FOI 23430-25 Rape investigations

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

Please provide the following information for each of the past ten calendar years (2016–2025 inclusive, or the most recent years for which data is held):

1. The number of women investigated by your force for making a false allegation of rape, where the suspected offence was perverting the course of justice (or wasting police time).

2. The number of women charged with perverting the course of justice (or wasting police time, if relevant) in relation to allegedly false rape allegations.

3. The number of resulting prosecutions for these offences.

4. For each prosecution, please provide the outcome (guilty, not guilty, charges dropped/no further action)

5. For each conviction, please provide:
- The sentence imposed (e.g. custodial, suspended, community order)
- The length of any custodial sentence.

If possible, please provide this data in an annual breakdown.

Response:

Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom Of Information responses.

Crime searched between 2016 and 2025 (5th December) for all offences with the stats classification 079/01/01 'Obstruct the course of public justice – Common Law' where the suspect is female. Searched MO free text for the keyword 'rape' to extract those relating to that offence and then a manual review completed to extract only those relating to a false allegation.

As with any keyword search, the search will only return exact matches. This does not account for differences in terminology and/or spelling used. Keyword searches are problematic and in no way provide accurate results or figures. If the selected key words have not been mentioned the data will not be returned.

1. 11

2. 0

3. 0 (When a person is charged, this means the CPS has decided that there is a realistic prospect of conviction and that pursuing a prosecution is in the public interest and marks the start of the criminal court process. So, where someone is charged, this means they are being prosecuted)

4. n/a For future reference, information on convictions i.e. results at Court, are held by His Majesty’s Court Service.

5. n/a

The numerical data presented in this response is an un-audited snapshot of un-published data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data, we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.