In July 2020 the CPS published on its website a document entitled “Rape and Serious Sexual Offences Strategy 2025”, or “RASSO 2025” for short.

With a foreword by the then DPP Max Hill and the CPS’s then Chief Executive Rebecca Lawrence, the document set out the agency’s strategy on rape and serious sexual offences for the next five years.

Perhaps due to the Covid pandemic that was running wild at the time, the strategy document did not win a great deal of attention when it was published.

In the below blog, Jenny Wiltshire, Hickman & Rose’s head of Serious and General Crime, analyses the RASSO document from the perspective of 2025 – when the future the CPS of five years ago envisioned is our present.

CPS “concern”

One of the most striking elements of the RASSO 2025 document is what the CPS says is its corporate opinion on the way rape and sexual offences were then being prosecuted.

“The CPS shares the deep public concern that while the number of RASSO reports to the police have increased in recent years, the number of cases going to court has fallen,” the document states.

“Working with partners across the criminal justice system and with victims’ groups to understand why this is happening, and finding the best way forward, is urgent and necessary.”

From a criminal defence perspective, this is a curious thing for a prosecuting agency to say. Strip away the stated empathy with public opinion, and the CPS is here expressing concern about its own behaviour.

This suggests that at the time the CPS published this document it did not have full faith in its own decision-making processes.

Non-existent targets

The CPS of 2020 was clear about what it hoped to achieve. “Our ambition [is] to narrow the disparity between the number of offences reported to the police and cases going to court, as well as encouraging more people to come forward and report with confidence”, it states.

How did the CPS of five years ago seek to do this? The document identifies five areas of focus. These are “Our People”; “Digital Capability”; “Strategic Partnerships”; “Casework Quality”; and “Public Confidence”.

It beyond the scope of this article to look at all these in detail, but as someone who regularly defends people accused of rape and other sexual offences, I was particularly interested to read what the CPS says about “Casework Quality”.

Here, the CPS sets out the two-stage test (The Code for Crown Prosecutors) by which any decision to prosecute must be made. This test, which has not changed throughout the history of the CPS, is:

• Does the evidence provide a realistic chance of conviction?
• Is it in the public interest to prosecute?

The RASSO document says this test either is (or should be – it is not clear) “clearly understood and continues to be correctly applied in all RASSO cases”.

In my opinion the two-stage test is such an obvious and fundamental statement of prosecuting principle, which has to be applied to all prosecutions no matter what the alleged offence, that the fact it merits inclusion when dealing with sexual offences is, of itself, concerning.

The CPS document then says another curious thing. It states: “We do not have any conviction rate targets in the CPS – every decision to charge must be based solely on an assessment of each individual case in accordance with the Code for Crown Prosecutors.”

This claim not to have conviction targets is interesting because, a year prior to this document’s publication, the BBC and Law Society Gazette revealed the CPS did have target figure of 60% for rape convictions.

The CPS said at the time that this figure was for benchmarking purposes only and had since been dropped.

Judging the CPS in rape and sexual offences: prosecution data

To properly judge the CPS’s success in achieving its stated ambition for rape and sexual offences we need raw, reliable performance data. While the RASSO 2025 document does not contain any data on CPS performance in these matters, this information is published elsewhere on various pages of the CPS’s website.

Collated by my Hickman & Rose colleagues, the table below sets out the CPS’s performance in so-called “adult rape flagged” offences for each of the past five years.

	Year to July 2021	Year to July 2022	Year to July 2023	Year to July 2024	Year to July 2025
Total completed adult rape flagged prosecutions	1,940	2,558	2,893	3,876	4,572
Convictions	1,333	1,765	1,793	2,292	2,692
% Convictions	68.7%	69.0%	62.0%	59.1%	58.9%
Guilty pleas	848	1019	1021	1235	1511
% Guilty pleas	43.7%	39.8%	35.3%	31.9%	33.0%
Convictions after trial	485	746	772	1057	1181
% Convictions after trial	25.0%	29.2%	26.7%	27.3%	25.8%
Non-convictions	607	793	1100	1584	1880
% Non-convictions	31.3%	31.0%	38.0%	40.9%	41.1%
Prosecutions dropped	189	238	330	496	609
% Prosecutions dropped	9.7%	9.3%	11.4%	12.8%	13.3%
Acquitted/dismissed after or during trial	337	484	676	976	1130
% Acquitted/dismissed after or during trial	17.4%	18.9%	23.4%	25.2%	24.7%

The first row “total completed adult rape flagged prosecutions” in the above dataset clearly shows how the CPS is today prosecuting far more rape cases than it did five years ago. The year to July 2022 saw the CPS complete 1,940 adult rape prosecutions. By July 2025 this had increased by 136% to 4,572.

But this dataset shows much more than just an increase in adult rape prosecutions. I will address some of these issues below.

