A leaked Ministry of Defence review has found serious weaknesses in the very organisation that was created to repair confidence in Britain’s military justice system, echoing AOAV’s own repeated concerns that military justice is operating in a broken system.
The BBC’s Defence Correspondent Jonathan Beale reported on the 12 August that the Defence Serious Crime Command (DSCC), established to investigate the gravest offences including rape and sexual assault outside the traditional chain of command, would face a “significant risk” of being graded inadequate if inspected to standards comparable with those applied to civilian police forces.
The internal review, conducted between August and November 2025 and overseen by a former senior civilian police officer, identified ineffective investigations, delays, inconsistencies, gaps in victim support, insufficient resources and workforce instability. These all echoe concerns highlight by AOAV’s own reports in recent years.
For an institution designed precisely to remedy longstanding failures in military policing, this raises the troubling possibility that structural problems identified repeatedly over the past few years have persisted, despite reassurances from Whitehall that systems have been created to correct them.
The DSCC was established in 2022, following repeated criticism of the way serious offences were handled within the Armed Forces. Its existence was widely reported after the death of 19-year-old Gunner Jaysley Beck. An inquest found that the Army’s mishandling of her complaints of sexual assault and harassment contributed to her death and exposed systemic failures.
Yet the leaked assessment seen by the BBC suggests that many of the conditions which undermined confidence in the old system are all to present in the new one.
The BBC reported how investigators were operating amid unclear guidance and excessive reporting requirements. How victims still confronted fear of not being believed, concern about the effect of reporting on their careers, confusing reporting routes and distrust both of the chain of command and service policing. And the leak also showed internal calls for stronger leadership in the investigation of rape and serious sexual offences.
In July 2025, before this internal review was undertaken, AOAV published an extensive examination of the Service Justice System. We found that court martial conviction rates were 64.4%, compared with 82.7% in civilian courts, an 18 percentage-point gap. For rape, conviction rates were reported to be three times lower in military courts than in civilian ones.
AOAV also found that 18% of military cases in 2023/24 were dropped because insufficient evidence was available, compared with 4.7% in civilian courts. More than half of those military cases involved sexual offences. At the same time, military police staffing had fallen by 17% over the previous decade.
These statistics suggested weaknesses in the British military’s investigative process: the gathering of evidence, the willingness of witnesses to speak, the resources available to investigators and the institutional environment in which complaints are pursued.
The creation of a specialist serious-crime structure was supposed to address precisely this problem. The Henriques Review had identified deficiencies in the independence and structure of the Royal Military Police and recommended a dedicated Defence Serious Crime Unit that was operationally separate from those it investigated, properly trained and subject to transparent oversight. AOAV noted at the time that Henriques had warned against relying on incremental adjustments to arrangements already shown to be failing.
The latest findings raise questions as to whether such concerns were ever heeded.
The Ministry of Defence’s first unified survey of sexualised behaviour across the Armed Forces, examined by AOAV last year, found that 67% of female regular personnel had experienced at least one form of sexualised behaviour during the preceding year, compared with 34% of men. Nearly a third of women reported inappropriate touching and 8% reported non-consensual sexual activity.
Junior women appeared particularly exposed. Among female Other Ranks, 71% reported sexualised behaviour, compared with 58% of female officers. Three quarters of incidents took place in ordinary workplaces, home units or training establishments. Nearly half of those targeted said that two or three different people had been responsible. Only 48% of women who experienced such behaviour told anyone, with some saying they believed nothing would be done, feared being regarded as troublemakers or worried that they would not be believed.
AOAV also reported last year on a Wiltshire Police investigation into allegations that military medical examiners sexually assaulted recruits during enlistment examinations over a period stretching from 1970 to 2016. The allegations, if established, would suggest abuse capable of persisting across generations of service personnel. More recently, four women told the BBC that they had been sexually assaulted or harassed while attending the Army Foundation College at Harrogate, when they were 17.
The MoD says it has not ignored the leaked review. It told the BBC that the findings were accepted and that significant work had since been undertaken, including greater investment in victim and witness support, stronger governance and safeguarding, and accreditation of investigators to nationally recognised policing standards. The review itself acknowledged that the DSCC had made “significant strides” in strengthening its operational capability.
But capacity remains a problem. Serious-crime investigations rose by 16% between 2023 and 2024, while the review found persistent staffing gaps and workforce instability limiting the Command’s ability to respond. In one case reported by the BBC, delays meant a potential battery charge was not referred within the six-month statutory time limit.
The DSCC subsequently apologised and accepted that the service provided fell below an acceptable standard.
Britain’s Armed Forces rightly demand extraordinary standards of discipline from those who serve. The reciprocal obligation is that when service personnel report rape, assault or abuse, the system investigating those allegations should meet standards at least as rigorous as those expected outside the barracks gates.
The DSCC was intended to mark a break with the past. The BBC’s findings suggest the past has simply been reorganised under a new command.
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