Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 17 March 2025. We will welcome our witnesses in a minute. Today, in this pre-panel, we are looking at the very important topic of violence against women and girls, which the NAO found was a significant and growing problem affecting one in 12 women and girls every year. Despite the efforts by Government to try to tackle the issue, outcomes for victims and the safety of women and girls have not improved. We are very fortunate to have with us here a panel of witnesses with huge experience working in this area, ahead of questioning of Government officials later this afternoon. We hope to hear from them about the demands on those supporting victims and how Government can overcome the most significant barriers to making progress on tackling violence against women and girls. This is a pre-panel. We are here not to catch you out but to try to seek out the truth and your huge knowledge, all of you. A very warm welcome first to Sarah Owen, who is Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, who is guesting on our Committee this afternoon. Sarah is a former member of this Committee, so she knows exactly how it works. We are particularly pleased this afternoon to have with us Nicole Jacobs DBE, domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales. Welcome, Nicole. Nicole was appointed, I believe, in September 2019 after more than two decades of experience working to reduce domestic violence, so you have been at this a long time. We are also pleased to have with us Professor Katrin Hohl OBE. You are professor of criminology and criminal justice at City St George’s, University of London. Katrin has spent over a decade researching issues relating to violence against women and girls. That is another huge amount of knowledge. Finally, but by no means least, we have Farah Nazeer, CEO of Women’s Aid. Farah joined Women’s Aid in March 2021 with over 20 years of director-level experience in the third sector. I believe that I am right in saying that both Nicole and Professor Hohl have not previously appeared before the Committee. A warm welcome to both of you. We are very pleased to see you. Let us kick off, because time is limited. We are going to do about three-quarters of an hour, hoping to finish at about 4.15 if we can. To get us going, the first question is from me. What difference do you think the Government’s efforts to date to tackle violence against women have made? You can be as critical, or not, as you like.

To date, we have not touched the sides of what we need to do. I also say that with the view that our first refuges were 50 years ago. I started working in the UK in 1998. There have been tremendous changes, so I do not want to negate any of those strides that have been made. The fact is that, as I see it, we still have some very chronic, fundamental problems that have been left unaddressed. I will probably focus more on those than the strides, but I am very happy to tell you about all the successes. There is the Domestic Abuse Act giving a definition. There are many things I could list. The things going forward that we have the most difficulty with are the fact that we do not have the fundamentals in place to reach the aspirations that we currently have, such as a sustainable way of funding specialist domestic abuse services. That type of funding comes to local areas in many different ways, including through MHCLG, through the part 4 accommodation-based duty, and through MOJ to PCCs. We have MHCLG sending local areas settlement funds, some of which are used for domestic abuse. The point is that victims and survivors depend on these services. The unplanned way that we send that funding to the local level makes it near to impossible to cobble that together so that we have funding across the board that I would consider very basic. I am soon to publish a report on children who are impacted by domestic abuse. We have defined them as victims in their own right, yet we have no funding stream that helps us fund services for them at the local level. I published a patchwork of provision that showed huge gaps. That is constantly holding us back. The second thing that holds us back quite substantially is data. We do not have end-to-end data, certainly for the criminal justice system. I just published a report about that. We do not have demographic data. I often say this, but it is true. I cannot sit here, as the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, and tell you which areas are performing at their very best. The third thing I would say is that we lack what I would tend to characterise as a co-ordinated response. It is about the specialist response, but what about housing? What about health? There are all of these very early intervention points. Within our strategies, which impact and empower what will happen at the local level, we are not creating a thick enough thread through all of those ways of working with the public that allows us to spot domestic abuse, prevent it, intervene early and provide support early.

That is a very helpful overview for a start. We will come back to a number of those points. Professor Katrin, do you want to briefly give your opening position?

I might focus on sexual violence, so rape, sexual assault and other forms of sexual offences, to complement. The area where we have made strides is that we talk about it, so there most certainly has been a huge amount of progress in terms of awareness-raising and considering it a priority. We have also had review after review. There are strategies, plans, documents, meetings and commitments. We now have plenty of all of that. Where, in my view, progress has been little or non-existent is prevention. Much of the focus has been on response and supporting victims and survivors, perhaps thinking of the criminal justice system, not that we have cracked that, but at least there has been some effort there. I do not think that, to date, Government have taken responsibility for prevention. We are not in that space at all. Where we also have made very little progress is in bringing perpetrators into the picture. We are far more comfortable speaking about victims and survivors and support for victims and survivors than we are comfortable acknowledging that sex offenders—people who sexually offend—are in our midst. The problem is particularly large for those between 10 and 20. Both the victims and the perpetrators are very young. There has been too little there.

That is really helpful. I am absolutely certain that we will come back to prevention. Farah, would you like to tell us your opening statement?

We have seen strides where there has been a coherent bringing together of infrastructure. You can see that through the Domestic Abuse Act, endeavours such as Raneem’s law and the coherence of policy across the piece. On the flipside, we see it falter where there is incoherence of policy. Nicole alluded to the incoherence around funding of services. There is funding from Ministry of Justice, MHCLG and the Home Office and via local authorities. When we were trying, as Women’s Aid, to look at where the funding comes from and how much funding is disbursed into the system to fund survivor services, it was an incredibly difficult job, and I am not sure that even we have it right. There is not much transparency. I am not sure that it is clear at all across the piece. On the other side of the equation, that leaves you without a sense of what is being put into the system and whether that figure comes anywhere near the figure that is needed when it comes to supporting survivor services. Currently, the landscape is that survivor services are not funded to within 50% of what is needed in order for sustainable, viable survivor services. They are at the heart of our response to domestic abuse and sexual violence. If a person does not have a place where they can dock in to keep them safe, you will not get them pursuing criminal justice outcomes. You will not get them engaging in prevention. Prevention is not just about younger people. It is also about the prevention of reoffending and further harm. That will not happen. You will not get the savings to society. You will not get people entering the workplace or protected children unless, at the core, you are funding survivor services. Right now, those services are absolutely on the brink. I have seen more services close or be in real jeopardy over the past six to seven months than I have over the past four years. We are in a state of crisis and we are now at a point where we have a 65% refusal rate into refuge and a 50% refusal rate into community-based services. You have survivors desperately wanting to access services. People do not go to services as a first resort. They go to services as a last resort. They are at a point of crisis generally, and we are saying no. In the current equation, we have no way of even beginning to address this issue.

Thank you, all of you, for your candid answers. It is really helpful.

Over the course of today and tomorrow, I am hosting a survivor summit, where 25 survivors from across England and Wales are coming together and having what we are calling curated conversations with officials and Ministers. Our panel this morning was about barriers. One thing that really strikes you when you listen to a whole host of quite diverse survivors, including male survivors, older survivors, disabled survivors and LGBTQ+ survivors, is that the very common theme is systems that do not work. First of all, they have a barrier themselves of explaining or understanding that this is domestic abuse. They talked a lot about how it took them a period of time to think, “This is something I would characterise as happening to me”. They knew what was happening to them was wrong and was causing distress. There is something there about how we help bridge that for people who are struggling in all sorts of ways. That is in the confidence we build in our frontline services, many of which, as they spoke about this morning, do not have core training. Social workers in England and Wales are not required across the board to have training on coercion and control. It is that kind of thing. When I describe that thicker thread, that is what we must see in the Government’s upcoming VAWG strategy so we address some of these barriers that mean that frontline services that would like to help are really missing so many of those opportunities. Then we have many barriers where victims this morning were describing things that you and I might find unimaginable, such as the idea that, when they called the police, they had such a negative response. When they spoke to a GP, they had such a negative response. We have a lot to do to build a concept of what good looks like in these very early points of contact. Victims and survivors have said to me that the two most obvious places for them to look for support would be the police, which we assume, and health professionals. We have very little in the previous VAWG strategies about the role of health and what health could be doing more in relation to domestic abuse. We really must see that change. The third thing that was mentioned so much this morning was the intersectionality. There is the fact that we have not defined honour-based abuse. Victims this morning were saying this was wider than what people tend to think of when they think of domestic abuse. It was not a current or former partner. These were extended family members, for example. One of their huge pleas to Government was that we must define honour-based abuse so we then start to build our practice around an agreed definition, just as we have in the Domestic Abuse Act. In terms of how much services that are by and for really impact those who are the most vulnerable, disabled and LGBTQ+ victims this morning were saying that it was an absolute change to their life coming into contact with services that they understood could immediately understand the context of their life much more easily, and yet these are the smaller charities, often, that are the least likely to be successful in the local funding arrangements. I believe we need to have a “by and for” way to plan for these services regionally and nationally, so that we have some service provision planned at the local level, but Government could play a much greater role in helping the capacity-building and technical assistance to make sure that we have some of this provision across England and Wales, because those are the people who are often the most vulnerable.

I am going to have to slightly speed this up.

Apologies.

No, because what you had to say was very important. Particularly that experience of your summit this morning was really useful to us. We have a lot of questions to get through. Perhaps we will have one question for one person, whoever is the best to answer it. Professor Katrin, do you have a quick answer on this particular question?

