Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the cost to the public purse of the cross-criminal justice system rape data tool set up by the Crown Prosecution Service and Avon and Somerset Police was in the financial year 2022-23.

We recognise the importance of linking end-to-end data across criminal justice agencies and are committed to continuing to improve the quality of and access to data to enable us to develop deeper insights and improve the response to crimes such as rape.

We publish regular statistics on adult rape through the CJS Delivery Data Dashboard. These statistics demonstrate progress on our ambition to more than double the number of adult rape cases reaching court by the end of this Parliament, and to return volumes of cases being referred to the police, charged by the CPS and going to court, to at least 2016 levels. In the year to June 2023 adult rape prosecutions were up 54% on the year to June 2022, this is the fifth consecutive year we’ve seen an increase in suspects being brought to trial.

In October 2023, the Home Office and Ministry of Justice published guidance and a template Memorandum of Understanding to support local criminal justice partners to share data for the purposes of monitoring and improving performance. The Home Office do not hold data on the cost of the development of this tool but through the Rape Review, the government provided £300,000 to the Police Digital Service to evaluate and develop guidance on a range of technical solutions which could be utilised by local agencies to link their data on rape, including the tool developed by Avon and Somerset Police.

Avon and Somerset were also the pioneering police force for Operation Soteria, which has developed new national operating models for the investigation and prosecution of rape to support police and prosecutors to ensuring cases are investigated fully and pursued rigorously through the courts.