NEWS & VIEWS

 

Police super-complaint submitted in relation to severely delayed police investigations into sexual offences

16/12/2025

 

Soaring police delays have left over 37,000 survivors of sexual offences waiting for more than three years for their cases to be investigated, over the last decade, according to survivor organisations launching a rare type of action against policing today. More than half of these investigations have taken longer than four years; and many considerably longer.

 

The super-complaint, submitted by Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre (CRCC), Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ), Rape Crisis England & Wales (RCEW) and Bindmans LLP, comes at a time of unprecedented delays and challenges across the criminal justice system, particularly in sexual offences cases. They say that the situation of very lengthy investigations into sexual offences has become inhumane and untenable for many survivors. It is also leaving police forces legally liable for their failure to properly progress cases, as the excessive delays in investigations may, in many cases, breach the UK’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

 

The super-complaints system is designed to identify and address systemic issues in policing and allows organisations to raise issues on behalf of the public about patterns or practices in policing that they believe are causing significant harm.

 

Research by the organisations reveal that sexual offence cases taking more than three years to investigate have increased sevenfold over the last ten years (652% increase) and almost 14,000 investigations over three years in length were still ongoing at the end of 2024/25. More than two-thirds of survivors in delayed cases surveyed by the charities said they were not sure if they would report to the police for help again. Although not a representative sample, these findings are consistent previous national research from the Bluestone Operation Soteria report.

 

Substantial delays and backlogs now affect every stage of the criminal justice system, raising serious concerns about its fairness, efficacy and long-term sustainability. Long waits for police investigations to be completed - followed by more years of waiting in the Crown Court backlog if the case is charged - mean that reporting rape and other sexual offences has become an increasingly difficult and re-traumatising process for so many.

 

This super-complaint draws upon data obtained by Freedom of Information requests to the Home Office as well as survey research and focus groups with Independent Sexual Violence Advisors (ISVAs) and survivors across England and Wales to show the true scale of the problem and factors within policing that are contributing to the delays.

 

Analysis in the super-complaint raises substantial concern around how police forces monitor timeliness and demonstrates that official government figures on lengths of sexual offences investigations are misleading, rendering very long cases invisible in the publicly available crime data. The organisations point to a number of issues within policing that contribute to the excessive delays and call for an immediate audit by all forces to establish how many survivors’ cases remain effectively stuck in the system.

 

You can find out more on the RCEW website.