Welcome to our witnesses in the first evidence session that the Home Affairs Select Committee is holding in our inquiry into the funding of services tackling violence against women and girls. As well as members of our own Committee, we have guests—Florence Eshalomi from the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, and Sarah Russell from the Justice Committee, because clearly what we are looking at goes beyond just pure Home Office. It might be a Home Office lead in many areas but in services delivered by local authorities there is always a justice angle and it is really important that all of these Committees are here. We are not looking at the policies at this point. We will use this inquiry to help inform ourselves about where we need to focus in the rest of this Parliament, but this is on the back of the NAO’s report into the delivery of services and its criticisms. We feel that the Committee is best placed to try to investigate whether the money gets to where it needs to get to and the services are properly delivered. I will ask our witnesses to introduce themselves. I will start with Leyla and we will move along in that direction, and then go into questioning.

I am Leyla. I am the Campaigns and Policy Manager at White Ribbon UK.

I am Ghadah Alnasseri. I am the Executive Director of Imkaan.

I am Sarah Fulham. I am the Director of Domestic Abuse Services at Hestia.

I am Ellie Butt. I am Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Refuge.

You are clearly all service providers and we are very keen to hear what you have to say. Ben Maguire will start the questioning.

What are the challenges and opportunities of accessing funding for tackling VAWG? I do not know who wants to kick off.

I am happy to start. I will start with opportunities. We do have a lot of challenges but there are some opportunities as well. The duty that was in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 for local authorities to assess need for domestic abuse accommodation has made a difference and more funding has followed from that. It is currently £160 million a year from central Government for safe accommodation. We are seeing that in local authorities commissioning different forms of safe accommodation. There is a caveat to that: taking into account the challenges with local authority budgets as a whole, not all of that money is flowing to domestic abuse safe accommodation. Nevertheless, it is a shift that is important to recognise for the accommodation side. The pressing challenge for Refuge—we are a provider of specialist services primarily for survivors of domestic abuse—is that the funding envelopes available for services are increasingly out of step with what it costs to deliver a service. Increasingly, we are looking at bids, thinking how could we deliver a service for that amount and concluding that there is no way we could do anything that would be safe and that we would be comfortable providing, and we will not put in a bid. What is happening is that either services are not being tended or they are going to generic providers that are doing them cheaply. That is an increasing pattern where the “doing more for less” is continuing to the point that lots of them are just completely unrealistic to provide anything that resembles a quality service. So that is a key challenge.

Picking up on what you have said about the funding challenges, a lot of the tenders that come out focus on pricing over quality. Sometimes you see it 20% in favour of quality over 80% pricing, which makes things unsafe and unaffordable and we are not willing to do it. We are having to fund the gaps ourselves through fundraising. In the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 children were recognised as victims in their own rights, but the funding has not changed to acknowledge that at all. We are still delivering services with exactly the same amount of money, with no additional interventions. We are having to do that ourselves with fundraising; luckily we are in a position to do that. If we are going to take this seriously, we need to make sure we are adequately funding those services. Recognising the trauma within those services as well, they need to be funded adequately to support victims and survivors. On opportunities, there is a growing interest from employers in collaborating to provide effective responses to domestic abuse and that has been of left out of the VAWG strategy at the moment. It is important for us to pick up on that. We can reach a lot of people that way. Looking at that area as well would be really helpful.

Specialist support for black and minoritised women is often viewed as providing social or added value within one-size-fits-all commission approaches. The competitive tendering excludes small and specialist providers as they do not meet the requirement for the financial threshold for bidding. Larger mainstream organisation providers have human resources administrative capacity to navigate complex bidding and requirements allowing them to offer shorter timelines and lower cost services. An example of how the funding is impacting the by-and-for specialist black and minoritised organisations that we represent through our membership is funding inequalities. Some of Imkaan’s research highlights structural inequalities. We found 25 black and minoritised women and girls services shared an annual income of £10 million in 2017, which is averaging £400,000 per organisation. By contrast, 10 generic women’s services shared an income of £25 million, averaging £2.5 million per organisation. These inequalities are also found in research by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, which found that by enforced services, we are six times less likely to access statutory funding. We estimate that means only 8% of local authorities’ funds are accessible for by-and-for organisations. We also need to look into the way that local authorities are conducting their local need assessment, and how they address different forms of violence against women and girls and consider protected characteristics, as these processes are not leading to more equitable provision. Small by-and-for organisations often have little choice in accessing statutory funding and are forced into unequal partnerships with larger providers with little control over referral, resources, allocation and local strategic influence. We found that white-led organisations retain up to 70% of the overall funding in some partnerships, resulting in elimination of the by-and-for specialism. On opportunities, definitely we are welcoming the longer term funding—the three to five years’ funding—but as has been mentioned here, it is about including the cost of living, the increase of national insurance and the cuts of the BVC is impacting the funding for our members.

From a prevention perspective, which is quite different from support services, most funding focuses on some vital crisis and support services for women and children. Primary prevention work is often overlooked, especially where it is focused on engaging men and boys to positively change the root causes of violence. This work remains underfunded, despite there being a case for its long-term cost effectiveness. The recent NAO report highlighted the extremely limited funding that primary prevention has received over subsequent Governments. Despite prevention being one of the main pillars of the last VAWG strategy and the domestic abuse plan, there is no national centralised funding for prevention work. However, there is huge opportunity for Government to lead by example and to influence other national funders to support this work, also by setting a national strategy that prioritises and measures primary prevention specifically. Our experience shows that there is real appetite for prevention work from public and private sector organisations and individuals, but funding gaps hold us back from how much we can do.

Ellie, you mentioned that it is £160 million, and you said that is not quite enough. Do you have a figure in mind that would be able to meet the needs that you have?

Yes. Women’s Aid Federation of England, which is an umbrella body for domestic abuse services, has calculated that what is needed to meet demand is around £222 million a year for refuges and £280 million for community-based services. The shortfall between that and what is currently provided is just over £300 million. That is a real drop in the ocean in Government spending. As you may understand already and will learn today, this sector is run on a shoestring and composed mainly of fairly small organisations, so we do know what is needed. It is a significant increase from what is there but a relatively small amount would make a huge difference in investing in VAWG services.

Do you have anything to add to that, Sarah or Ghadah? I will ask Leyla the same question on prevention, but I will let you guys come in.

On costings, for Hestia’s work across the UK, partnering with employers and businesses, raising awareness, providing safe spaces, we would be looking at around £300,000 to £350,000 per annum. Partnerships like this are basically very cost-effective but that would be obviously in addition to the money that is needed for refuges’ VAWG accommodation.

On the cost for the by-and-for black and minoritised organisations to run their services, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has estimated that they would need £284.9 million over a period of three years to meet the current levels of demands and expand capacity across England and Wales. We still definitely need better quality data and a specific cost of the by-and-for services at a local level. We caution against the use of national datasets, such as the British Crime Survey, to make funding estimates. We know that the prevalence of VAWG is significantly underestimated and this is definitely disproportionately the case for black and minoritised women due to structural barriers of reporting and accessing support. I need to address the overarching funding disparities in the VAWG budget. We work with academia; Sylvia Walby, who you probably know, has estimated that we spend seven times more on criminal justice system compared to specialist services and we urgently need a cost-benefit analysis on the public services, especially around criminal and civil justice and health. This is extremely problematic. As has been highlighted before, women do not only seek justice through criminal justice but they also seek access to safe housing, mental health support and support for their children.

