Specialist Rape Courts to Reach Every Crown Court by 2028
The Prime Minister announced specialist courtrooms for rape and serious sexual offences across all 84 Crown Court buildings by 2028 — remote viewing, video evidence from separate rooms, private entrances, trained staff, and fixed trial dates from next month: “Prosecution rates for rape remain shamefully low… This is not good enough.” The backlog stands at 80,098 cases, nearly a fifth of them sexual offences; one MP’s 1,088-day wait for trial helped force the change.
The design targets the attrition point the statistics hide: most collapsed rape cases die of delay — complainants withdrawing after years in a floating-list limbo — so fixed dates and separate rooms are not comfort measures but conviction infrastructure, aimed at keeping witnesses in the system long enough for justice to occur. The £23m price is almost suspiciously modest, which locates the real constraint: courtrooms can be specialist, but they still need judges, counsel and sitting days from a system 80,000 cases deep, and the Victims’ Commissioner’s warning — the backlog threatens everything — is the honest asterisk. The 2.8% prosecution rate is the number the reform will ultimately be marked against. Watch the fixed-date compliance statistics from next month — floating lists have survived abolition before.