We’re delighted to share hugely important news about funding for Rape Crisis Centres!
Following extensive campaigning by RCEW, our member centres and supporters over the last year, the Ministry of Justice yesterday confirmed that they will award £550 million to specialist services offering practical and emotional support to victims and survivors over the next 2 years. This includes:
- Confirmation that the Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Fund (RASASF) – the only ringfenced government funding stream specifically for specialist sexual violence support services – will continue into 2026/27 and 2027/28, with a 2% year on year increase. Next year’s total spend on these services through this fund will be £21.3 million.
- Confirmation that the MoJ will continue to award Police and Crime Commissioners (PCC) funding for core victim-survivor support services for 2026/27 and 2027/8, with a 2% year on year increase. A total of £131.8 million will be allocated to PCCs next year, some of which (we don’t yet know how much) will be ringfenced specifically for sexual violence and abuse support services.
Just last week, our Rape Crisis member centres were facing a funding cliff-edge in March 2026. We did not know whether the RASASF would continue next year. Many centres were preparing to make redundancies. Some had closed their waiting lists. Three have closed their doors altogether over the last year.
Thanks to sustained efforts by our staff team, member centres and our supporters – writing to MPs, submitting evidence to the government, advocating for survivors to receive the support they deserve – the Ministry of Justice have published a two-year funding package which will give our member centres, and the survivors they support, some stability over the next two years.
Our whole team including our award-winning Policy and Public Affairs team has been relentless in fighting to get Rape Crisis centre concerns heard, and survivors’ voices centred in the decisions that will impact them and the support they’re able to access.
But our work won't stop here.
We still need to ensure that monies are ringfenced appropriately, so that specialist Rape Crisis Centres, and services supporting migrant women, women with no recourse to public funds, and specialist Black and minoritised women's services receive fair settlements.
And we also need to ensure greater funding settlements in the future. PCC budgets for victim-survivor support services were cut by 4.2% in this financial year, and charities were not exempt from national insurance employer contribution increases, so even with a 2% increase in funding for 2026/27 and another 2% in 2027/28, specialist services must still contend with a real terms reduction in funding. There are 11,754 people on waiting lists for support from our 36 Rape Crisis centres alone, and every day more survivors come forward to seek the support they need and deserve.
We thank the Ministry of Justice for their recognition of the vital role of these services, and their commitment to funding them over the next two years. We must now focus on ensuring a truly cross-departmental and whole-system response to all forms of violence against women and girls which accurately reflects the scale and impact of sexual violence and abuse, and ensuring that free, community based and specialist support is available to every survivor who needs it - before, during, after, and irrespective of any criminal justice process they may choose to pursue.
Two years is less than the average wait for a rape case to go to trial. And every year, month and day in England & Wales, another woman experiences rape or sexual abuse. Until that ends, we’ll keep fighting for services, support, restitution and recovery.