LONDON — The criminal justice system in England and Wales is close to exploding under the strain of court closures, underfunding and rising drink-spiking incidents, former senior investigating officer Tim Grattan-Kane said. Grattan-Kane, who led the team that arrested the London taxi driver John Worboys in 2008, said young police officers were frustrated by the state of the system and that the Crown Prosecution Service was underfunded and taking too long to make charging decisions.

He said there was a lack of support workers because of financial cuts, and that securing trial dates had become difficult because many courts had been closed. More than half the courts in England and Wales were closed between 2010 and 2019, according to the Law Society.

He said drink spiking had become far more common, and offered several possible explanations, including greater public awareness leading more people to attempt it, the attitudes of some men toward women, and an increase in women reporting incidents to the police. He said he believed there remained a real problem with men administering drugs to facilitate sexual assault.

Grattan-Kane was the senior investigating officer of the team that arrested Worboys after officers pieced together the accounts of numerous women who reported being given drugged champagne by a London taxi driver who then assaulted them. Worboys drugged and sexually assaulted cab passengers in London. Because he had been a black-cab driver who dropped victims home after attacking them, police officers did not initially suspect him.

Grattan-Kane and his officers identified links between Worboys's crimes, reviewed previous blood tests and CCTV footage, and spoke with a person training to become a black-cab driver to predict which routes Worboys might have taken. He said officers told victims they would be trusted, listened to and believed, which led to many victims contacting the police.

The Worboys case led to changes in how the police deal with rape allegations. He said the process for handling rape cases should begin by believing women who claim they have been assaulted, and that police investigating sexual assault need to consider suspects in positions of trust and keep an open mind. He said the system needed continued, constant monitoring to ensure the process was followed appropriately.

Grattan-Kane also said that measuring police performance by numbers rather than quality led to problems and that a balance was needed to ensure a victim-focused process. Tony Blair's government adopted a New York-style target-driven system for holding police officials to account that measured performance by numbers rather than quality.