It is very difficult to give this a figure because we are currently measuring where we are failing to prevent violence and not gathering data nationally that shows where we could have a positive impact, for example through regular and national attitudinal surveys. If we do not measure the attitudes that underpin and possibly go on to cause violence, we will struggle to find solutions to prevent it from happening. We need dedicated prevention budgets within overall VAWG spending that goes alongside our support services.

That is really helpful.

Thank you for coming. In addition to funding from Government sources, what other additional funding possibilities exist and how are they going?

I can speak to that. The local authorities are the primary commissioners of violence against women and girls services, and then police and crime commissioners make up the other part. For non-statutory sources, we are looking at our fundraising income, which comes from a variety of different places, so that might be trusts and foundations, corporate funders, major donors and then community fundraisers, so people running the London Marathon for us and things like that. That is our mix of funding. We rely on fundraised income to top up the very small amounts available with statutory contracts. We might come on to this more later, but there is almost no funding for child survivors of domestic abuse whatsoever. We want to make sure that in every refuge where children are usually the majority of residents at any time, there is a specialist worker for them, and that primarily comes from fundraised income. That is a core part of the service and should not come from fundraised income, but that is the situation at the moment. Then, the real challenge is when the fundraised income is harder to come by, which is very much the case at the moment. Refuge, like most charities, has seen its fundraised income decline. You have an unstable, unsustainable system where we are propping up small value contracts with fundraised income that is increasingly expensive to get and is unstable. That is our current picture and our mix of funders.

With the MOPAC funding, which tends to be a lot shorter term, it is usually quite innovative work, and you can usually put things forward. That is great, but the short nature of the funding—often a year at a time—makes it very difficult to recruit and retain staff and to fully develop and deliver a service. That is quite challenging. Often we will not find out until literally weeks before the end of the contract is due. It is great that we have that money there and those initiatives, but to make it really valuable and make it work, we need that to be longer term, similar to the more local authority contracts that we get.

What length is that? Three years?

It varies. It used to be more three years plus a two-year extension, and we are seeing more that are five years with a two-year extension, which is a lot better. It sometimes can take a year or so just to mobilise a service and get things running. You need that time to be able to do it, learn lessons and evaluate. Yes, that is preferred.

We are coming on to questions about evaluation now. I will bring in Chris Murray and then, Leyla and Ghadah, if you have anything you want to add after Chris’s question.

Thank you very much for coming and for the amazing work that you do. Leyla, I want to focus on your final point, which is how we measure the effectiveness of projects and measure the outcomes of what you do. You know that the Government have the ambition for a violence against women and girls strategy, which is a great ambition but it is quite broad, hard to define and hard to measure. I want to ask about that. I have three sub-questions that I will give to you all and you can choose whether to answer one or all of them. First, what is it like engaging with central Government and measuring outcomes of violence against women and girls for central Government relationships? Secondly, how do you measure funding on service delivery? What data do you need? Thirdly, what is the capacity to measure the outcomes? Are we able to do it and does it distract? How bedded in to your operations is that? Open to you all.

In the work with black and minoritised women who experience violence, one of the biggest challenges is that most national and statutory data fail to desegregate the protected characteristics, such as race, ethnicity and immigration status, and also the overlapping forms of violence against women and girls or how the systems themselves reproduce harm and the disproportionate impact experienced by certain communities. For example, systemic racism influences how VAWG is reported, investigated, and addressed. Imkaan and the Centre for Women’s Justice reviewed over 40 cases of domestic violence related to death and suicide. We found that women had been failed by the police, whether that was disbelieving their account of abuse, accepting the perpetrator’s narrative or not understanding the specific risk facing black and minoritised women. There are also some forms of violence like FGM and forced marriage that are not well reflected in the national surveys and Home Office data. This type of data is more likely to be available from the specialist organisations that we represent. National data does not include those living outside of residential properties, for example, who are homeless, living in hostels or with families and friends. Black and minoritised communities are three to five times more likely to form part of the hidden homeless population. We have estimated that for collecting data and evidence on the impact of violence against women and girls, 90% of Imkaan members do not have dedicated monitoring and evaluation staff. They depend completely on Imkaan for data collection and co-produced research, which for us is very hard to access funding. For example, it took Imkaan seven years to access funding to carry out in-depth research on sexual violence to address the gaps in the knowledge. Without these types of research, our members are unable to expand or develop their services or access funding. That is one of the issues.

I will start with the measurements and then go on to where we get our funding from to answer your question. Traditional measurement focuses majorly on criminal justice data, which only represents what is reported and recorded and often the usage of support services, which are vital, but this is a measure of our failure to prevent violence because violence has already occurred at this point. ONS crime data and surveys are focused on crime that has been committed as well as numbers of people accessing services. Work that seeks to prevent violence and crime is not nationally measured in the same way at all. How can we prevent violence? We cannot prevent violence. Violence cannot be measured by the number of victims and survivors who exist, nor by the number of perpetrators who have been caught. We should be measuring through attitude surveys that tell us the true prevalence of attitudes that underpin violence against women and girls. That is of men’s attitudes, but also we need to get more data about women’s everyday experiences of violence against women and girls, and that is all women. We need research to develop our understanding of what best practice looks like in prevention. Our own forthcoming research with the Centre for Protecting Women Online should help add to this, especially as there is a lot of impact reporting on it from organisations across the sector delivering the prevention work. Cross-departmental working in Government has been highlighted in the NAO report. As I said, it is not happening and that is one of the main reasons there is a lack of understanding of what works in prevention. We need that data to know what works in prevention because we have to be able to say what work we need to do to challenge that information. For our funding at White Ribbon we rely heavily on the public and private sector work that we are doing, through our support programmes that we offer to workplaces. We have over 400 organisations partnered with us through our accreditation programme or our supporter organisation programme, who are looking for this support. There is a lot of—well, there is some, I wouldn’t say a lot actually—fundraising but the majority of it is done by families who have lost loved ones. It should not be up to them to be funding this work. Also we rely on a number of projects that we are running. Again, you have to balance how much the project costs with how much you are making from it in running valuable projects. For example, we have a project currently with the Premier League that is showing really great results so far.