I have two very brief ones. One is absolutely data. Without data, you have no idea how much sexual violence, for example, there is. You have no idea what is working. Operationally, we cannot track people through the system. We know that known perpetrators and repeat perpetrators account for a huge amount of harm and use of courts and so forth. It is absolutely data. Without improving the data, I have no idea how anything else would work. The second barrier I would wish to see tackled is really going after big tech companies properly. Today is actually a significant day for the Online Safety Act because yesterday the deadline ran out for these big tech companies to assess whether they have illegal content on their webpages. As of today, they would have to remove it. I barely see anything in the news. There is no strategy to make people aware that actually the law should protect them better. I would see those two things as huge barriers. If we do not get the data in place and Government do not go after big tech, I see that very little can move in terms of shifting anything in this area.

Children should be recognised as survivors in their own right. Currently, there is very little provision out there for children. Children’s services mainly are not commissioned through local authorities. Services find money here and there to put them on, so they are fragile, vulnerable and unsustainable. They have been the casualty of this latest funding crisis. The second thing is funding services appropriately so they can respond to demands and need. The third thing is a recognition that there is not a silver bullet. There is not one law, announcement or intervention. We truly need a whole-system response. Where a survivor is engaging with health services, education services, going to the police or engaging with the criminal justice system, all aspects of the system need to recognise domestic abuse and sexual violence, be trained around it, engage with it and have professional curiosity around this. It would be naive to assume that simply putting on training or interventions makes a difference, because there are so many barriers to many of these institutions even recognising the need for training, feeling that they need to get engaged with this or that training would make a difference to them. Very often, they do not engage.

Thinking about what you said, Professor Katrin, listening to the “Today” programme this morning, all we heard was some leader of one of the tech companies saying that he could not stand the possibility of being fined up to £18 million and he was leaving the sector, not about how he was concentrating on taking any illegal content down. We should all say from this Committee this afternoon, loud and clear, that, if you have illegal content on your platforms, please take it down as soon as possible.

I am going to pick up with Farah. You spoke very clearly about the pressures on your members. I spoke to my local Bradford Rape Crisis recently and very much understood some of those pressures on the organisations that are supporting victims. How have the demands for those sorts of services changed and what do you think is driving those changes?

Demand is as high as it ever was. Demand has become more complex since covid, so cases remain more complex. People have lived in circumstances that are very challenging for longer periods of time. Funding has become more volatile within services, which often means that services are haemorrhaging very experienced staff. Having that continuation in order to support survivors is very hard. For example, whereas previously contracts used to be three, four, five or seven‑year contracts, now often they are one or two‑year contracts. It is very difficult to retain experienced staff who have mortgages to pay and families to maintain. Under those circumstances, that in turn has a huge knock-on effect when it comes to supporting survivors. Broadly, it is the disruption to staffing and the complexity of cases. There is the fact that the number is not going down and they are more complex. There is the increasing need to recognise children because, since they became victims in their own right, there is a duty to provide for them, but there is not very much funding in the system at all to do that, so services are even further stretched. Then there are the support services around services, so, for example, the helplines that exist and the other bits of funding that come through. Those are all expiring as well. It is a really complicated, challenging picture.

Can you help the Committee by unpicking a bit about complexity? I am keen to keep it on the demand side. What is changing about the type of victim that is coming forward? Give us a sense of what you mean by complexity.

For example, we are seeing more survivors presenting with mental health conditions. I think that over 45% of people in refuges now present with mental health challenges and there is not enough provision within the refuge services to meet that need. There are more people presenting with varying kinds of disabilities, and refuges are not equipped to do that. In fact, I believe that there are only two refuges that can properly accommodate somebody with a physical disability who is in a wheelchair. Refuge space is being filled up and people are not finding additional accommodation to move into. For example, where you have a survivor with male children over a certain age, that presents an additional complexity because there are very few refuges that might be able to take them. Where they can, they are not finding space in the local authority settlement to move them on. Criminal justice processes are taking longer. The family courts’ processes are harder to navigate, in spite of the many pathways that are in place. They are not yet touching the majority of survivors. There was more money floating around in the system so you could support survivors through that criminal justice or family courts journey. Now you simply cannot because those services do not exist anymore, so people are staying for longer with more and more acute challenges.

I had a particular case in my constituency of a woman with a physical disability, and we found it very difficult to find a refuge that could accommodate her, so those sorts of examples are very real.

There are two elements to this. One is that we need to recognise that the most common age of victims and perpetrators of sexual violence is 11 to 20. The average age has come down, successively, year after year, and this is what police know about, so this is not even what is not reported. We also know that young people now spend a lot of time online. We know from Baroness Bertin’s pornography review that they see incredibly extreme pornography. They see illegal images and all that all the time. This is part of their life. If we are not addressing that, if we are addressing it half‑heartedly, if we are letting companies get away with flimsy definitions that shift, shapeshift and change, or if we criminalise an aspect of it that is very hard to police, because these companies are abroad, and shy away from saying, “Having those images is a problem”, we are not going to make a dent. If this Government are to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and let us say that 11 to 20 is the most prevalent—it does not mean that it does not happen to older or younger people, by the way—these children are now born, are they not? They are the ones going to our nurseries and into our school systems, both prospective victims and perpetrators. This is the time to act, is it not, so that they go into a world where they do not see those things, do not think you can get away with it and it is not normalised? To them, non-consensual sex, rape, is normalised. It is what they see when they go online. The time to act is now. We do not have time to wait and see whether the reforms or changes in law done today will bed in well enough and then we can top up if required. We will have missed that decade, will we not?

Ms Jacobs, what progress do you think the Government can realistically expect to make in terms of halving VAWG in the next decade?

They can make huge progress. I really welcome the ambition because it concentrates our minds. What evidence do we have that we know works? Are we acting on any of that evidence? Where are evidence gaps? You may likely talk about this in the next panel, but I know that an evidence sprint has been taking place and have seen some of the outcomes of that so far. That helps us to compare other countries, but we have to be careful that context can be quite different. What are we basing our assumptions on? There are a few question marks in my mind. Given the fact we are talking today, I have not seen the VAWG strategy. I have not seen the outcome of the spending review, but I know that work is taking place. We have to focus on, other than what we have talked about, children, prevention and some of the things we have already spoken about. For domestic abuse, given the volume—and it is domestic abuse, sexual violence and stalking that the commitment is to halve—we have to think about how well we are doing in the places where we know victims will be accessing help and support at the very first instance. We have to think more creatively about the messages we send to the community, our friends, family and social networks. This morning, victims were talking about the church they go to. As Farah said, it is not going to be one thing, but we have to understand more about where our first points of contact are. I have a huge focus in my criminal justice report recently, which we will hear the Government response to on Wednesday, about the very first point of contact. We tolerate 43 police forces doing things in 43 different ways. What is the quality of that first point of contact? Are we making sure that it is not the police alone, for example? Are they working in partnership with our specialist domestic abuse services? For the victim, that opens up many more avenues of support and understanding. Also, perhaps, if needed, there should be more advocacy alongside the victim so that the police are doing all that they can. I would also make the same case for health. Health responses are the place where we would likely see the most diverse range of victims at an earlier point, and yet we have little to no commitments in relation to health and social care in relation to the previous VAWG strategies. The good news is that there have been efforts in pockets that have had evaluation. There have been, ironically, Home Office‑funded health initiatives that have brought to light what good looks like. We need to build on some of this analytical sprint, but we also need to be aware that some of the best work over time is quite localised. We have to learn and make policy decisions based on that and understand the shift that we need to take across all Government Departments and the kind of resource. If we really want to halve violence against women and girls, there are ways to do it. It is just that we do not tend to make those commitments.

To interrupt very briefly, you think it is possible, but it is about making sure that people are really focused on the things that are effective and we are not quite there yet, if I could just summarise what you said.

Do I think it is possible in 10 years? You could say that some of the prevention absolutely has to be prioritised. Whether we will see that direct effect within 10 years is hard to know. That does not mean that we would not want to do it. There are some ambitions for the Government. They have to really look critically. For example, if we were able to improve our criminal justice response, how does that measure up with the pressures we know already exist, such as the lack of prison places and the fact that we do not know what good rehabilitation and management in the community looks like for perpetrators of domestic abuse? There is a lot about the collective ambitions across Government that is not adding up just yet. That does not mean that I do not want to do everything and have this investment, but there is a lot to work out and work towards. I guess that, in each of our own ways, we are trying to say that there are chronic failures over many years that have not been addressed, such as data and the foundations of our strategy to fund. Those are things that must be addressed in order to get us anywhere close to that halving of VAWG.

You have mentioned the need for data. I would like to come back to this point about the evidence base. In particular, Nicole, you were suggesting that there has been some evaluation, but, on really critical issues such as rehabilitation, there is not a good evidence base. What do we know and should we be doing everywhere? What more do we need to do to fill the gaps in terms of what your priorities would be for evaluation?

