When crimes against MPs reach the point of a charging decision, they do not fare badly. The Metropolitan Police told the Speaker’s Conference that in 2023-24, cases handled under Operation Bridger, the national scheme for protecting MPs, showed a higher rate of charge or summons outcomes, and better conviction rates than the general population.
That is the part of the system that works.
The rest is harder to defend. The same inquiry found that the criminal justice response to abuse and intimidation of politicians is inconsistent, within forces, between forces, and across prosecution and sentencing decisions. These crimes are damaging but rare, so many officers and prosecutors seldom handle them, and the response varies with whoever picks up the case.
There is also a gap in the record. The Crown Prosecution Service does not collect structured data on the profession of a victim, so there is no clean national picture of how a threat against an MP travels from report, to charge, to court, to sentence. The Conference recommended building a system to track cases and their charging and sentencing outcomes. Until that exists, nobody can say with confidence how consistently these crimes are punished.
To address the inconsistency, the Conference called for small specialist teams in both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, dedicated to investigating and prosecuting crimes that target elected officials. The reasoning was that consistent decisions come from expertise rather than seniority, and that officers and lawyers who see these cases regularly will handle them better than those who meet one once in a career.
The clearest failure is a penalty the courts are not using.
Under the Elections Act 2022, someone convicted of an intimidation offence aggravated by hostility toward a candidate, an elected official or a campaigner must be barred from standing for election for five years. The court is required to impose that disqualification order unless it would be unjust, and no prosecutor has to ask for it. Yet the then-Solicitor General, Lucy Rigby KC, told the Conference that in six recent cases where an order should have been made, none was. The courts gave no reasons, and CPS records do not even show whether the orders were considered.
These orders cover political intimidation broadly, not only threats against sitting MPs. The case that prompted one regional CPS unit to remind its prosecutors involved criminal damage to an MP’s office. The point is not the label but the pattern: a penalty Parliament wrote into law is being missed, and no one is recording why.
None of these findings is the cause of the others. Cases can be charged well and still vanish from the national picture. A penalty can be skipped without any single official deciding to skip it. What links them is the absence of a system built to notice.
MPs reported almost 1,000 alleged crimes last year. The country can count the threats. It still cannot show, case by case, what justice did with them.