I will come on to how we measure our services and evaluate them. Refuge collects a lot of data. For example, intake and exit measurements are collected. Some of those are consistent across all of the survivors that we support. Has the abuse you are experiencing ceased? Are you feeling safe? Are you frightened? But also when a survivor comes into any of our services, we work with her about what she is trying to achieve. Is it criminal justice? Does she want some non-molestation orders in place? Are there child custody issues? Often it is all of the above, but she will tell us what she needs and at the end we will measure the extent to which we have done that or not. That is how we measure our own services. However, on top of that there are then the measurements and the data that the funders require of us and that varies enormously. For some contracts there might be five key performance indicators and we report against those. For others, there could be 40 and they are always different. A huge amount of time and resource in this very underfunded sector is taken up trying to report against hundreds of different KPIs and indicators across our services. That is a real area where we could drive improvements and efficiencies by creating standard metrics and outcomes and encouraging different commissioners and funders to use them. I agree with my colleagues that evaluation is quite limited within this sector for a number of reasons, mainly because the funding is so restricted, but also the contract lengths are often so short. We are starting to see a few more of three or five years, but one and two years is still really common. When you are trying to set up, then re-tender and plan if you need to close a service over a period of a year or two on a really small budget, evaluation is, sadly, rarely something we can do. For some projects we can apply for funding and get some additional funding for our services to be evaluated. To give an example, recently in Lambeth we had an early intervention project working in an intensive way with pregnant survivors and survivors with children under the age of three. That was evaluated; the evaluation came back and it was very positive about the benefits to those survivors but also all the other impacts on health, criminal justice and education that that had saved. By the time that evaluation was completed, the funding had run out and the service had closed. There is this real gap of building in evaluation so that we have real quality evidence of what works, but that also needs to work within the commissioning system that then cares about the evidence or takes it into account when making funding decisions. At the moment it is so dysfunctional—short contracts, pockets of money here and there, some evaluation, lots of data—and really inconsistent, so we cannot really compare which services are the most effective. Where should we be putting the most resources? That really needs improvement. I think that the VAWG strategy and the brilliant ambition to halve violence against women and girls is a time when we need to work collectively to solve some of these entrenched problems that are taking up a lot of time and resources that we do not have the luxury of having, really.

Before Sarah comes in, I will bring in Jake Richards.

On the preventive metrics, which is obviously really difficult in any area of public policy, could you illuminate us about what that looks like, what kind of factors you guys and local authorities might be looking at? Is it housing or is it—I don’t know, that is why I am asking the question.

We will start with you, Sarah.

With preventive data?

Well, no, answer the original question and anything else you want to add.

I want to add on the previous point about evaluation that the data we are required to provide is often very quantitative. It is about numbers—the number of people that we see, the number of people coming through our doors—and not necessarily focused on the quality of the support being delivered and the journey travelled by survivors. Internally, I am sure most organisations do those things. We get survivors’ feedback, but what we are being asked for externally does not really help to design services, and to know about the complex needs of people coming through our services and how we should deliver them. On data and evaluation, I am not so sure but I think we have a really good opportunity where we work with young people and children in our services. There is work going on in schools, but why are we not doing more where we have young children who have experienced or witnessed domestic abuse and violence? We know that statistically, 55% of those young people and children could go on to experience the same thing in their own relationships. We need to focus on this area. We can follow the journeys of those young people and children from when they come to us, but that is not currently happening. We need to focus on that area.

Leyla, do you want to come in?

Can I ask you to repeat the question so I am clear on it?

I am interested in knowing what kind of metrics are asked of you or what you think would be useful in the preventive area, after the event—after the violence has happened. I understand there are datasets, but what kinds of things are you asked?

To put it bluntly, we are not asked because there is no funding for it.

So you cannot answer the question.

That is the reality, but on how it could be measured and how organisations that are delivering this work measure it, I will tell you what the Government do and then tell you what we do. I think that the Government should do national attitude surveys, as IPSOS does, on the attitude of men and boys towards women and girls, finding out what they think about the experience of women and girls and how they feel towards women and girls to get at the root cause analysis of this stuff and gender inequality, rigid gender norms and so on. On the flipside, we also need all women and girls’ everyday lives and experiences to be captured—things that are missed by the crime data. The work that we do in prevention has to be informed by all the experiences of women and girls, otherwise we are missing the point and we will not stop the violence. It will keep happening. As for how we do it, one of the things that we offer is accreditation for other organisations. They go into a three-year cycle. Most carry on for years. We provide them with an action plan to support them in embedding this work within their culture, within policies and with all staff. We recommend that they take baseline data at the start—exactly what I am saying that the Government should do—and measure the same things over the three years to see whether there is any shift in attitudes. Organisations are doing this. There is evidence for this work. There is evidence in other pieces of work by other organisations. The report we are putting together, which should be published in September, will also provide evidence.

I want to go back to something. One of you mentioned the data issue. You will all be aware of the National Audit Office’s report of January this year, which highlighted some of the issues around data and the fact that the Home Office is not leading on it properly. Do you agree with the National Audit Office’s concerns about the definition of violence against women and girls causing problems for how the data is being collected?

Yes, is the simple answer. We have several datasets, none of which is perfect. If we are going to set out to halve something, we need to define it. That said, we have enough data to know that there is an epidemic of violence against women and girls. We know that one in four women will experience violence in her lifetime, that an average of three women a fortnight are killed and that more are taking their own lives as a result of domestic abuse. I would not want a lack of data to hinder progress and action because we know that the scale is huge and that we are only responding to a very small part of the demand for service delivery, let alone all the demands on the state linked to violence against women and girls. We need more data and consistent definitions across agencies. There could be improvements in the crime survey for England and Wales, particularly in recording the experience of children subject to domestic abuse. Data is a problem and it could be improved, but we do know a lot and it tells us that there is an epidemic of violence against women and girls,

I wonder about two aspects of the data. First, do you know if there is any accurate national measure of how many victim survivors are seeking spaces in refuges but cannot get them? Secondly, to what extent is children's access to services measured and do we have accurate figures for the number of children who are impacted?

Can you repeat the first bit of the question?

Do we have a good understanding of the number of women, nationally, who are seeking services but potentially not receiving services and, in particular, are being turned away from refuges for want of a bed? Secondly, do we know whether or not children are receiving the services they need and how many might not be getting them?

I know that Women’s Aid produces data, and that the number of women turned away from refuges is higher than the number of women we accept into refuge, which is shocking. A lot of the reason for that is down to the types of need that women present with. Often women have complex needs, but due to the services not having adequate funding or staffing, it is sometimes quite high risk to house all those women. That is one of the main reasons why people are declined by refuge. Women having no recourse to public funds is also a barrier to accessing refuge and is another reason why they are declined. We record data about children accessing our services simply because we do, not because we are asked to do it by anybody. One of the barriers is when women have multiple children. There may not be enough accommodation for women with several children. The waiting lists for women’s health support and children coming into refuges are long and sometimes non-existent. What kind of service you will get is very hit and miss, depending on which borough you are in and what sort of resources they have. It is quite postcode-dependent.

You mentioned boroughs. What is the situation like outside of London?

I would say that it is the same. Women’s Aid data is national.