Thank you for giving me the evidence question. What do we know? What do we not know? Most we do not know. I know that the Home Office has done its evidence sprint and looked at what is out there. We as academics—and I think the sector and everybody—always look for things that work. We find things that work for specific types of perpetrators, not all perpetrators, or specific groups of victims in some local context. Often the impact is localised, specific and hard to measure long-term. We do not tend to experiment with humans the way some do it with pets or animals. We cannot do in social sciences what you can do in the natural sciences. We cannot expose people to randomised control trials. If we only look at that type of evidence, which often Government tend to privilege, we will find very little that works. We know that victim support works. We have a lot of evidence that supporting victims works for support, but also for prevention. That is probably the one given. It is a mistake to just see that as mop-up or response. That is also prevention and intervention. On this one, the evidence base is very strong. We have next to no evidence on stopping perpetrators. I want to separate here prevention and intervention. Intervention is if we want to stop somebody who has already begun offending in some way. Prevention would be to try to stop somebody before they ever get into it. On prevention, we know that a whole-school approach works better than one‑off going in. We know that holistic set-ups work better. We know that we have to work with boys and men. We cannot just focus on girls. We know that just focusing on consent and healthy relationships is not enough. It needs to be respectful relationships. We also know that there is a huge overlap between male violence against women and girls and other types of crime. Any money spent on preventing male violence against women and girls is probably going to prevent some terrorism and other types of crime. It is a mistaken belief that people who offend against women only offend against women; they do not. We have too little evidence. Academia has been letting you down for the last 20 years or so. We have stopped researching sex offenders. It has become unpalatable. We do not do it. Ethics do not do it at universities. There is huge room for Government to fund research programmes that are collaborative and are not done in ivory towers but are done, for example, like Soteria, between criminal justice agencies with Government Department involvement and academics. That will help us speed up. We are very slow as academics. We take too much time if we are left to our own devices. We will write a very long piece of work with very impractical recommendations. Do not leave us to our own devices. Make us work with practice. Having some Government involvement is not a bad thing either in Soteria, which would have never happened without Home Office funding and involvement, although the credit very much goes to policing for taking the initiatives and running with them. They have gone from 2% to 8% or 9%.

As somebody who dabbled as an academic for a while but was always about application, I really appreciate, as I am sure your fellow panellists do, your honesty about making sure that research is relevant and done in partnership. That is very helpful. Perhaps I can go to the other colleagues on the panel to come to this issue about local innovations and what we can be learning from that. I have an example in West Yorkshire. West Yorkshire police set up a preventive programme in schools called Pol-Ed. It has already been adopted by four other forces, but at this point I am not sure whether it has been evaluated or indeed whether that is something in the prevention space, the whole‑school approach, that should be adopted by all police forces, for example. How are we spotting local innovation and making sure it is evaluated and spread? Nicole, are there any examples that you would wish to highlight from your role?

I have a relatively small team at the commissioner’s office, but the first team I prioritised was setting up a practice and partnerships team so we could understand, across England and Wales, what the local innovation is. Having worked in this for quite a while, I understood that that is where you find the best practice that you build on and try to replicate. This is one of the things that is a real challenge for the Government in their mission-driven approach and the ambition we were talking about before, so really embracing a much more coherent way to take some of this local practice and make it the common practice. We tend to tolerate huge amounts of variation. That is hard to do, I suppose, without always playing to the lowest common denominator. I debate this all the time. Do you mandate all areas to do particular things, but then perhaps that disrupts some of what is really excellent local practice? We need to spend more time understanding that. Since I have been commissioner, I go to very few meetings where there is a real in-depth analysis based on local innovation. You mentioned a policing example. There is the new centre for VAWG and public protection that has just been announced and will be up and running soon. I would hope that that would harness much more of a coherent picture of what goes on from force to force. It is very much up to the Home Office and Ministers how they lead and what they require of that centre. I often see lots of efforts from policing where they bring together a highlight practice, but very little in saying, “We will now expect every single force to do”—you could pick so many things, such as disclosure schemes. You could think of so many examples where we have given tools and created legislation and options that get implemented in a very haphazard way. There is something about the mission, harnessing all of what Departments should be doing across Government, but also having ways that we require and having much more of a grip on creating that consistency.

This new centre sounds like it might solve the problem in policing. I did not quite catch its full title. Obviously there is lots more, given we have just said that it needs to be cross-departmental, across health, education and so on. If it is not anybody’s job at the moment to do that, do you have any thoughts on whose job it should be? We are about to have the Government officials in.

We have 200 members that provide something like 500 services across England. Across that provision, there are so many examples of good practice, be it good practice with children, good practice in schools, good preventive practice, good practice working with those with mental health conditions or indeed good practice with black and minoritised women and so on. There are lots of examples of good practice. The vast majority of those examples are bred of innovation, experience and opportunity, and they are cohered into something that makes a difference within that context. What they do not have attached to them is the sort of funding that is needed to evaluate and then think about scalability and replicability. That is not there. There is a desperate need to support a thorough interrogation of what these interventions are, how replicable and scalable they are, and then cohere them into something that could actually make a difference to the landscape at large. Many of these things come from the bottom up, so they do not have that kind of funding attached to them to actually interrogate them in the way that you are describing.

Our time is almost up, so I am going to ask each of you what we have not covered, because that is really important. I think that you have been warned that I would ask that. I have three questions within that and any of you can address any of these, but probably not all of you addressing all of them. We have a lot of evidence, as you might imagine from this session. The Gender and Tech Research Lab tells us that the absence of a consistent definition for VAWG is critical in the context of technology‑facilitated abuse. I do not know what you think about that. It recommended two helpful things: establishment of a specialist tech abuse helpline and a taskforce to improve service access. We then heard evidence from SHERA Research Group. As I say, I do not know these people, so I do not know whether they have a particular beef or not. It highlights the institutional sex/gender-based violence within family courts in England: “Some of the above abuses are enacted by court actors such as legal and social care professionals, with these abuses being under-recognised in family court”. I do not know whether that is a problem or not. I picked these three out of 85 or so bits of evidence we have had. Finally, there is the whole business of a persons at risk of violence order. There is partly the difficulty of the £308 cost, but sometimes the difficulties of the judicial process of taking it to court and making the insolvency register private so that repeat offenders cannot go back and see where these orders are granted. I am going to start with you, Commissioner, if I may. You may take any of those questions or none of them and you may address things that we have not yet covered, please.

Those are good selections. My real hope for the next VAWG strategy, and what I would want to hear from the next panel, is how we will have a very significant, convincing thread through all of our Government Departments, including what education and health will be doing in these much wider programmes of work in Government. I feel like that is where we could make the biggest headway to have the systemic change I was describing earlier, so within reforms of children’s social care and women’s health strategy. There are so many opportunities where, with ministerial leadership, you direct and make sure you are opening up so much more that could be happening in highlighting domestic abuse. Then, of course, there is having the innovations that Farah was just describing and having some additional funding. My biggest concern is that the funding for the specialist services is everywhere but nowhere. You can have each Department, in an ideal world, playing their part in the VAWG strategy, but we have to have a coherent understanding across Government Departments of these fundamentals we started off with today. Of the things you mentioned, on tech, domestic abuse merits some very different thinking in relation to what we expect of the Online Safety Act, because the nature of it can seem so benign to us. A perpetrator posting a picture of your front door is not an obscene image. To the victim of domestic abuse, that is a way to say, “I know where you live. All that effort you just made to uproot your entire family: I know”. From DSIT and the VAWG strategy, we need ways that we equip the first people victims will talk to about that. They will talk to the police, so we need that to be covered very well. They will talk to the members that Farah represents, and they have very little funding for that kind of advice. Those would be my final pleas to the Committee.

I have two. One is that there is obviously the VAWG strategy that is about to be published, apparently, and then there is separately a tackling child sexual abuse strategy. Why are they separate? There is such huge overlap in the two, so already silos are beginning to emerge. Farah has made the point excellently throughout about children. We need to think of them too. We cannot drop the “girls”—and the boys—in “violence against women and girls”. The second is a plea for innovation. Nothing we already know will shift the dial. In Australia, the state of Victoria has done a huge programme. They were where the Government here are today 10 or 15 years ago. They have done a huge programme investing in prevention and gender equality. Ten years on, they are not sure that it worked. They feel that some of it has worked—there is more awareness and better attitudes—but has VAWG reduced? No. Unless we are very bold and willing to invest in innovation, halving it in a decade or nine years—now there are nine years left—is not going to work. I have a third one, which is about responsibility. Someone asked earlier who should be responsible. In the past, perhaps sometimes plans were not ambitious enough. If you make it so ambitious and the timeframe so long, there is such a good chance that no one who is in charge now will be held responsible for whether they delivered when it comes round to check. What are the interim milestones to see whether we are on track with this and who is actually responsible? Are we hoping that somehow the Home Office has enough muscle to convince other Departments, which are all being squeezed, to part with money for something that is not their priority? How is this going to work? There needs to be much higher-up responsibility. Those would be my points.

