Chief Constable Charlie Hall admits 1,000 reports of violence against women and girls in Herts every month

A thousand crimes of violence against women and girls are reported in Hertfordshire every month – but just 5% of alleged perpetrators are charged and appear in court, the county’s chief constable has admitted.

Charlie Hall was talking to Conservative Herts Police and Crime Commissioner Jonathan Ash-Edwards at their first “accountability and performance” meeting on Friday (July 18).

When asked about charge rates and patterns of offending, Mr Hall said: “This is not straightforward because the way we record crimes is against Home Office crime categories and they don’t specifically set out a violence against women and girls category because the offending there could be captured under many different crime headings: violent crimes, harassment offences, public order offences, and the like.

“So, we do try to track across all our crime categories where it appears that it’s an offence, or a report to us, that would be violence against women and girls [in a] broader grouping.

“When we do that, it looks like within the constabulary we’re recording in the region of 1,000 offences per month that relate to violence against women and girls.

“That sounds like a big number – it is a big number. It’s far too big for what we would wish to see. If we could track that over five years, it has reduced slightly. Still got a long way to go. The figure within that is not quite as significant as it was, but 1,000 is still a lot.

“Within those, there will be a lot of what we call our safeguarding work that takes place to try to protect victims, to try to encourage them to follow the criminal justice process through.

“Not all of our victims will wish to do that, and if they don’t, we absolutely work to ensure there is some safeguarding activity that’s wrapped around them to try to prevent them becoming, or continuing to be, victims in that way.

“In terms of that figure, the number we are formally managing to charge and get before a court sits just above 5% at the moment. That’s nowhere near sufficient. I want to try to lift them but there’s a whole complex set of reasons behind why that can be challenging and difficult to get those cases before a court.

“I would encourage any woman or girl who is experiencing these issues to report them to us. Even if it’s ultimately not your wish to go before a court, we might talk to you and see if there are other ways we can do that.

“In some cases, we’re able to pursue what we call ‘victim non-supported prosecutions’ where we can take the decision and the evidence is such that we’re able to put a [case] to court without the victim’s involvement as such.

“We think that’s important because we do know there is a cohort of people, sadly, who tend to move from one victim to another.

“At the very least we will risk assess all those situations and take appropriate safeguarding action.”

Mr Ash-Edwards, who was elected in May, said: “They’re really stark figures actually. One thousand offences a month is horrendous and something that we’ll need to really keep a close eye on because the constabulary is really focused on trying to drive those [offences] down and drive charge rates up.”

He will formulate a new Police and Crime Plan later in the year, setting out his priorities for the force.