If I could add a point, I think the Women’s Aid figure is that about 62% of refuge referrals are declined, mainly because there is not enough space or the space is not right. We know that we do not have enough refuge beds, but what is making that problem more acute—for Refuge anyway, and probably for other services—is that the stays in refuge are getting longer because it is very difficult to find affordable, safe, appropriate homes to move on to. It is very common for a woman and her children to be in refuge for up to two years. Even five years ago, that was almost unheard of. Refuges are emergency accommodation for people who are at high risk of serious harm. Refuges are fantastic but they are supposed to be temporary. They are becoming longer-term housing options. That is not only not right for a survivor who, after a period of intense work, is ready to move on, but it means that we do not have places for survivors who need them. There is a challenge in the system that is closely linked to the problems of finding affordable housing. We have women in Refuge who might have been in a refuge for a year or so and we are trying to support them to find housing but they might be offered a place in a mixed hostel or bed and breakfast accommodation. That is after a long time in temporary specialist accommodation and, understandably, they are declining those places. They are not safe or suitable places for them. However, it means that there is no refuge space for new arrivals. We need to link the systems because move-on housing is a big challenge, as well as increasing the number of refuges, which we also need to do.

I want to come back to that point. Chair, you may be aware that the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee recently released a report on housing in temporary accommodation, specifically on the impact on children. Across England, local authorities spend £2.29 billion a year on temporary accommodation alone. In London, the figure amounts to £4 million a day, just on temporary accommodation. You highlighted that women and children are spending up to two years and even longer in refuges. We have families fleeing domestic violence living in unsuitable accommodation, in some cases for five to six years. Do you feel that there should be some specific ringfencing around the refuges? We have a situation where more and more women with children will be placed in these refuges for much longer because there is nowhere for them to move on to.

Yes. In some parts of the country, we have quite effective pathways where survivors are prioritised for social housing or housing association accommodation. That can work very well. However, they too are enduring increasing pressure as the wider housing crisis continues. Yes, we favour pathways for survivors to get into long-term, safe accommodation. That is not only best for their needs and for recovering from abuse and staying safe, but it is much more cost-effective than keeping women and children in refuges or temporary accommodation for years. We endorse ringfencing and prioritisation for this group. It exists in some places. We had an effective pathway in one London borough but it has closed down. It can be a case of one step forward and more backwards. It is a huge issue.

Ellie, you said that the majority of refuge applicants are declined. What support do those women get?

It depends. We run the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, which is a 24-hour/365-day service. Sometimes when a woman calls that helpline and we search the directory, there are no places or there is one and we call the refuge but find it has just gone. We have to say “Call back. Please call us tomorrow. We will try again”. That happens. It is not a great service but it is sometimes what happens when there are no beds. Increasingly, we are seeing referrals from local authorities that are using Refuge as a housing option. Women subject to domestic abuse are told, “Call Refuge”—us—and the local authority has done their job. That woman may not want to go into a refuge. Refuges are fantastic but they have to be the right option at the right time. Going into a refuge often involves a woman uprooting her life, leaving her job and moving her children's schools. It is not just a housing option for every survivor but we are seeing those inappropriate referrals. Sometimes we simply will not know what to do if one refuge space comes up and there are five referrals. It usually goes to the first person whose needs fit that space. Depending on where the referral comes from, if it is from us and the helpline, we will refer to other services. We will try to make sure that the person has some support but we will not always know. If a referral comes from a local authority and the woman does not want a refuge or does not want to move into the area where the space is available, sadly we will not always know what happens or what support she gets. I don’t know if that is true for others.

Yes, definitely. Often, women are working with independent domestic violence advocates and might continue calling and trying, while in the meantime they are in a particularly unsafe situation, but we do not always know what happens if we do not hear from them again.

A majority of our members provide services to women, including refuge services specialised for black and minority ethnic women. Cuts in local authority funding meant they could lose their funding to support women who have no recourse to public funds and those with children, and have to choose between those women. There is always an issue around sustaining funding for migrant women who have no recourse to public funds. One of the recommendations from our members is for the Government to create national multi-year ringfenced funding especially for by-and-for services so that they could receive funding without having to compete with the mainstream organisations and lose their vital services. Some of our members had to close down because they lost their funding, and women who live in those regions will not be able to access by-and-for services. They have to go to different areas and regions to access support from our members. So, yes, funding is vital for the survival of organisations as well as to support women to escape violence.

I think most people would be quite shocked. We all find the idea of the 8 o’clock scramble for a GP appointment pretty unacceptable but the idea that whether or not women get a refuge bed happens to be about whose independent domestic violence advocate happens to ring first or that you are being put in a position where you have to choose between women with a variety of risk factors and hope for the best for the others is unacceptable. How do you make those safeguarding decisions, because they are decisions? Secondly, what do you think would solve the problem? You talk quite specifically about the problems of women with larger families. What other protected or ordinary characteristics might women have that will mean they are not getting a space?

The solution is the funding. If the Government are committed to ending violence against women and girls in a decade, the commitment has to come with specific funding for specialised by and for, as well as meeting the intersectional needs of black and minority ethnic women, who have multiple disadvantages. They cannot save one woman and leave other women behind; there must be a holistic, cross-government approach. The Government are currently working on developing the violence against women and girls strategy and we are hoping for a cross-government approach.

A lot of groups are disadvantaged. There are some with disabilities. The accommodation that we provide refuge in is often quite old, supported housing that has been around for some time and is not always suitable or converted for everybody's needs. There may be stairs. Women with disabilities are impacted more than others. The LGBT+ community cannot always access prevention services, and by and for is important in that. More refuge provision is needed but it needs to be purpose built to meet needs. It must be trauma informed, for example, and not just something that is used repeatedly with no thought given to it. To get contracts, we need to come with a building. It helps if we are not the landlords but come with a building in partnership with somebody, but it might make things quite competitive rather than working together to get the right people and the right organisations to provide support. There also needs to be more move-on accommodation. Like Refuge, we need accommodation that is accessible for different groups.

I can elaborate. The main answer is that we need more funding because we do not have refuges to meet demand. However, we also need mixed-model accommodation. As Sarah said, the refuges are quite often in older buildings, and are what we call communal refuges where everyone has their own bedroom but shares facilities. At Refuge, we have been trying in recent years to create more of what we call dispersed accommodation, self-contained flats or houses with some facilities for accessing support. We have been doing a lot of that in Warwickshire. I made a point at the beginning that there was an injection of funding from MHCLG for safe accommodation for the domestic abused. In some areas, that has led to some innovative work. We have been able to obtain the right buildings to offer refuge accommodation to a wider variety of survivors. Another issue arises with women with older sons because most refuges will have an age limit for boys. Those women can find it very hard to find a place, so dispersed accommodation means that we can meet the needs of a much wider group. In some areas, there seems to have been both funding and a willingness to ask us what works, how we can solve this problem, and how we can create more accommodation. In other areas, we have seen budgets just shrink and shrink and shrink. There is an issue that we need to grip on of where that money is going and whether it is being spent on specialist accommodation.

How does the other way round work? What is happening to protect women for whom it is more appropriate to stay in their home and to remove the violent perpetrator? How effectively is that working?