I will pick up on the second point you made, Chair, on the family courts. That is a really interesting area. Survivors tell us routinely that they feel that going through the family courts processes is almost more abusive than having experienced abuse by the perpetrator. They see them as harmful, misogynistic spaces. We know that training, if it happens, is perhaps not as we think that it should be and not as frequent or deep as it should be. We know that there is a big gap when it comes to implementing the recommendations of the harm panel, now five or six years on. Nothing has really altered there. Where you have Government recommendations that could make significant difference to the vast majority of survivors, to refuse to implement them is simply not acceptable, particularly in the context when we are talking about halving VAWG. That brings me to my second point about incentivitis. There are new reports and recommendations everywhere. There is a lot of good stuff out there already that has been tested, evaluated and agreed. Starting by implementing some of those things would get us quite a long way forward. That is the second point. The third is the funding of services and that whole-system approach. A simple example would be Raneem’s law, which is something that should absolutely be celebrated, and experts in 999 call centres. What do those experts do with those survivors once they are identified? If they are not in touch with and aware of the local service, not attuned to what the local service can provide, or that local service does not exist or is not funded, what happens to that survivor and her children? What happens to them? In fact, you could place them at greater risk. That is what we need to think about when we are thinking about whole-system approaches, not silver‑bullet interventions that could actually cause more harm than good, while, of course, being a good intervention. It is really important to think about the back end and the whole system.

Reports have gone up. They acknowledge that some of that is confidence in coming forward, but they are not confident that all of it is just more people coming forward and that that would be enough to cancel it out. They think that it may have made some difference, but not certainly.

Can I thank all three of you very much? We have a lot of witnesses before this Committee, but I have to say that you three have given us some really useful and interesting evidence this afternoon. Thank you for giving your time to us. We have appreciated it hugely and I, for one, have learned a lot. Thank you very much. Witnesses: Sir Matthew Rycroft, Richard Clarke, Talitha Rowland, Justin Russell and Emma Payne.

Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee. We now continue into our main session. Violence against women and girls is a serious and growing problem, causing significant harm, with long-term impacts on victims. It is estimated that one in 12 women are victims of violence against women and girls each year, although the actual figure is probably much higher. More than one in four women will be victims of sexual assault or attempted assault in their lifetimes. The Home Office leads the Government’s work to address violence against women and girls, although many other parts of Government need to be involved to achieve real progress. Efforts to tackle this issue have not yet been successful in improving outcomes for victims or the safety of women and girls. The new Government have set an ambition to halve violence against women and girls in the next decade. I would warmly like to thank all those who submitted evidence to this inquiry—about 85 people, I think—which has been very useful to the Committee. We have just heard, from an excellent panel of witnesses, some of the challenges and barriers to tackling violence against women and girls. We will now be hearing from officials about how they are planning to address some of these issues to make real progress in tackling violence against women and girls and meeting Government’s ambitions. I should just say, before we go on, if anybody who is here or anybody who is listening to our proceedings has been affected or upset by any of the issues we have been discussing, there is a full list of organisations at the back of the NAO report that may well be able to provide help. We are very pleased to have our witnesses with us this afternoon. Sir Matthew Rycroft is seasoned in appearing before this Committee. You have been Permanent Secretary since 2020. This is probably your last appearance before the Committee. May we thank you very much for all you have done? You have been before this Committee a lot. There have been a lot of controversial issues. You have answered our questions with good humour and frankness, so thank you very much for that. Next to you is Richard Clarke, director general for safer streets and public safety. You returned to the Home Office in 2024, following six years at the Department for International Development. We are also pleased to have Justin Russell from the Department for Education. Justin was appointed to this role in 2023, having previously been HM Chief Inspector of Probation. I should say Justin is the director general of families at the DfE. We also have, from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Emma Payne. Emma, welcome. Emma joined MHCLG in 2022 to lead the Homes for Ukraine programme. Rather at the last minute and standing in very quickly, we are very pleased to see Talitha Rowland from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Talitha is the director of security and online harms, and I am sure we will be examining some of those issues this afternoon. A warm welcome to Richard and Talitha. I believe this is your first time in front of this Committee. You are very welcome here. I would also like to welcome our guest member, Sarah Owen, who is Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee. You are very welcome, Sarah, and, of course, you are a former member of this Committee, so you are well seasoned in how this Committee works.

Good afternoon, panel. The prevalence of domestic abuse against women has fallen in the last decade, from 9.2% to 7.4%, but, over that same period, incidents of rape and sexual assault against women and girls has increased almost fourfold, from 34,000 to 123,000. Sir Matthew, I wonder if you could give me the Home Office’s assessment of its own sense of satisfaction on what it has been able to achieve to date in tackling violence against women and girls.

Thank you very much, Ms Olney. Thank you, Chair, for the welcome this final time. As you can see from the panel, this is a joined-up approach from the Government, involving the four Departments represented here and many others as well. The figures are horrifying, in terms of the damage done and the volume of incidents of violence against women and girls. It is quite right that this Government have chosen violence against women and girls as a central pillar of the safer streets mission, with a very ambitious target to halve violence against women and girls over the next 10 years. Nobody looking at the figures that you have identified would feel anything but determination to redouble our efforts to make sure that the sector, some of whose members you have just heard from in the previous panel, policing, the whole of the criminal justice system, and the wider system of prevention—including education, represented here, health and many others—all come together to do a genuinely cross-societal effort to tackle violence against women and girls.

In terms of your sense of satisfaction, as I said, does it trouble you how much rape and sexual assault has gone up in the last 10 years?

Of course it does. That is why we are determined to, as I say, redouble our efforts and to use this new mission structure to tackle what I thought were the big themes coming out of the first panel: the joining up across Government, the funding and the data. Those three things were themes of your first session, all of which the Government absolutely accept as areas where we need to be doing better. That is precisely why the safer streets mission is putting this at the heart of its priorities.

First of all, my heart goes out to all victims and survivors. The Government, since the election, have already demonstrated their commitment to tackle violence against women and girls with the introduction of domestic abuse protection orders, the introduction of Raneem’s law, in terms of specialists in 999 control rooms, and the creation of a new offence of stalking. There are many other examples, which I am sure we will come on to. Of course, that is not enough on its own, but it represents a strong start and a downpayment, if you like, in terms of that 10-year commitment.

The overall measure of success, as you know, is to halve incidents of violence against women and girls over 10 years. The trajectory to get there will not be plain sailing. Each of the measures that I have just described, and other aspects of the strategy to be launched by the summer recess, will have evaluation measures attached to them. My successor and others will be able to keep this Committee and others updated as we make progress.

Yes, absolutely. It is important both to have the metrics that are, in very black and white terms, measures of whether we are moving in the right direction and how fast, but also that more qualitative assessment of how victims and survivors are feeling about the services that they receive. If I may, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of the NGOs and others in the sector that do such sterling work. This is something that must be horrifying to deal with day in and day out, but it is such an essential part of our society.

In the case of both DAPOs, the domestic abuse protection orders, and Raneem’s law, we are building victim and survivor experience into the evaluation that runs alongside those.

Sir Matthew, you know from many previous appearances on this Committee that we are quite keen on milestones. I am very keen that we do not go too many years in without seeing what progress has been made. We want to see some real good progress from now on in. Will that plan under you, or your successor, have milestones in it, so we can see whether you are meeting your aspirations?

It absolutely will and it is a really important part of getting the safer streets mission up and running, not just on this bit—the violence against women and girls—but also on the knife crime bit and the other parts, which are, as you know, improving trust and confidence in policing and the criminal justice system. Those are the four pillars of the strategy. They all require metrics. They all require very frequent reporting back to this Committee and to others, and that is what you will see. We have on this bit spent the first six months deliberately working out where the evidence points. This Government in September set up an evidentiary sprint, which is coming to an end, six months on, and we will be publishing the findings of that, alongside the violence against women and girls strategy, before the summer recess.

Can I just thank the panellists and also the members of the pre-panel? It was incredibly helpful. Panellists will recognise that the Home Office has found it challenging to get buy-in from other Government Departments. The oversight group that was established did not meet until a year after the 2021 VAWG strategy was launched. I am very familiar with that period, as I was a council leader and was, in many ways, being contacted by on-the-ground organisations and residents who were very keen to have an input in that strategy. I wanted to first ask about the ministerial oversight of that period, in the spirit of wanting to learn from previous VAWG strategies, so that the next VAWG strategy is more successful. That group met only four times in three years. That is one question. It speaks to a broader question about the struggle to get buy-in from other Government Departments. Why do you think that is?

In that line of questioning, you are making a very strong argument in favour of this Government’s mission-based approach and the join-up. You are right that the previous Government did have methods of joining up, including the ministerial one that you have identified and others. There were other criminal justice taskforces involving Cabinet Ministers and others at various stages, but it is fair to say that the absolute priority given to violence against women and girls has increased with the general election. In this area, the previous Government focused most of all on reducing homicide, serious violence and neighbourhood crime. Those were the three big things that that Government were tracking through their period in office. They did achieve the 20% reductions in all three, as well as the 20,000 additional police officers through the police uplift programme. The Government that came in in July have absolutely elevated tackling violence against women and girls to a much higher level of priority, and that is why you now have that cross-Government approach. One of the many benefits of mission working is that it really creates a framework for collaboration across Government and beyond, with the sector that I mentioned earlier.