Judging the CPS in rape and sexual offences: reporting data

The second data point we need to judge the CPS’s progress are the numbers of sexual offence reports to police. This information is published annually by the Office for National Statistics.

The table below sets out the ONS’s data on the total number of rapes, sexual assaults, and total sexual offences reported to the police in each financial year since 2020/21.

Financial year to end	Reported rapes	Reported sexual assaults	Total reported sexual offences
Mar 2021	55,701	49,731	147,700
Mar 2022	70,039	74,824	193,357
Mar 2023	68,844	78,140	194,729
Mar 2024	67,828	74,505	188,644
Mar 2025	71,540	77,659	209,079

Here again, the table clearly shows a substantial increase in the number of sexual offences being reported to the police.

Over the past five years, the total number of reported rapes increased by 28% to 71,540; reported sexual assaults increased by 56% to 77,659; and all reported sexual offences increases by 42% to 209,079.

These are all big increases. But compare the rise in rape reports with the far bigger increase in the number of rape prosecutions, and the CPS appears to be coming good on its stated ambition to “narrow the disparity between the number of offences reported to the police and cases going to court”.

The devil in the detail 1: an increase in failures to convict in rape cases

The above analysis is far from being the full story of CPS rape and sexual offence activity over the past five years.

A closer analysis of Table 1 data above shows how the agency’s success in taking more rape prosecutions to court comes at a cost.

One of the most striking trends is the rise in the proportion of rape prosecutions which result in non-conviction. Five years ago, the CPS failed to secure convictions in 31.3% of the adult rape prosecutions it brought. By July of 2025, this figure had risen to 41.1%.

While we would expect to see an increase in the number of non-convictions as more rape cases are prosecuted, this steep increase in the proportion which end in non-conviction is potentially serious for the agency.

One way of understanding the non-conviction statistic is as a measure of prosecutorial failure. Every criminal prosecution must stand or fall on its own merits and the evidential stage of the two-stage test states that for a prosecution to proceed the CPS must be satisfied that a conviction is more likely than not.

Whilst the CPS may argue that its current record of achieving convictions in 58.9% of rape prosecutions suggests the two-stage test is being applied correctly, this cannot be that case when looking at each case individually.

Devil in the detail 2: increase in dropped rape prosecutions

I have written before about the growing proportion of rape prosecutions being dropped by the CPS before a case gets to trial.

Table 1 above provides more evidence for this trend. It shows the proportion of rape cases being dropped by the CPS grew from 9.7% in 2021/22 to 13.3% in the most recent financial year.

The Government and victims’ rights campaigners have pointed to an increase in complainants withdrawing their support as key reason for cases being dropped. But this is only part of the picture.

In my experience, there are wide variety of reasons why the prosecution may offer no evidence on cases. Often this decision comes after defence representations that, on a proper review of all the evidence, there is no realistic prospect of conviction.

This decision to drop the case can also occurs when key evidence (very often digital evidence) is not obtained until after a suspect is charged. Rather than supporting the prosecution, this new evidence is revealed to undermine it.

Devil in the detail 3: increase in rape acquittals after or during trial

Finally, Table 1 shows how the rate of rape suspects being acquitted or dismissed after or during trial has increased: from 17.4% five years ago to 24.7% now.

This CPS dataset does not distinguish between rape acquittals obtained as result of a jury’s verdict, or a judge’s ruling that a case should stop.

I am aware of sexual offence matters in which senior counsel for the prosecution have advised that there is no realistic prospect of conviction, but the CPS have nonetheless decided to press on to trial.

This does beg the question as to whether the CPS does have a target in terms of the number of cases that make it to trial.

What is really happening with rape and sexual offence prosecutions?

The CPS is clearly in a difficult position with rape and other sexual offences.

As the below graph illustrates, over the past twenty years there has been a significant rise in the number of reports of rape and other sexual assaults (indeed: the past five years’ increase is relatively small compared to the fifteen years prior).

This change has put an overstretched agency under political pressure to bring more cases to court. The RASSO 2025 report was one way in which the CPS responded.

While the agency has met the ambition it set itself in 2020, there are worrying signs it did this at the expense of fairness.

Of all the data points above, I am particularly concerned about the rise in dropped prosecutions and non-convictions in rape cases. Together these indicate that suspects may be being investigated and charged unnecessarily.

The CPS will argue that sexual offences are difficult to prosecute. I agree, but the law has evolved to meet these challenges.

There is, for example, no longer a need for corroboration evidence. And the previous defence that a belief in consent needed only be ‘genuine’ now needs to be ‘reasonable’, which is a higher bar.

There are also understandably strict rules limiting cross examining a complainant on their sexual history (including in relation to previous sexual activity with the accused). Furthermore, judges give careful directions to juries warning against sexual myths and stereotypes.

Rape, sexual assault and sexual offences are difficult cases to deal with, but they should not be considered as a being in a special category in which the usual guards against injustice are waived.