Six police forces will be given powers to charge domestic abuser suspects without the involvement of the Crown Prosecution Service as part of a series of Labour proposals to solve more crimes announced on Thursday.
A future Keir Starmer government would also give victims in domestic abuse, rape and sexual assault cases the right to have specialist support advisers throughout the criminal justice process and beside them in court.
Other proposed reforms meant to speed up and improve the efficiency of the charging process, announced by the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper and the shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry, include:
• A plan to drop the requirement of police to redact case files before they are sent to the CPS, which Labour says will save thousands of officer hours.
• A statutory duty on chief constables and chief crown prosecutors to work together to deliver justice for victims, including a requirement to develop new joint justice arrangements in every area and devise an annual joint charging action plan.
• Annual joint inspections to ensure the CPS and police improve communication, reduce delays, bolster case file quality and drive up the charge rate.
Leaning into Starmer’s credentials as former director for public prosecutions, Labour has set out the proposals as a result of a report from the charging commission, a panel of former senior police chiefs and prosecutors assembled by the party to examine how to improve charging rates.
Home Office figures show that in the year to March 2023, there were “evidential difficulties” with 2,435,273 out of 5,480,135 recorded crimes.
Some 9.2% of crimes resulted in a charge or out-of-court action, along with a further 0.6% being dealt with through diversionary activity, according to the data.
Thornberry told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday: “The proportion of crimes charged has gone down by two thirds since 2015, which is pretty terrible. And at the same time, the amount of time that it is taking once the CPS had been given the information for them to charge has gone up by three.”
She added: “We ought to be thinking about the victims who are just being let down by this dysfunctionality.”
Chaired by the former victims’ commissioner Dame Vera Baird, the commission concluded that there had been a breakdown in confidence and communication between the police and CPS with officers and prosecutors often refusing to speak to one another.
Labour plans to extend the use of emergency provisions for the police to charge high-risk domestic abuser suspects where the CPS cannot charge in time after a recommendation by the commission.
The plan, based on a pilot implemented by West Yorkshire Police which has invested in a cohort of trained police decision-makers, will be rolled out to six unnamed forces with high levels of “file quality compliance” at first, the party said.
The commission said the police and CPS must “end the blame game”, and called for a new legal duty on chief constables and chief crown prosecutors in England and Wales to reduce delays and friction between the two agencies while cases are being investigated and charging decisions considered.
Some officers said they did not even have contact details for the prosecutors working on their cases, meaning they could communicate only through a “ping pong” of electronic memos, contributing to disastrous delays.
One lawyer who had been working for the CPS for more than three years said they had never spoken to a police officer. Many of those who contributed to the commission were nostalgic for the days when police and prosecutors worked alongside each other in the same building and could talk through difficult cases face-to-face.
Baird said: “These new proposals will bring a boost to charging by bringing CPS, police and victims’ organisations closer together with shared duties, through cross-agency collaboration and in a joint effort to remove inter-agency friction and focus wholly on the public interest.”