Community-based services are hugely important. At Refuge, we track all commissioning opportunities for violence against women and girls services. We have seen an increase in the accommodation services in recent years and a bit of a drop-off in community-based services but we need both. Those services can work with women where they are. If the women are safe in their homes and they want to stay there, the services need to come to them. They might be in other forms of accommodation that are not refuges but services could come there. However, there is danger there. We see things such as the cut to the victim services budget from the Ministry of Justice and we are concerned about that and wonder if we will start to see other reduced budgets or decommissioning. Those services and budgets are not statutory requirements. We are looking carefully at the situation as more local authorities declare effective bankruptcy and pull back the services they provide. We are worried about that. Those services are extremely important and often less well understood because they are not a building like a refuge is. Until fairly recently I would have said that the commissioning of services was a bit more stable, though not perfect, and still short contracts. Now we are seeing things start to chip away.

We are not going to halve violence against women and girls in 10 or even 20 years without serious investment in prevention. Without prevention, we are managing the fallout of violence but not stopping it from happening in the first place. The primary prevention method tackles the root causes of violence against women and girls, specifically harmful and rigid gender norms that inevitably impact men, women, girls and boys. The National Audit Office report showed that without serious investment in prevention, the Government will not meet their targets. We need to remember that prevention is not an add-on and neither should it be viewed in competition with support services. It is essential to reduce long-term strain on services and create a safer and more equitable society. We also need to remember in doing this work that culture change takes time but we can measure it.

Evaluation is a bit siloed between organisations. We are not measuring attitude. It is very difficult to measure anyway and once things get to the crime space, the violence has already happened so we are not measuring prevention at that point. How we measure it as an organisation is through the organisations that we work with. We have over 400 partnerships with organisations such as White Ribbon. They do baseline surveys so it is tracked that way, but they also have action plans. They have action plans that span more than three years and we check the effectiveness of prevention through them. It works at four levels. One is senior leadership, another their internal staff, and then the work they do in communities. A lot of local authorities are White Ribbon accredited and they are tracking this work and seeing the shifts happen, whether that is in attitudes, through increased reporting with staff or in their local areas. How they see attitudes shifting is challenging and is a bit more anecdotal. They see it through things like how men are challenging sexist comments and through the policies they put in place. A member of this Committee, for example, is supporting a campaign on extending paternity leave, an important policy that supports gender equity and prevention.

Yes. Again it goes to a lack of data.

Very difficult because funders want security and confidence about what they are giving their money to. There is a massive shortage of funders nationally that will fund this work, especially where it is about engaging men and boys. I have heard stories about it from the sector, from other organisations. They have gone for funding, have said that they will be working with men and boys within their prevention piece, and funders have said, “The Government should be funding that; it is in their strategy”. However, the Government are not funding this work. White Ribbon, for example, has only ever received one very small tranche of funding in our 20 years as an organisation. The majority of the money we get comes from partnerships. Yes, data affects funding prospects. If we had the research showing what best practice looks like, we could have the confidence to apply. The Government have a big role to play in influencing the national funders to open up their funding streams. Going back to evaluation, a fantastic piece of work is happening across the UK by different organisations. There is data out there. I can share one anecdotal piece with you now. We have a pilot project with the Premier League about fan-to-fan peer behaviour change. Following a piece of training we delivered to one of the groups of fans of one of the clubs, a fan said, “I didn’t realise women felt this way because women come to football matches and so I didn’t realise there was anything wrong for them about their experiences”. Doesn’t that just show how powerful this piece can be, reaching out and helping people to build empathy and an understanding of other people’s experiences? It has to be about all women’s experiences. We are not talking about women as a monolith having just one experience.

Our organisation does not support perpetrators. If you think about violence against women and girls on a scale or continuum, we work at the start, the so-called lower-level behaviours. Thinking more widely about violence against women and girls online and about tech-facilitated violence, boys and men can be heavily shaped by online influencers because, for example, they may be looking for spaces of belonging and finding the wrong influencers. Prevention has to go where they are. Prevention in digital terms has to look like and include media literacy. I mean this for children and adults because we often forget the adults in this. Prevention covers media literacy, consent education, learning key skills such as critical thinking and analysis and displacing harmful content with positive examples. We are currently feeding into the Ofcom guidance being developed on prevention. We are also speaking to DSIT about it. The Centre for Protecting Women Online is doing some great work in Milton Keynes.

At Refuge we have a tech-facilitated domestic abuse team. It is the only one of its kind in the country. We set it up about six years ago because we were seeing more and more survivors coming to our services whose perpetrators were using tech as part of the abuse against them. Now, that applies to the vast majority of survivors who come into our services. Like others, we are concerned about the rise in online misogyny and the radicalisation of young men. We have some of the answers about prevention. To pick up on that Ofcom violence against women and girls guidance that is being consulted on at the moment, Refuge, along with some other organisations, campaigned really hard to get that guidance in there. We wanted a legally enforceable code of practice and what we got in the end was guidance, but within that guidance is a huge range of interventions that tech companies can take to help prevent, not just respond to, the violence and abuse that is perpetrated on their platforms. There are things like the incentives to create content, how misogynistic content is shared, how it is taken down, how it is pushed through algorithms. The guidance is quite impressive on what can be done in prevention and response. The problem with it is that it is guidance and we have very little confidence that there will be much take-up of the work. We want to see a much greater focus on prevention in the violence against women and girls strategy. That is about the attitudinal change that colleagues have spoken about but it is also about how we get tech companies to play their role in prevention. They are not just neutral platforms. The creation and spread of this content is encouraged and it is part of the profit-making model. One step the Government could take in their VAWG strategy that would make a difference with prevention is to make this an enforceable code of practice. That is a concrete step that could be taken and is really important if we are not going to have the same conversation in 10 years’ time about whether we can prevent some of the abuse that is taking place online. We know how to do some of that but we have to enforce it.

I want to add about the role that employers and businesses play in this prevention work. There is a lot that needs to happen with children and young people, and that is vital, but there are millions of people in the workplace. We know that one in five people will probably experience domestic abuse in the workplace and we need to change those cultures, about how to challenge people appropriately, making sure domestic abuse policies are in place in the workplace, which many organisations don’t have, including on sexual harassment. I feel that there are some easy wins by working with businesses and employers and raising awareness.

Thank you so much for your question. Black and minoritised victim survivors of VAWG all the time emphasise the importance of having a specialist organisation because it offers understanding, safety and long-term support that statutory services often fail to provide. Black and minoritised women report higher levels of psychological safety trust connected to several factors, including being sheltered from the retraumatising effects of not being understood, victim blaming, feeling invisible and having to explain themselves repeatedly to mainstream organisations and statutory bodies because of racism, misogyny and systemic discrimination. There is enough evidence from Imkaan’s members to show the crucial importance of the by and for, which is holistic, intersectional from the start and where staff are skilled to understand and more equipped to respond to the whole of survivor context, including the intersection of violence, abuse, mental health, racism and other factors. I have some statistics. More than 85% of black and minoritised women prefer to receive support from black and minoritised VAWG services and 99% state that such services make them feel safer and protected, which has reinforced the value of the by and for. When support is delivered by specialist staff that reflects the communities they serve, women benefit from a uniquely empowering form of support. We spoke to survivors through our recent mental health report that we launched and I can quote one of the survivors who told us, “My support worker is almost like a bulletproof vest for me. I do still feel the heaviness, the weight of this process at times but she feels it first and she can dilute it.” Beyond the service delivery, black feminist organisations have contributed significantly to policy and legal progress on violence against women and girls in creating social and legal change in law and policy to challenge exclusion, racism and misogyny within system structures. We would not have access to safe housing for migrant women who lack legal protection or enhanced protection for women who are subjected to forced marriage or improved safeguarding with MARACs without the expertise and contribution of the by-and-for sector.