You would expect me to say this. I am in favour of the mission, but the mission in itself does not create a change of working within Government Departments. It is very clear from both the National Audit Office report and, indeed, some of the publications from the Home Office itself that the cross-departmental working challenges can in many ways be down to structure, but also culture. I absolutely take the point around there being a commitment that is Government-led and, indeed, Prime Minister-focused, around tackling violence against women and girls, but I wonder if there is anything you or your colleagues might want to say around the practicalities of making sure that cross-departmental working will happen more effectively, so that the new VAWG strategy can be seen as an effective tool that has better outcomes.

Before inviting Richard to say something about how the safer streets mission will do that, and my colleagues from outside the Home Office, who can offer a view on what it is like to work with the Home Office from outside it, I just want to say that, when I came into the Home Office, I had previously never worked in it. This was five years ago. “Collaborative” would not be the adjective that first came to mind in terms of my own view of what the Home Office was like as an organisation, from a position outside it. I have really tried, with my senior colleagues, to improve the reputation of the Home Office for its collaborative spirit. There is quite a long way to go on that journey. Changing culture, as you know, takes a very long time. In Richard and his colleagues on the executive committee, we do now have a set of people who are absolutely driven to demonstrate that cross-system join-up, very much a mission-based approach, not just in the safer streets mission but in everything that we do in the Home Office now. There is a lot further to go, but I hope that we have been moving in the right direction.

I wanted to give an example of working between the Home Office, the police and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government but, Richard, if you would like to go first, that is fine.

That would be great, if that is alright. Thanks. You asked about the frequency of meetings. It is worth saying that, since September, the safer streets mission board has met four times and the violence against women and girls sub-board, which Jess Phillips and Alex Davies-Jones, the Ministers from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, jointly chair, has met three times. We already have real ministerial momentum. It is also important to emphasise as a senior civil servant just how clear to the civil service, as well as to the public, the Prime Minister is about putting missions genuinely at the heart of Government. The Home Secretary and I have a regular stock-take, which Matthew attends as well, with the Prime Minister to assess progress against the mission. I feel appropriately under pressure and held to account. As Matthew said, colleagues on the panel may want to comment on this, but my aspiration from when I took this role on in July has been to be collaborative and demanding of my colleagues, making sure that we are making real progress. The mission does feel different in practical terms, and it certainly feels different in the sense of expectation from the Government as a whole.

I am, on behalf of the Committee, looking for confidence that the spirit and commitment will translate into cross-departmental working. If I may, Chair, with your permission: every week, like most Members of Parliament, I hold an advice surgery, and more often than not, I have a constituent come to see me with a domestic violence case. It is unusual in no way. We are often the last port of call when people have experienced crisis, as I am sure you will be aware. This week I had two cases. It just happened to be just before we had this panel session. Both cases were of a woman whose partner had beaten her up so badly that he was in prison, had been let out and had continued to harass her. In both cases, the women felt that they were at physical risk with their children. In both cases, she was seeking to be rehomed and could not be rehomed. In one case, it was challenges with the local authority. In another case, it was challenges with a housing association. The theme, though, was common. I know it is a complicated picture, because there is a wider picture of a housing crisis, but these were quite extreme cases. These individuals had already been convicted, already had a record of violence and, from my perspective, were likely to reoffend o,r at the very least these women and children were at risk. They could not get themselves rehoused to another location. It feels that there is something fundamentally wrong about Government Departments not being able to set up in a way that allowed these women to live safely or feel safe. They found themselves in a church hall speaking to their Member of Parliament. In one case, she was not going home. She was living somewhere else, because she would not go home. In another case, she told me that, despite having a panic alarm, she did not feel safe. I thought, “There has to be something wrong with the departmental working in this country that does not allow these women to feel safe, even when their ex-partner has been convicted”.

I have heard about exactly the same scenario on more than one occasion.

I just wanted to give panellists the opportunity to talk about those two things.

Nesil, shall we allow Sir Matthew to answer first? Then, perhaps we ought to go to Emma Payne, MHCLG, after that.

I was going to suggest that Emma should answer the housing and local authority aspect of the question, but I am really shocked and saddened to hear those examples. If there is anything that you would like us to follow up with offline, then we will follow up after this hearing.

Similarly, I am so sorry to hear about those examples and am very happy to follow up. In terms of the housing situation, there is a duty on local authorities to support victims of domestic abuse in safe accommodation. That duty came in in 2021 in the Domestic Abuse Act and, since that point, MHCLG makes funding available to local authorities to support victims of domestic abuse in that safe accommodation. There are a range of other things that local authorities have to do as part of that duty, including setting up a local partnership board, which brings together police, tier 1 and tier 2 representatives, specialist services and a range of different partners in the community. That partnership board assesses local support needs, publishes a strategy and then makes available support in line with the strategy. That is the duty that is in place, and funding flows out from MHCLG to local authorities. That funding has increased year on year and is being uplifted again into 2025-26. There are also requirements around homelessness support and social housing access, which I can go into in a bit more detail if that would be useful. There is a range of different steps that local authorities need to take to support victims.

Ms Payne, is it your understanding that that is what is routinely happening? I promise you it is not.

Our understanding is that it is happening in the majority of cases, but you have raised some examples and it sounds like other Committee members have examples where it is not. We collect mandatory data on an annual basis from local authorities to understand what is happening. That data is published. We are also in the process of carrying out a full evaluation of how that duty is working. That evaluation is due to report this spring, so that will give us fuller qualitative and quantitative evidence of how it is working on the ground.

I will stop there, but I will just finish by saying that I hope you take good note of what the Local Government Association has said in this space. The duties that you outline are not happening across the country. Local government does not have the capacity to do that. The examples that I have given are in no way unusual. It is not just a capacity issue. There is something around the culture of a holistic approach to tackling this. One of my pleas would be that the new VAWG strategy allows there to be flexibility and cross-departmental working that is far more effective, so that women are not having to go to 100 front doors and can just go to one.

Perhaps, Emma, you could tell us what you need from the Home Office, as MHCLG, to produce a holistic strategy for violence against women and girls. I am going to ask the same thing to Justin Russell in a minute and maybe even to Talitha Rowland. What do you need, as a joined-up strategy from the Home Office, to be able to make this whole thing work better?

I would just echo what has been said about the cross-Government working. It really is stepping up and there is a lot of collaboration going on, as well as engagement at official and ministerial level. That is really positive. We have been feeding evidence and data into the work that the Home Office is co-ordinating, and we will continue to do that. I agree that we need to look holistically at what is happening. In local places, we need to look at things holistically too. The local partnership boards that I mentioned are one way of doing that, and the evaluation work that we are carrying out at the moment will absolutely feed in as well. I would just say, in answer to your question, that collaboration, sharing of evidence, sharing of data and understanding how things are playing out in local areas feels really important.

I have also seen a step change in engagement on this issue across Government. Our Ministers have attended three cross-Government ministerial meetings on violence against women and girls. There is a supporting officials’ group, which my directors attend as well. I am seeing very good joint working with the Home Office on initiatives such as Operation Encompass, which is a scheme for the police to notify schools about domestic violence incidents. On the ground, we are trying to enable different agencies to work together in a better way. The new Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes a clause to set up multi-agency child protection teams involving the police, health and children’s services within statutory partnerships to investigate child protection cases, a significant proportion of which are likely to involve violence against women and girls. I am also noticing this change in focus and prioritisation.

Richard, I am sorry to bring this back to money, but this Committee is very keen on money and how it is spent. The NAO report makes it clear that there are lots of different pots of money in your Department and in the various Departments. How are you, as the co-ordinating Department, making sure that all the money that Government spend on this difficult and tragic issue is being spent effectively? How are you evaluating what all the various Departments are doing towards a holistic strategy?

I see it as my role, in part, to make sure that we are sharing best practice when it comes to evaluation. I am sure you will want to come back to this as part of the discussion this afternoon. We are making sure that we are sharing best practice of what really works well. Project Encompass, which Justin just mentioned, works with schools to make it easier to refer potential examples of domestic abuse. Its evaluation is due to be completed very shortly. That is something we have been working on together. The spending review, which is due to complete in the coming months, is a really important opportunity for us to bring together Government in a very different way, when we think about joining up spend. I was in the room listening to the witnesses immediately beforehand. I am very conscious that there are benefits that come from having specific funds that target individual areas, but that this can be a confusing landscape if we do not join up really effectively. The NAO was right to say that, at the moment, we in the Home Office do not have a comprehensive account of exactly what is being spent in every Government Department, but I am confident that the approach we are taking to the forthcoming spending review will really shift that.

The previous witnesses made a big point about data. What are you doing to improve not only your own data, but cross-Government data on this issue?

