The 100-Year Life Health Education and Government
Ahead of its manifesto launch, Labour has pledged to create 80 new “rape courts” to tackle the UK’s enormous backlog of sexual assault trials. Delays due to lack of capacity in the criminal justice system currently mean that if a woman reports being raped today, it could take until 2029 for the case to reach court. But even if a future Labour government could locate and refurbish 80 viable spaces within the existing dilapidated court estate, where are all the judges, barristers and solicitors to come from? Meanwhile The Secret Barrister, the criminal justice commentator, observed on X that the Conservative Party’s manifesto “contains not a single mention of the record delays caused by its defunding and mismanagement of the criminal justice system. Not a single idea to fix the 5-year delays for rape trials.”