I probably mentioned earlier that the by-and-for sector have difficulty applying for funding at the same level as mainstream organisations. Imkaan tries to provide a solution. We have started to re-grant our members. We collaborated with different funders to fund Imkaan and we will be the grant funding for our members to overcome the limitation of accessing funding as well as the capacity of staffing. We will be funding them to do their work and making sure it is all on a trust base.

Yes.

I have probably mentioned trust-based and recognising experts and specialist services. The funding will go directly for women to escape violence and being out on the street. There is quite concrete evidence that the funding is provided in a shorter time with less bureaucracy.

I want to ask some questions about the victims missing from the data, but before I do I have some more basic questions on something that Florence referenced earlier. To get a hand on the data, I suppose one would have a definition. Why isn’t there an agreed definition of VAWG?

Following the Domestic Abuse Act, we have a statutory definition of domestic abuse. I think it is quite likely that most of our organisations define violence against women and girls in the same way but you see across different statutory agencies that there can be different definitions used at different times. I don’t think there is a logical explanation as to why. Perhaps the different types of violence against women and girls have been focused on at different times and definitions have followed. I suppose that domestic abuse and sexual violence are the most commonly understood. Some organisations focus their work, and there is lots of advocacy work to do, to make sure the full range of violence against women and girls, including things like honour-based abuse, FGM, are included. It is never a huge problem that comes across the sector. I think we are all pretty well aligned but different agencies define the problem in different ways. I don’t know if my colleagues have any thoughts as to why.

Not really. I think you have answered it quite well. We work closely on these things and the way funding is sometimes given focuses on different areas and separates things a little bit, but I think overall we are working towards the same thing.

Thank you. The crime survey of England and Wales excludes the young and the old. How does one stop children and older people being invisible in the statistics? How does one get funding for addressing VAWG in those situations?

It is a significant problem and, as colleagues have already said, we had this big legal change in 2021 with children being recognised as survivors in their own right for the first time but that has not been followed by a lot of change in understanding and funding services. If we take our refuge services for example, but also all our community-based services, we know that we are supporting children, either directly or indirectly, either because they are living in the refuges or we ask women we are supporting if they have any dependent children. We fundraise really hard to bring in money to deliver those services. For instance, we want to make sure that there is a child support worker in every one of our refuges. We are very nearly there. I think there is just one where there is not. That is the very bare minimum that we want to provide a child who has fled violence and abuse. They need a support worker but they need so much more and, quite simply, the funding just is not there. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner published a report last week about this very issue and some of her key recommendations were we need the data, we need to know how many children are subject to domestic abuse and we need the funding and co-ordinated working to make sure that children get the support they need.

I think it is an interesting point as well because although the VAWG strategy has not come out yet, we have an idea of might be there. Sexual abuse and violence for children is not included. It will be dealt with as a separate issue. I think if we are talking about violence against women and girls and leaving that out speaks to that problem.

What about old people?

Today we are meeting with colleagues who work at Hourglass, which is a specialist charity that supports older survivors of domestic abuse. We do not have an age limit at Refuge. We support survivors regardless of age and we will signpost to specialist organisations where a survivor wants that, but I do not think it is defendable or sustainable to have an age cap on the crime survey for England and Wales. We need to know how many survivors are out there.

You have mentioned various different commissioning models, primarily driven by local government. Ultimately, the money that is spent by local government comes via the taxation system and through central Government. There are obviously multiple different departments spending Ministry of Justice money, Home Office money or NHS money. How effective is the co-ordination of funding from central Government?

I do not think it is co-ordinated at all really. Everything is very much in silo, the different pots of money. It does not feel that anyone talks to each other and you might reference other funding streams when you are vying for things. You probably get duplication in some places and our experience is that it is very different and also very different depending on which borough or area you are in. It has not been a positive experience for us and it leads to inconsistencies in the level of support and kind of support people might be able to access.

I agree with that. I do not think it is well co-ordinated at all. The NAO found that the Home Office did not know or track how much spending was on violence against women and girls let alone co-ordinate. That leads to confusion but also to some major gaps. We have spoken about children. We highlight that there is a big gap for technology-facilitated abuse and the way technology is used and online violence against women and girls. Does it sit with DSIT; does it sit with the Home Office? It does not have any leadership or funding or strategy. We had the Online Safety Act with new measures for social media but there is nothing for tech-enabled devices and other ways that technology is used. It is poorly co-ordinated and we have these gaps and inconsistencies.

What do you think the Government should be doing to iron out those inconsistencies?

We talk a lot about cross-departmental working and I think that just needs to happen. It does not clearly happen. We need people around the table to talk about what those needs are, how they can be achieved. We need to get the right people around the table so that that is done. We talked about evaluation earlier. There is some good work and good pilots going on and that is not shared. Those things could be duplicated elsewhere if they are working well but you end up getting lots of people doing the same things. They should be shared collectively. We have some funding from MOPAC to help with children and family work around their mental health with our children and wellbeing practitioners. We have some funding to do an evaluation and research on that ourselves but that is the sort of thing that needs to be shared with everybody, what works and what doesn’t work and for future funding.

Focusing on the targeting of funding, evidence suggests that about 11 million people live in rural areas and international research indicates that violence against women and girls is more prevalent in rural areas. What do you think the Government should do more of particularly in rural areas where you may be dealing with police forces that are smaller in nature, smaller in size and there might be missed opportunities where those who need the help are not getting it just simply given the geographical area that they live in?

I think there needs to be a lot more training. I talked about employers and businesses and I think the police fall into that as well with their knowledge. We train police at Hestia. We help with policies as well with the police but in general with schools and early intervention practices. That is one way that it needs to be addressed. There is probably not as much awareness of domestic abuse, sexual violence and other things that come along with that in those areas and we have ways that we can address that.

Are there any prevention mechanisms particularly focusing on rural areas?

A great example of a project that Government have invested in is in Wales, the Sound campaign. It is fantastic. There are huge swathes of Wales that are very rural and the campaign has had fantastic evaluation and outcomes. They talk a lot about the evaluation coming from the valleys in particular. I point to the evidence there and I am happy to share that with you.

Thank you. Another issue that was brought up earlier and is a key theme is the challenges with how funding is drawn down and the lack of co-ordination and so on. Could all of you comment, if it is an issue at all, on the challenges of the increase in employers’ national insurance? I know the challenge it is having from the correspondence I am getting from other sectors. When you want to provide a professional service, what challenge specifically is the increase in employers’ national insurance having?

