Violence against Women and Girls Strategy

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if she will make a statement on the violence against women and girls strategy.

The scale of violence against women and girls in our country is intolerable, and this Government are treating it as a national emergency. Members are aware that we have made an unprecedented commitment to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. This effort will be underpinned by our violence against women and girls strategy. As I said in my oral statement on the Angiolini inquiry earlier this month, I know that there is a great deal of interest in that strategy. Having lived and breathed this piece of work for many months, the eagerness with which colleagues across the House are awaiting its publication is something I welcome, not least because in order to succeed in our mission, we will need everyone to play their part, including Members of all political stripes. I can confirm that the strategy will be published this Thursday, 18 December, and I look forward to presenting it to the House on that day. I will be very happy to discuss every detail and every policy in our plan once it has been launched; until then, I hope that hon. Members will bear with me for just a few more days.

We have not been sitting idle, however. Since the general election, we have taken urgent steps to strengthen the response. We have introduced new protections for stalking victims, launched long-awaited domestic abuse protection orders, increased refuge funding and increased helpline funding. We have placed domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms in the first five areas, and we have begun the process of ending the presumption of contact—something begged for by victims for years. We are expanding support for child victims of trafficking across the country. Because I have a time limit, I will not list the many other things that have been done in this area not just by the Home Department, but by every Government Department. I really could go on.

Those steps are all having an impact, but to give every woman and girl the safety and security they deserve, a complete reset is needed. Through the strategy, we will go further than ever before in our efforts to deliver real and lasting change, and provide every woman and girl across the country with the safety and security that they deserve.

I stand here today disappointed—disappointed that women and girls continue to be unsafe in Britain in 2025, and disappointed that the strategy has been delayed three times this year, when urgent action is clearly needed. This Government should not have to be dragged before the House for an urgent question on a strategy that should have been published months ago. I am disappointed that, now that it is finally set to be published—on Parliament’s final sitting day of the year—stakeholders have said that the consultation process was inadequate and that the strategy “feels like an afterthought”. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary has been trailing it on the airwaves without parliamentary scrutiny.

One in four women have experienced domestic abuse. A woman is killed by a man every three days. Only 2.6% of rape offences result in a charge or summons. Those are shocking figures, and they are certainly not an afterthought to me or to the millions of women and girls in Britain. The police have called this a national emergency, and they are right, yet consecutive Governments have either sat on their hands or produced VAWG strategies that have failed time and again, as a National Audit Office report showed this year.

How will this strategy succeed where others have failed? How will progress towards halving violence against women and girls be measured? What interim targets will be set, and what consequences will follow if those targets are missed? Finally, as long as violent, misogynistic content continues to reach children online, the crisis will persist. Social media companies are failing to enforce their own terms of service, and the Online Safety Act 2023 has yet to deliver. What will the Home Secretary do to change that?

I feel every moment of disappointment that the hon. Lady feels about the failures over the years. I recall working in a service during the coalition Government, when we had to cut our child rape service and get the money from the Big Lottery Fund, because the state, in an era of austerity under that Government, took away the funding that we had used for a child rape counselling service. There are many, many years to reset. We have to change decades—not decades, actually, but millennia—of the expectation that women are just meant to expect this violence.

I could have made a document that, like all the documents that went before, did not do that reset. The delay—I am going to do something rare for a Government Minister—is my fault. It is entirely my fault because, with every iteration, the strategy was not ambitious enough. I could have done it more quickly, and then it would not have been as good. I apologise that the hon. Lady has to wait till Christmas, but there have been decades of failure. The metrics that we will be measured against and the plans for how they will be measured will all be released on Thursday. The hon. Lady will be able to hold me to account. I will not be dragged kicking and screaming; she is welcome to come into my office at any point and have a meeting with me.

It is important to acknowledge that there have been delays, as the Minister has said, but it is also important that the next strategy is comprehensive and has multi-departmental and cross-departmental working embedded within it. Will the Minister, who was formerly an active member of the all-party parliamentary group on domestic violence and abuse, of which I am the chair, meet jointly with us and the all-party parliamentary group on perpetrators of domestic abuse in the first week back from recess, so that we can discuss the strategy in detail and how it can be successfully implemented?

I absolutely will do that. I commit to that here and will make sure that is noted down, because the strategy is not the end and it does not have all the answers. It is something that will have to be changed and worked on, and it will take everybody to do it. It is a fundamental shift. I absolutely commit to doing that. Just to say, I have always worked alongside my hon. Friend, and Members of Parliament who reach out to me and want to work together on this issue are always welcome.

