Courts in England and Wales will set aside specially equipped courtrooms to fast-track rape and serious sexual cases, as a massive backlog means thousands of women wait longer than a year to get a court date and justice.
Every Crown Court in England and Wales will set aside a courtroom just for the hearing of rape and serious sexual offence cases, with the government earmarking a ‘multi-million-pound’ budget to specially adapt the courts for the task. Court houses will provide a special private entrance for sex crime victims, and special waiting areas inside, so they aren’t circulating in the same public areas as others.
Court staff, including judges, will receive special training as part of this initiative, which will see rape trials not only allocated their own courtrooms but also prioritised with fixed-date trials, rather than sitting on a waiting list like other court cases.
The change is part of the government’s ongoing attempt to get a grip on the towering courts backlog, which, through years of underinvestment in the courts system, with ever more technically complex and consequently longer trials, and a rise in the amount of crime being detected and prosecuted, has seen wait times soar. In more and more cases, victims can wait years for a court date, which critics say discourages people from coming forward, and in some cases encourages victims to withdraw cases when they become demoralised by the extremely long process.
Per a report in The Times, the average rape case took 424 days to complete once it had entered the Crown Court system.
The initiative will start with six dedicated rape courts in 2027, with every Crown Court in England and Wales set to have a dedicated courtroom within two years, the government said.
While there is extra funding in the package for the conversion of existing courtrooms to a dedicated space suited to hearing rape and sex assault cases, the total number of courts and sitting time appears to be unchanged, meaning the overall court backlog in the UK is unlikely to meaningfully change, as other types of crime are de-prioritised in favour of sex crime.
Regardless, the initiative is likely to be received with considerably more enthusiasm than Labour’s last high-profile idea to cut court waiting times, by removing the right to a jury trial for a considerable proportion of cases.
Other options exist, including opening more courts more frequently, including 24-hour court sittings, but these options cost money, and the government has other priorities.
Responding to the specialist rape court initiative, Conservative justice spokesman Nick Timothy broadly welcomed the idea but asserted more court sitting dates were still needed to provide justice for all. He said: “Tackling the delays in criminal rape trials is long overdue. The fact that victims have been withdrawing their cases because they have taken too long has been a disgrace.
“However, rape trial delays have been used by Labour as their main justification for their attack on juries. If resources can be found to accelerate rape trials, why are they persisting in their attack on this ancient right to jury trials? Labour need to get courts sitting throughout the year, end the delays and clear the backlog – not undermine our right to a trial by jury.”
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