It is having a huge impact on us. What tends to happen—and it is not just the national insurance increase, it is the cost of living increases and paying the London living wage—is every year we go to commissioners and talk about what those costs are and what we will need to continue to run these services. Often we are told we need to restructure within the financial envelope that we have already been given. This obviously reduces the service that we are delivering and, as mentioned earlier, the more for less comes up, but you get to a point where you can’t restructure safely. That is not appropriate and services will close or we have to have difficult conversations with commissioners that we can’t deliver a service like this, which means there is even less refuge provision. These services save lives and it means there will be even more problems. Those are difficult conversations but they are also quite labour-intensive, they are not quick. You can be talking for months and months. We start to prepare ahead of time but you get to the point where it is going backwards and forwards and that is not the work we want to be doing. We need services that are funded adequately, that take into consideration annual uplifts and other things that are needed so we can just get on and deliver the work.

As a result of employers’ national insurance increasing, other overheads, maybe minimum wage, may impact the level of service provision, perhaps business rates increase if you are operating from physical premises. Is that likely to result in a decrease in the service provision that you are able to offer?

Yes, absolutely, if it continues and we do not get the funding that is needed.

Are the Government giving you any additional funds to help with the additional financial costs that the Government have imposed on your service provision?

No. That is what we are asking for but, no, it has not been positive. Some local authorities have been able to provide some support. Again, it is very dependent on where you go and what they have available but often it is just about there is no help.

Would a joint spending review bid by Government, a cross-departmental spending review bid, be welcome?

Yes, definitely.

The impact of the increase in national insurance on the by and for is double or even triple. Some of our members have to use their reserves. Some could definitely be on the verge of closing and services are not available in the region or the area for black and minoritised, so women are left to face violence without support. It is not only about the increase in national insurance. It is the cost of living and, something that has not been mentioned, the riots that happened last summer. There is still an impact on our members of having to change their services and schedule and focus their support to the women and safety of the women and because of the shift that they did last summer they still have and impact on their services today. There is not any compensation to cover the cost. As an umbrella organisation, we are trying to get some funding to be available for our members to access support for them to continue to provide the support. This could happen again,

On Robbie’s point about the national insurance contribution, the Government gave local authorities funding to cover that but the Local Government Association highlighted that there is still a gap of about £200 million. Do you feel that any of those additional costs that local government is facing have been passed directly on to you?

No, not for us. It may be for other supported housing possibly but I don’t think we have received any positive responses to the requests that we have made so far.

For tendering and commissioning, as has been mentioned, the envelope is the same as four years ago. There is not any increase or any reconsideration of the increase even though it is four years ago. The cost of living, national insurance and all of those costs have not been included.

Keeping on the issue of funding and looking at long-term funding, one of the areas that you touched on earlier the new duties being placed on local government since 2021. We know that across England local authorities are facing financial pressures; the Local Government Association highlights that in real cash terms there has been about a 49% decrease in local government funding since 2010-2011. One of the areas that the Government are looking at is multi-year funding settlements, consolidating some of the funding pots and less competitive bidding. Do you feel that there should be a longer duration of funding to help you to deliver the services that you are providing?

Prevention needs to be applied contextually in spaces, and that requires time and consistency. We would recommend a minimum three to five-year funding cycle to be essential for continuity, trust building, staff retention and retention of knowledge. Short-term funding leads to burnout, high staff turnover, the loss of specialist knowledge and the inability to evaluate work properly. To reiterate, inflation eats into budgets and so the real-term value has to be protected in that.

For the Government to make sure of the commitment to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, they should definitely consider reforming the current competitive funding and commissioning model to ensure by-and-for services have a fair chance of accessing grants and move towards a grant-based approach. That is one of our recommendations. I think I mentioned having multi-year, three to five years, ringfenced for specialised by-and-for organisations.

We cannot achieve our outcomes without long-term funding. It is too unstable. We touched earlier on retention and recruitment and what that means for survivors, so long-term funding would be welcomed, and three to five years with extension periods.

I agree with colleagues. We need to see it shifted in this VAWG strategy. We have been talking about it for such a long time now and it is such an obvious inefficiency. The contract values are not really enough anyway but we are having to spend so much time rebidding, restructuring, preparing in case we have to close down the service and then maybe with two weeks to go we find that we have got another year. That happens all the time. It is rarer that it does not happen than it does. We are spending such a large proportion of our small resources engaging with this commissioning process. I agree with colleagues that five years is good practice.

On the issue of long-term funding, again coming back to local authorities that you all work with and local authorities right across England, a number of them are presenting challenges in not just this area but adult social care, children’s social care and temporary accommodation. They are key areas that are forcing a number of councils to apply for something that is called exceptional financial support, which is effectively a Government bail-out so that those councils do not declare bankruptcy. Are you worried that if the situation across local authorities does not improve, that will have an impact on the day-to-day work you are doing for your sustainability and long-term funding?

Yes, absolutely. Local authority funding is such a core piece of the national response to violence against women and girls that is not always understood. It is what impacts our day-to-day service more than anything else and that is a real concern of ours.

The by and for can hardly access local authority funding. Eighty per cent of our members have access—they are already trying to find another funding, alternative funding. Very few of them have access to local authority funding.

I completely agree. The majority of our work with organisations is dependent on the funding that we get or the service that we provide to local authorities that they pay for. That is slightly different to applying for funding. There was a report done by the West Midlands OPCC a few years ago—I believe it was 2021—that was about the knowledge that we have, the local authorities we have, in preventing these issues from escalating. I think we really need to start thinking about that for this issue: what do we know that we are not doing, and that is prevention, to stop this escalation, to stop the crisis point from happening? That is what we have been living with for so many years.

My experience of two different local authorities is that the re-contracting process appears to be extremely problematic. What is your perception of the solution to that problem? I am interested in whether or not you think competitive commissioning is the right model fundamentally or if there might be a better one available. Secondly, what role do you think central Government should take and how directional should central Government be about that specific recommissioning piece? I have seen quite a lot of practice where decisions appear to be being made—and it is exactly the piece you have referred to but I have seen it—incredibly last minute by which point staff have been put through a redundancy consultation process. It has been completely needless, as you say, so a total waste of internal resource and time. It distresses staff, provides instability to service users—it is a catastrophe. Is the model fundamentally wrong and if it is not fundamentally wrong, what role should central Government have in it or should central Government step back? What would sort out this bit?

