say, that will be published shortly after recess—she should not mistake that for the beginning of the work. Much work has been done thus far, and we are engaged closely with the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and other partners to make sure that the action plan and the work we need to do to get more cases from report into court has begun already. As the hon. Lady will know, the Crown Prosecution Service and the National Police Chiefs’ Council launched their joint action plan in January this year, and I am pleased that that progress is being made as well.

That is against a background of significant action by the Government over the past decade in various areas of violence against women and girls, which I hope the hon. Lady will appreciate and applaud, ranging from creating the offence of coercive control to outlawing upskirting, stalking, and revenge porn and the threat thereof. We have just passed the landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021 with great support across both Houses. Alongside that, we have the information and support campaigns the Government have been running, along with the very significant financial support that has gone into support for victims and witnesses of rape and sexual violence.

The document is important, and it was important to get it right—as I say, we delayed it at the request of the Victims’ Commissioner and the victims sector. Please be under no illusion: we are working extremely hard to try to correct what, as the hon. Lady points out, is an injustice.

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con) [V]]

As somebody who both prosecuted and defended probably dozens of rape cases in the course of my career at the Bar, I can say that the Minister is certainly right to recognise that these are always complex and demanding cases. The difficulty of securing the same level of convictions as there is for other types of serious offence has been around for many years—it is not a recent one.

It is also right, of course, to have delayed publication until the decision of the Court of Appeal in the judicial review; otherwise, it might have materially altered the review’s conclusions. However, now that all the challenges have been dismissed on all grounds and the judgment has been handed down, on 14 May, will my hon. Friend undertake to ensure that not only is the document published but that there is proper resourcing to support the joint national plan of action between the Crown Prosecution Service and the police? Doing the same is starting to make a difference in relation to the problems experienced in the past with disclosure. Getting the thing working on the ground, surely, is what we must now tackle very urgently.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee. He is quite right that to get this complicated and difficult piece of work correct, it was appropriate for us to delay. I have to confess that I was pretty gung-ho —anxious to get it out before Christmas. But as I say, the intervention of the sector and the judicial review meant that we had to hold off because of the implications.

My hon. Friend is quite right that the key issue is not so much the document, which is an important statement and political moment, but the operationalisation of what is within it. While we are dealing with a police service of tens of thousands of individuals, a prosecution service with many people involved, and lots of other parties that take a case from report to court, getting them all to both act and think differently—the culture change as well as the operational change—will be an enormous challenge. That is what we are focused on. He will be pleased to know that I have convened a Criminal Justice Board taskforce of key individuals in the organisations involved to try to drive that operational challenge of embedding change.