There are two key things that we are doing. The first is to make sure that we are working with each individual Department. We have been doing this, in part, through the evidence sprint, the work that we have been doing over the last six months, which the previous witnesses and Matthew mentioned earlier, to make sure that we have the best summary of what data we have at the moment and where we have data gaps. We know, for example, that FGM is an area where we have insufficient data being gathered locally. The other thing that we are doing is some specific work in those places where the absence of joined-up data is the most significant potential barrier to delivery. The best example of that by a long way is the criminal justice system. At the moment, it is not possible to track an individual very clearly through the criminal justice system, because we have slightly different ways of categorising individuals. We have been doing some work for the last several months with colleagues from the Crown Prosecution Service, the Attorney General’s office and the Ministry of Justice. This work is being co-sponsored by Matthew and his opposite number at the Ministry of Justice, shortly to be Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, and is specifically on how we can join up data more effectively across the criminal justice system as a whole. We will be taking that work into both the VAWG strategy and into our collective approach to the spending review.

Presumably, that joined-up approach to tracking individuals would be of considerable assistance to the police in the types of cases that Nesil and Rachel were talking about.

Yes, absolutely. It would, but if we were to stop only there it would not get at the two very distressing cases that you were describing earlier. In those sorts of situations, the key thing is for us collectively, as Government, to be thinking about the approach we are taking through the lens of the individual experience that a person, a victim, a survivor or a family has, making sure that we are not presenting as a series of silos, if you like. That is always the risk with Government, if we do not get it right.

I would like to echo my colleague, Nesil’s, point, particularly about housing. I have had very similar cases. Speaking to the local refuge, it has long waiting lists, because it is simply not able to move the women and their children into social housing or accommodation following a period in the refuge. This is some of the evidence we have received. One piece is from Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse and says that, for 80% of victims and survivors, their first or only point of contact is with healthcare services. As a Committee, we could not have added every Department to this panel, but I did just want to particularly ask, in terms of this cross-sector working, what the Home Office’s ask would be of the Department of Health and Social Care. As we heard from our pre-briefing panel, they have such an important role in that first contact and in then supporting victims and survivors at that early stage.

The NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care have a particularly important role to play in what we call early intervention. We will talk about prevention shortly, I am sure. It is absolutely critical, if we are to halve violence against women and girls, that we are working with individuals who, at the moment, are not perpetrating domestic abuse or violence at all, but would otherwise perhaps go on to do so. As Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, has said to me on multiple occasions, we know that victims and survivors of domestic abuse are most likely to first raise a concern about the very early stages of domestic abuse, for example, to a midwife, a health visitor or a general practitioner. We are working with the Department of Health and Social Care. In particular, one of the things we would like to do is to work more effectively with the governing bodies—the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Midwives and bodies like that—to make sure that we are supporting best practice guidance on what to do in those circumstances. The NHS has done some brilliant work in Devon, I think it is, where GPs have all been supported collectively to develop a new pathway for rapid referral of individuals in those circumstances, training GPs to spot the very early signs of domestic abuse and to work with victims and survivors and, indeed, with perpetrators, as rapidly as they can. That is a very good example, if I may say, of circumstances where we do not need to try something in loads of different ways. If there is an example of something that works very well, what we would love to do is see that being rolled out nationally as quickly as we can manage it. That may well be one of those kinds of examples.

You mentioned this specifically in your earlier answer, and it relates to the MOJ. You were talking about having data about offenders. I have a case at the moment where there is some contact between a convicted perpetrator and victim, basically continuing coercion from inside prison. We have received evidence about this. How do we do better in the MOJ, not only in terms of the rehabilitation and stopping the reoffending, but actually stopping the ongoing victimisation? There is a risk of that resulting in a failure, if they are still on remand, to proceed with the case. How will data and your links with the MOJ actually tackle some of the issues around rehabilitation and reoffending?

Our relationship with the MOJ is perhaps one of the closest we have. I mentioned that the Ministers from the Home Office and MOJ jointly chair the violence against women and girls sub-board of the main mission board, and I work very closely with a range of colleagues from the Ministry of Justice board. In addition to the work we are doing at the moment to make it easier to spot patterns in data, like the kind of thing you just described, in those circumstances, I think of some of the criminal justice interventions that the Government have introduced since the election. I think particularly of the work we are doing with domestic abuse protection orders, where an individual could be placed on an order, a breach of which would itself be a criminal offence. That would be a good example of that. Criminal justice interventions on their own will not halve violence against women and girls in a decade, but they are a really important part of our early priorities. Some of the initiatives we already have under way plus the use of better analysis of data will go some way to the kinds of example you have just described.

We had a previous Committee hearing on some of the delays in the Crown Courts. Clearly, there is a big issue there about sexual offences and the large numbers of victims withdrawing, because of the long times. We will not go into that today, but it just underlines this whole session and how critical it is that this time, this whole-Government, whole‑system approach works, where previous strategies have not. Although the Home Office has previously been the lead and, in a sense, continues to be, it is really important that the sum of all these different departmental activities adds up to a massive step change if there is going to be success. I want to draw out those two examples of health and MOJ, representatives of which are not present on the panel.

We have something, I hope, that will be stronger even than a joint bid. The Treasury has made it clear that it wants to approach this spending review through a strong mission lens. For that reason, there are a series of meetings that the Cabinet Office and Treasury have been chairing, which I have been at, along with other Government Departments, on our approach to the spending review, including in relation to business‑as‑usual funding. One of the witnesses on the previous panel made the point that making this real shift cannot just be about new money. It will have to be about the way in which systems themselves operate, as it were, in their core. Prior to the spending review, that process will operate at ministerial level as well. Matthew may want to comment on this, but my sense is that we are in a very different model than we have been in previously, with a much stronger sense that we need to approach this spending review through a mission lens.

A lot of Permanent Secretaries, myself included, have been pushing for a more joined-up approach to spending reviews over many years. I am very glad that that is what is now happening with this mission-led approach to the forthcoming spending review. As you and others have said already, that does not solve the problem, but it is a very good start and it does allow the mission structure, led by Richard in this case, at official level, and by the Home Secretary at ministerial level, to really corral their colleagues across Government in pursuit of the safer streets mission.

The whole spending review is going to be mission‑led. It is up to the Chancellor and the Prime Minister to set out in detail what that means but, from what we have been encouraging, the spirit of this is that the five missions are the top priorities, including the safer streets mission.

We were on an improving trajectory under the previous Government, with the previous strategy and, within the Home Office. We were improving our ability to spend that money properly within each financial year, making sure we improved our ability to give clarity to our partners as early in the financial year as possible, making sure that we were managing those contracts very actively and making sure that we were improving our forecasting. All of this, in the past, led to concern from the NAO and others, quite rightly, about unnecessary underspends. We have corrected that set of issues within the Department. Of course, the mission structure gives us an opportunity, working with all of our colleagues across Government, to co‑ordinate. It is important that it is the word “co-ordinate”, not “control”. This is not the Home Office controlling spending across Government, but it is a co‑ordination function that maintains the responsibility, essentially to this Committee, for its accountability, to the accounting officers of every Government Department. The co-ordination will be done by the mission.

This goes to the heart of our system of accountability. That is what this Committee does. The picture is shifting. I very much hope that the system of accountability will shift with it, so that we can have a much more joined-up, much more mission-led approach to every phase of the spending of the money: the first phase, which is the spending review; the final phase, which is accountability to this Committee; and everything in between. We are not there yet, but we are absolutely moving in that direction.

It is very important to be clear that the current system is that the accounting officer of each Department is accountable to Parliament through this Committee for the spending of the money by that Department. That is the position and will continue to be the position. That is the very final moment of the whole cycle. Before that, there are no reasons not to be totally joined up, totally co-ordinated and totally collaborative, including at the very beginning of the cycle, which is the allocation of resource by the Treasury through a spending review. That is what we are seeing really for the first time through this spending review.

That is something that the mission will need to track very carefully. I will give an example that the National Audit Office picked out in its report on the drugs strategy, which was a joined-up strategy and a bit ahead of its time in terms of being mission-like before this Government introduced missions on a bigger scale. The Home Office’s role in that is quite similar. There is a lead Minister, a lead official, myself and a little joint unit inside the Home Office, with representatives from the relevant Departments, of which there are six in that instance. All of the money and accountability sits in the six Departments. The role of the centre, which is the Home Office unit in this instance, is to do that co‑ordinating, to make sure that it adds up to more than the sum of its parts and that every Department is fulfilling its commitments to what is also a 10-year drugs strategy. That is the sort of model that the National Audit Office was suggesting we should do on violence against women and girls, and the Government are very supportive of that suggestion.

The accountability to Parliament rests with that Department. I suspect that bit of the system will remain. That is if something has really gone off track. We are putting in place through the mission structure the sorts of culture, levers and co-ordination, rather than control, that will reduce the likelihood of that happening and keep the whole thing prioritised.

The funding, of course, is all for a purpose. It is to deliver the outcomes. The Chair mentioned the importance of milestones. That will partly be through us measuring whether we are making a difference every year to the underlying statistics, but it will also be about whether we are meeting our commitments in an input sense or an output sense, to make sure that we are, for example, rolling out the next phases of programmes and things like that. The safer streets mission board, therefore, will move quite shortly much more into a programmatic delivery mode, where I would expect to say to my colleagues and I would expect the Home Secretary to say to her ministerial colleagues, “We are expecting this thing to be delivered. Has it been?” It will also help to have that very clear linkage between financial input and eventual outcome.