I call the shadow Minister.

I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving the House the chance to discuss this important issue that affects the lives of millions of women and girls across the country. This issue is a stain on our society, and I am sure that Members across the House will support the ambition to halve violence against women and girls. For the same reason, I hope that the Minister can recognise the work undertaken by the previous Government through the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 and the related plan, funded by hundreds of millions of pounds, alongside important changes to legislation in areas such as harassment. While it is clear that much more still needs to be done, those were critical steps in the right direction.

Worryingly, according to data from the crime survey for England and Wales, sexual offences, rape, stalking and harassment have all increased by between 5% and 9% under this Labour Government. That has occurred at the same time as the number of police officers has fallen under this Government. It demonstrates that despite the targets that have been set and the undoubted will of the Minister to reduce these life-altering crimes, there remains a significant gap between ambition and results.

We look forward to seeing the full scope of the strategy, which I am sure all Members would have wished to see sooner. I am sure that Members would have preferred to hear it in the House, rather than in the press. Is there a plan to identify and build on the measures in the strategy that are found to be most effective? Given the Government’s cuts to police numbers, what will be done to ensure that police forces have not only assigned individuals and titles, but the resources needed to tackle violence against women and girls head-on?

I will pick up on a couple of the points that the hon. Gentleman has made. On the reduction in police numbers, I noticed that the Leader of the Opposition cited those figures, too. Just to be clear, 94% of the fall that has been cited was from March to June 2024, which was before this Government were elected. I just want to be clear on the numbers we are talking about.

Police numbers are produced in March and September. The last official records show—

Order. Minister.

Okay, I may have to stand corrected, but all I can say is that a huge amount of what is being cited on police numbers is being taken from the previous Government’s figures. In my area, we have not got up to the level of police funding that we had in 2010, so I will not take lectures from the Conservatives, given the hollowing out of the police over their era. [Interruption.] The shadow Minister may not like what he hears.

Brilliant work has been done under a number of people who have held the same position as me, and I can see one of them on the Opposition Front Bench. Throughout the progress of the Bill that became the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, when we were in opposition, I worked very closely with Ministers. I see that the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) is present. I worked incredibly closely with her in opposition to ensure that the Bill was good enough. Not once has any Member on the current Opposition Front Bench sought a meeting with me to discuss anything that they actually want to see in the strategy, but they would be very welcome to do so.

Order. To prevent any further confusion, I should point out that this is not a debate but a response to an urgent question, and Members do not intervene on the Minister.

I thank the Minister for coming to the House to respond to the urgent question. I know that this is an issue that she cares passionately about, and I can sense her frustration about the fact that such an important strategy is to be announced in the House on the last day before the recess, when many Members will not be here to respond and give their feedback. I hope that we will have another opportunity in the new year. I also hope that the strategy will confirm that there will be cross-departmental work, and that a big part of it will relate to where these vulnerable women and girls are to be housed. Did Ministers from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government attend the advisory board meetings, and will housing feature in the new strategy?

Ministers from MHCLG are key partners, and housing is a huge part of the issue of, specifically, domestic abuse-related crimes. Today the MHCLG announced refuge funding of £499 million over the next three years, which represents a huge increase on what was previously being offered, as well as an extra £19 million in support of part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act, which places a statutory duty on local authorities to house victims of domestic abuse.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

Violence against women and girls is a stain on society. I know that the Minister shares the passion that we feel about the issue, and I know how much work she has done in this area. However, I want to follow up on some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) that were perhaps not dealt with in as much detail as we might have hoped, given the level of the briefing to the press over the weekend.

To ensure that halving violence against women and girls does not become a broken manifesto promise, how will the Home Secretary and the Minister measure progress, and what consequences will be set if progress is not made quickly enough? With misogynistic content continuing to spread online, how will Ministers ensure that social media companies are upholding their duty to protect children, particularly when figures such as Andrew Tate—described by the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who is not in the Chamber, as an “important voice” for men—are so easily accessible?

The Minister seems to be somewhat frustrated about being here today to answer the urgent question, and indeed we all feel frustrated. The Home Secretary gave many of the details of her announcements to the press this weekend. Given the seriousness of the issue, and given that we have been told that the statement will be made on Thursday—the final day before the recess—does the Minister think that this is an appropriate way to conduct government?