The number of rape charges and convictions being achieved in court have been overstated in Crown Prosecution Service figures, the country’s top prosecutor has admitted.
Max Hill KC said that one reason was that offenders initially charged with rape but convicted instead of sexual assault had been included in the rape conviction total. He said that other cases where an initial rape charge had later been dropped had also been included in the charging statistics. He accepted that the cause of problem was a “flagging” system used to identify rape and other sensitive cases.
Mr Hill, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said the CPS would now be displaying “caveats” about the impact of flagging on its figures more prominently throughout its statistical publications, but admitted that “further work” needed to be done to improve the statistics being presented to the public. The admission by Mr Hill came in response to a letter to him from the head of the Office for Statistics Regulation, Ed Humpherson, raising concerns about the CPS rape statistics.
Mr Humpherson said he was worried the “flagging system may lead to inflated figures for the number or charges and conviction data for rape” and that this should be “made clearer” with a “prominent caveat alongside the data”.
No estimate of how much the CPS figures for rape charges and convictions have been overstated is included in either letter.
Official figures published by the Ministry of Justice earlier this month in an update on its Rape Review reform plans showed there were 459 adult rape convictions in 2022.
That was up by three per cent on the 2021 total, but still only a fraction of the 68,948 rape offences that separate Office for National Statistics figures show were reported to police in the 12 months to the end of March this year.