I was actually going to intervene, Sir Matthew, to remind you about your drugs joint strategy bids. It is very welcome to hear that you are going to do it on this as well. The Chancellor has talked about multi-year settlements. There is nothing more damaging to a project than having to stop and start, because you never know what yearly budget you are going to get. Do you expect that some of this will apply to multi-year settlements?

We are absolutely expecting the current spending review, which we are just beginning to negotiate now, to be for three years’ RDEL and four years’ capital. That is a very good start after a series of essentially one-year spending reviews. That really does help. Of course, you want to go much further into the future than just three or four years. Clearly, we are talking about 10 years for violence against women and girls, 10 years for knife crime and an overlapping 10 years for the drugs strategy. It is difficult to do that without the certainty of funding, but the Treasury is quite right to refuse to sign cheques that far into the future, given the current climate. We will live within whatever rules it sets for how we do this, and we are very glad that it is doing it for those three and four years in the upcoming spending review.

I suspect the Treasury, like this Committee, will want to see substantial results in that three or four years’ worth of money before it considers further money.

What was successful about the illegal drugs strategy was having a Home Office-led team with staff from other Departments seconded into it, which is a different approach to the approach that you have used with your violence against women and girls strategy. Why was it different when it came to approaching violence against women and girls, given that the illegal drugs strategy has seen some success?

The reason we set up the joint combating drugs unit was that we had a very clear 10-year strategy, largely thanks to the brilliant independent adviser Dame Carol Black, who was instrumental in creating that framework for us in Government. We had a shared set of objectives and outcomes, which were focused on supply, demand and treatment, and we created a structure of six Government Departments corralled by the Home Office. To be honest, it does not have to be the Home Office. Previously, it was my colleague in the Department for Work and Pensions who was the lead official for the drugs strategy. If you do this properly, in one sense, it does not matter where the lead is, nor where the small unit sits. The joint combating drugs unit does sit within the Home Office and that has worked really well. The reason that the previous Government did not apply this in lots of other areas, including violence against women and girls, is that it is not replicable on everything. You need a very clear set of outcomes.

Are you saying, then, that you had this clear 10-year strategy for reducing drug use and you have not had that for violence against women and girls, and that is why you have not been able to replicate this structure?

The previous Government felt that there was something very particular about the drugs strategy, which required that join-up in pursuit of that 10-year outcome. This Government, with their mission-based approach and with the recommendation of the National Audit Office ringing in their ears, are actively looking at how to do that in relation to violence against women and girls for the next phase.

Are you saying that, under the last Government, you did not have this clear set of objectives that mirrored what you had with the drugs strategy, meaning that there was a reason for setting up the VAWG strategy in a different way?

Yes. The violence against women and girls strategy from 2021 saw some good progress, albeit against the backdrop of a very difficult situation.

You mean the covid situation?

Covid saw an increase in domestic abuse and there were other big things happening in our society that meant that, despite a lot of work under the previous Government, not as much progress was made as was possible. The then Government felt that the way to deal with violence against women and girls and, indeed, to tackle other crime types was through the existing departmental structure, with co-ordination and with ministerial meetings, as colleagues have already talked about, but without the need for a joint unit. That is what this Government are looking at.

Shall I just do one sentence and then hand over to Richard? The six-month evidentiary sprint that we have already talked about was designed to look at the whole of the evidence to see where the gaps are and, among other things, to help create a national framework, which we will then use to track progress over the next 10 years. For instance, having the right definition of what counts as violence against women and girls is an important part of the baseline. When the Government set out the strategy to tackle violence against women and girls before the summer recess, it will also set out the findings from that sprint.

The first thing to say is that the Government will be using the crime survey for England and Wales as the measure for whether violence against women and girls has been halved, not police recorded crime. We know that, for some of the most serious offences, the underreporting level can be between one in six and one in five. The crime survey for England and Wales is a long-established longitudinal study that asks individuals whether they have experienced different crime types. It is robust and is the right approach to use for measuring whether the mission has been successful. It is worth saying, though, that my expectation is that it will rise before it begins to fall, partly for the reason that you said. There is likely to be greater awareness, particularly in relation to crimes like coercive behaviour, some of which have also been included in the crime survey for the first time, because of the changing nature of our collective understanding of things like domestic abuse. Because of its methodology, even if more rapes are reported to the police, for example, and police recorded crime increases, if the overall number of sexual offences has fallen over the course of the 10 years, we would expect to see that in the crime survey. We have agreed three headline metrics that we will use in combination to track progress over the next 10 years, but with a basket of sub-metrics that we will say more about when the strategy is published pre-recess, to make sure that we also have an indication of things such as sexual harassment, which we know from evidence can be a lead indicator of the kind of crimes that can lead on to other things, like stalking or rape.

It depends on whether that tech-enabled violence against women and girls is itself one of those elements. For example, tech-enabled sexual harassment absolutely would be. I do not know whether DSIT colleagues want to comment on tech-enabled VAWG more broadly but, if it were enabled by technology but aimed in one of those areas—stalking is another good example—then it absolutely would be included.

It would not be in the headline metrics, but it may well be captured in some of the sub-metrics, as we finalise those for the strategy itself.

Before we get too much into the tech stuff, which you are coming on to, Sarah, can we just ask a fairly simple question about the methodology of recording crimes? I understand that the national police, when recording crimes, tend to record only one crime per person, when it may be that multiple crimes have been committed against that person. That seems to be a fairly big lacuna. What are we doing about that?

It is important to say, first of all, that that is partly why we are not using police recorded crime. No criticism of the police is intended in what I am about to say, to be clear, but that is partly why we are not using police recorded crime as the measure for whether we have been successful. The Home Office crime rules and the police approach to recording crime is designed to put the victim at the heart of the police’s interaction. That does mean, therefore, that if an individual were the victim of a specific crime and other crimes as well, that would not necessarily be picked up by police recorded crime, subject to a very important caveat, which I will come on to in a moment. That is precisely why we are using the crime survey, because it is a much better indicator of the total experience of victims. We are also actively working with the Office for National Statistics to establish whether we can work out a way of recording repeat domestic abuse. At the moment, the crime survey asks an individual whether they have been the victim or survivor of domestic abuse, but not whether it is an ongoing pattern of behaviour. We are looking at the moment, with the experts at the ONS, at whether there is a way of doing that. We are also doing some work with the police, with some Home Office-funded investment, to look at whether we can use algorithms to spot, in the free text that police officers use when they are recording crimes, domestic abuse flag indicators as well. At the moment, if someone were the victim of actual bodily harm, that would not necessarily be recorded. We ask the police to record that as a domestic abuse incident as well, if it is. That is not always the case. The police themselves would say that. That does not always happen, but we are now increasingly able to use technology to spot those patterns in free text to make it easier to link an ABH or a GBH with a domestic abuse offence as well. We are looking to see whether we can do that same thing with stalking and spiking.

Is the other way around not equally as important? Domestic abuse often or sometimes leads to more serious crimes, such as grievous bodily harm. Surely you need to be looking at it in reverse as well.

Yes, I completely agree, and we are.

We are acutely conscious that the crime survey only goes from 16 to 19 when it comes to girls and boys. The Office for National Statistics has now removed the upper age limit, so it goes from 16 and above, but we are acutely conscious of that. We are working with the Department for Education, which, for obvious reasons, has a very strong interest in this, to see whether we can establish a solid methodology for assessing girls’ experience of violence aged under 16. There is some very good work that the Home Office team who deal with child sexual abuse have been doing jointly with the ONS and the NSPCC. It is innovative work, looking at children’s experience of child sexual abuse, which is highly sensitive and has to be handled incredibly carefully, from an ethics perspective. We would like to try to apply those same principles to getting a better sense of under-16s. Although we cannot do that at the moment through the crime survey, that is something we are actively seeking to do. Part of the reason for using the crime survey is precisely because of its longitudinal benefits and the fact that we would be able to track consistently over time where there have been those experiences.

DfE is contributing £500,000 towards the ONS developing a young people’s safety survey. The Youth Endowment Fund also runs an annual survey on young people’s experience of violent crime, including girls’ experience, and there is some useful information that comes out of that. We collect data coming off children’s services case management systems of the number of cases they manage that involve domestic abuse or other forms of violence against women. There is a range of datasets we can use, but I agree with Richard that there is a gap in that under-16s space.

The Online Safety Act is our key lever here. As the Committee already noted, today is a really big milestone day for us. Those legal duties are coming into force today. Ofcom has announced an enforcement programme already. That is a really key tool. It will have a significant impact. We have an evaluation programme. In our evaluation work, we are working really closely with Ofcom, which is doing its own evaluation, and we are linking into the work that Richard and others are doing to ensure that all those datasets speak to each other. One of our primary datasets that will tell us what is working is Ofcom’s twice-yearly online experiences tracker, which breaks down a number of things, both legal and illegal, including cyber-stalking, content that objectifies women and sharing or the threat of sharing intimate image abuse. That is broken down by 18-plus and 13 to 17-year-olds. That will be one data source of many, but a really key one in telling us how far that Act is working or not.