I think we need a mixed model. I would not say that we should never have to competitively tender for services but we should not have to do it all the time on these short-term contracts. I don’t think it delivers the best service or value for money. We need a move towards grant making in some places. Competitive tendering might be right for the larger, longer-term services. It is a real difficulty to get the balance right between local flexibility to meet the needs of their population and the real inconsistency we have at the moment where some local authorities seem to find semi-reasonable budgets for these services and others don’t commission anything whatsoever. We have a lot of guidance, and the guidance on paper is not that bad, but for the oversight of that guidance in places we need central Government to take greater control and dictate, particularly in the case of refuges. They are a national network and survivors move to be safe. That means that some local authorities say they are not local services for local women, so that falls to the bottom of the pile. If everyone does that, we don’t have any refuges. We would like to see much stronger central Government involvement in those services in particular. I think it is challenging and we need to continue to work together between central, local and services to find the best balance, but the one we have particularly at the moment does not work. I am hopeful that the spending review—the message of longer contracts is starting to be heard but it would be a huge missed opportunity if the VAWG strategy did not clearly try to bring everyone together to make some change there. In February this year we did not know if a third of our services would still be commissioned the next month in March. It was a huge cliff edge of funding. The system completely stopped working at the centre and we just did not know. It is really difficult to recruit and retain staff in the sector as it is. The wages are not where they should be. It is work that all of our colleagues are passionate about and love and it is hard, demanding and traumatising. We are asking people to do that with no job security on wages that are increasingly barely above the minimum wage and it is just not working. We desperately need to offer a deal for the expert frontline teams that we have that want to keep doing this work.

Ghadah, you mentioned the difficulty that specialist BME groups are facing and you said that you still want a mixture in that long-term funding, including areas of competitive tendering and bids. Are you not worried that some organisations have a full-time member of staff whose sole job is to apply for funding, because it is so demanding, whereas smaller specialist groups do not have that at their disposal? Do you think that if one of the areas being suggested for local government reform funding is removing some of the ringfencing, there would still be preventive funding in this key area?

Can I add to that because it links to a question I have? How much value is currently being invested by your organisation in reapplying for funding, or applying for funding in the first place, that could be spent on frontline services?

I don’t have an exact figure but I am happy to go back and write to the Committee. I think we have done that work, because it is disproportionate. To answer your question, we are really worried about ringfences. The domestic abuse safe accommodation money that we were talking about is now in the local government settlement. We are quite concerned about whether that money will be spent on safe accommodation and also the ability to track it, but we completely recognise that Refuge is one of the larger organisations in the sector and we completely endorse calls for there to be ringfenced grant funding for smaller by-and-for organisations. They are vital. The system needs reform as a whole. It still does not make sense for even the larger organisations to spend as much time and energy on competitive commissioning as we are forced to do. It also creates this competition where we can collaborate much more. We absolutely need grant funding and protection particularly for the smaller organisations that are absolutely vital.

I don’t have the exact figure, but as an example of how Imkaan has overcome some of the challenges and supported our members, during the pandemic we had a programme of grant making and we distributed over £1 million in grants for 58 organisations through the tampon tax. Our members sustained and survived with vital services to the women. That is an example of how we overcome the funding challenges that our members cannot access.

We go to the final set of questions, which are on how should Government prioritise violence against women and girls services. Robbie Moore will conclude on that.

Many issues have been discussed and I think this is almost summing up some of the key themes that have come through. This has been slightly touched on throughout, but what criteria should the Government be using to prioritise funding for the services that you are providing in an ideal world? Ellie, do you want to go first?

While we have spoken today about the fact that data and evaluation and monitoring could be better, a lot exists. We know that specialist violence against women and girls services are effective for survivors and it is what survivors want. That is not just us saying that because that is who we work for. The evidence of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s research looking into different service models is that that is what survivors want. We have good social return on investment data showing that for every £1 spent on specialist VAWG services, there is £9 of saving. On funding and prioritisation, we have an opportunity to fund this sector properly so that survivors can access the services they need. As I mentioned at the beginning of the meeting, that is about a £302 million shortfall at present. It is a significant but not huge, not impossible sum that would make a huge difference in preventing violence against women and girls.

Can I just interrupt? Is that an annual shortfall?

Yes. Colleagues from Women’s Aid Federation of England have made those calculations and I believe they have submitted them as evidence. On the criteria for what works, the specialist services that have been built up over decades and are really under pressure at the moment should be your prioritisation and your criteria. Let’s get services to survivors.

One of the priorities obviously needs to be around early intervention and prevention. There can be long-term savings by investing now and investing properly, especially when we look at young people and children, which is not funded for at all. I think we all have to fundraise for that. We look at young people’s services in supported housing and a number of those young people, care leavers, have experienced domestic abuse. We have an opportunity to act early and prevent those future access points into supported housing, which then go on to adult services. On criteria, looking at the crisis services for refuge will always be a high demand and needs to be funded adequately. We recognise that there are trauma-informed services and the early intervention work is needed as well.

Thank you. Is there anything in addition?

Yes, maybe more about the cost-benefit analysis from the by and for. Imkaan did this analysis and found that for every £1 in grant income to specialist by-and-for organisations like our members, our members reinvest £4 into their local economies, reducing the overall cost of VAWG to public services. There is a reduction in the cost of public services through our specialist work.

Thank you. On prevention?

Prioritise primary prevention. The underlying thing, going back to talk about definitions, is there is no national definition for primary prevention. We need one. If we are going to fund this and ask regions to fund this, we have to have an understanding of what that is. A lack of understanding is highlighted within the Safer Streets funding guidance. It is horribly depressing when you read that guidance with its understanding of what prevention actually works. The other thing for priorities is fund work that involves men and boys. We have to work with men and boys. We have to work with the underpinning culture and the root causes of this issue. We keep talking about violence against women and girls but this is men’s violence against women and girls. Thirdly, we need to support the proven models of what works but we also need to allow space for innovation within prevention. That could look like not just service provision, not just working directly with individuals. There are other ways of doing this. There are funding campaigns for awareness raising that genuinely changes people’s behaviour and there is also cross-sector working, which has proven to be positive and significant in this work.

Maybe this is an unfair question to ask you, and I will ask everyone. Is there an appropriate ratio, appropriate balance between the funding for prevention and funding for other services beyond prevention?

We cannot do that. We cannot create a competition between prevention and support services. This goes hand in hand. It is not an either/or question. It is two sides of the same coin, but if we ever want to get upstream from the crisis issues that these guys in their organisations are dealing with every single day, we have to start looking at prevention.

The service that our members are providing is prevention because they are preventing women from having more violence and being worse. That is how we see prevention. The provision of services is preventing women from escalating into a worse situation. To talk more about prevention and schools, I have one point on equality and diversity inclusion. It is regarded as an add-on and not as part of safeguarding practice, which for black and minoritised women and children is an issue of hyper-sexualisation and not diversification, which can impact disproportionately for black and minoritised women. This needs to be addressed in schools to prevent that.

We are seeing a real mixed understanding of what prevention means from Government, current and subsequent. There is prevention of reoffending after harm has already happened and there is primary prevention, which is a long-term strategy to prevent violence from ever happening in the first place, before harm has ever happened. I want to say that that is really important.

Essential if we are going to halve the figures. Thank you very much for this marathon evidence session. It has been incredibly informative. If there is anything that occurs to you on your way home that you think we have not covered, please feed it in. Likewise, if we come up with anything, I hope you will not mind if we come back to your organisations with further questions. Thank you again for coming and helping us in this incredibly important piece of work. With that, I conclude the session.