As you say, we have taken significant action on intimate image abuse. We, like your Committee, were really pleased to see that Ofcom is going to be consulting on using hash-matching in the next illegal harms consultation. The report raises some really good points around that, and we will want to consider them really closely, in consultation with our Home Office colleagues.

Ofcom enforcement will now kick in for the legal duties that will kick in in the summer for child duties. We have given it a really strong set of enforcement powers. It can fine up to 10% of worldwide qualifying revenue, right up to the extreme end of business disruption measures. We are really clear that, for illegal content, there is no excuse. It is not optional, and we expect to see Ofcom use those powers.

Where loopholes exist, yes, absolutely, we want to look at those. We are looking at the recommendations of your Committee really closely, in collaboration with the Home Office. We do not want to see any loopholes.

We have already taken some steps. We have already taken steps to make intimate image abuse a priority harm under the Online Safety Act. As I say, we will want to look at where we can go further.

On that very point, our pre-panel members were very clear that the ages between 10 and 20 years old are determining ages. There is a clear linkage between those ages and the stats around violence against women and girls, both as victims and perpetrators. What Ms Owen has talked about, in many ways, is part of that culture. I guess I am asking for reassurance from panel members and a recognition that there is a real window of opportunity for the Department and the Government to make sure that the strategy is right and that we are not just using existing levers but, if necessary, amending legislation so that the strategy has the teeth that it needs to be able to make the necessary culture change. Imagery is one aspect, but third-sector organisations have also raised with me a concern around audio, which, in my understanding, the legislation does not even mention. There is a growing concern that audio recordings are being used by individuals to exploit women as a way of blackmail, for instance. I am very happy if panel members do not want to comment on it.

I will just say one thing before seeing whether Talitha or Richard want to come in. First of all, a huge thank you to the Women and Equalities Committee for your chunky, as you call it, report. It certainly is chunky, and there is a lot to go through. The Government are going through it and will respond in the normal way to all your recommendations. Secondly, the violence against women and girls strategy, when it comes out, is bound to have a very significant online and tech-enabled aspect to it, given the prevalence of those issues. Thirdly, I think I am right in saying that other countries do not have an equivalent of the Online Safety Act. The UK is significantly at the forefront of international efforts here. The big platforms also have a moral obligation, as the Home Secretary sets out very regularly, but now that the other obligations, the legal obligations, are kicking in alongside those moral obligations, we really expect significant progress against a very difficult backdrop.

Just to come in briefly on the prevention point, picking up on what the previous panel said, I would just highlight the child duties. The panel made an important point about the normalisation of some of these cultures online, whether that is misogynistic abuse or exposure to pornographic content. The Online Safety Act will be game-changing there. Companies will have a duty to prevent children from seeing that material. Generationally, in combination with other efforts made across Whitehall, that has the potential to make a real difference.

The Online Safety Act is law, and they will be expected to comply with the law. The Government have given their really strong backing to Ofcom to use its enforcement powers, which apply overseas as well, to the maximum extent.

Talitha, I am keen to follow on from Sarah Owen’s questions. This whole area of online harms is progressing at a huge rate. Perpetrators are finding ways to get around the existing systems. We cannot just say, “We have done online harm”, and rest on our laurels. We need to be thinking about where we are going prospectively. What is DSIT’s role in online areas? I am thinking about safety by design, transparency and accountability, agile regulation, inclusivity and resilience, and technology and innovation. In all of those areas, what are you going to be doing prospectively?

Some of the areas on that list are in the draft statement of strategic priorities for Ofcom.

All of them, I hope.

That is a really important part of our work, in which the Secretary of State sets out his priorities for Ofcom across the spectrum of their work. That is still in draft. It will need to be laid before Parliament. We are already starting to see some of the read-through. Ofcom is really committed to this agenda as well. You are totally right. The Online Safety Act will make a big difference here, but it is the start; it is not the end. As I say, it is only just starting to come into force, but we are not waiting for that. We have taken action to maximise the levers and opportunities that it gives us. I have mentioned that we have added intimate image abuse as a priority offence. We are looking at whether there are other VAWG-related offences that we might be able to add. Ofcom has already announced that it will do another illegal harms consultation in the spring. It has just come into force today. It will have already started consulting on the next iteration. This is designed to be an iterative regime. Outside the regime, we have also taken action with the new AI offences, for example, the publication of the independent pornography review and a range of other measures that we have taken across the space, including a study on child social media use and the age appropriateness of that.

Just to take one of those, the safety by design principle, how are you going to make sure that leads to really meaningful action that protects women and girls online?

It is a fundamental principle of the Online Safety Act. It is also a principle that comes across really strongly in Ofcom’s VAWG guidance, which it has published under the Act. I would probably call out the risk-assessment process under the Online Safety Act. That is designed not just as a box-ticking exercise but as a measure to help drive cultural change within organisations. They will have to risk assess the likelihood that their services could be used to facilitate offences or harm to children and take action on that. We are really clear that it is not just about looking at those individual harms but looking in a holistic way at how the design, whether that is the features, policies or functionality of services, contributes to harm. Ofcom has outlined some really specific measures in its VAWG guidance to companies with best practice measures that they can draw on and start to think about those harms from the very beginning.

I do not know what you felt, but I felt the pre-panel had some real experts on this. We had the commissioner, people from academia and practitioners on the ground. How will you keep consulting with them so that you are able to react the moment a trend appears online? It does happen very quickly.

We work really closely with the sector. As I say, we have built it structurally into the Online Safety Act. It is a regime that is designed around consultation and evidence. There are statutory consultees, including the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, but it is really important that we, as a Department, keep in touch with the sector. We do that regularly, and we draw on the learning of other Departments. Earlier, we were talking about some of the roundtables that Home Office Ministers will have. We are absolutely part of that. That is a really important data source for us.

I would like to move on to research, evidence and evaluation. In your letter to this Committee in January, Sir Matthew, you said that you will base the new violence against women and girls strategy on what works and the best possible evidence both in the UK and internationally. You mentioned that you have done a six-month evidence sprint. What has that covered? What have you learned?

It is still ongoing. It is just coming to the end, and we will publish the outcome, alongside the VAWG strategy, before the summer recess. I can already say that the picture is very promising in terms of evidence on, first, the importance of education, such as healthy relationship training in school; secondly, bystander interventions and sexual consent training; thirdly, screening to identify domestic abuse victims; fourthly, perpetrator programmes; and, fifthly, therapeutic victim support. Those are five areas where the sprint has demonstrated that there is very strong evidence in favour of the linkage between investing in these areas and making an impact in tackling violence against women and girls. On the other hand, there are some other areas where the evidence is weaker or non-existent. Further work will be required in order to be clear about, for instance, what sort of communications campaigns really work, in what circumstances family interventions work, whether there is a greater role for specialist courts, what the right approaches are within policing, and the evaluation of protective orders. Those are areas where the evidence base is weaker. All of that is a shorthand summary of some of the emerging trends, but we have further work to do as we are completing the six months now and getting it ready for publication.

We look forward to the publication of that, but thanks for giving us a heads-up. You mentioned that there are a number of areas where it would be nice to have had better evidence. Did you miss the opportunity by not evaluating the 2021 strategy or the 2022 domestic abuse plan?

The strategy as a whole was not evaluated, but significant chunks of it were. When a chunk was not evaluated, it was because there was a particular reason that it was not particularly amenable to evaluation. It is fair to say, as Richard said earlier, that we are absolutely putting evaluation into the big building blocks of the upcoming strategy.

In terms of those chunks that were evaluated as part of the 2021 and 2022 strategy and plans, have some of those reported and are they part of your sprint?

Yes.

Just to take a couple of examples, we evaluated the Enough campaign, which was a big public comms campaign. That had real cut-through both in an input sense—millions of people saw it and hundreds of thousands of people clicked through—and the individuals with whom we spoke ascribed genuine reflections to what they had seen. As I mentioned earlier, the Operation Encompass evaluation is due to complete shortly. Although that was from the previous strategy, we have been reviewing that at the moment. We reviewed the Safety of Women at Night Fund. Next month, we are completing the review of the Children Affected by Domestic Abuse Fund evaluation. All those things are being picked up in the evidence sprint as well. In addition to undertaking what our analytical community is confident is the single most significant evidence review that we have ever done in this space as the Home Office or as Government, we are also able to draw through those specific bits of evidence that have come through from the evaluations we have done previously. Just to repeat something that Professor Katrin Hohl said as part of the previous session, this is an area where there are some very significant gaps in terms of what is known internationally. That is why it feels really important in a mission sense for us to make sure we are testing and learning what works. We are consciously deciding to try things in the hope that they will work and evaluating them so that we are adding to the evidence base, as well as having the best possible sense of what the evidence tells us at the moment.

Just for context, I should probably put on the record that I previously worked as a chief analyst in a Government Department and indeed headed up one of the What Works centres. That is the context to me asking these questions. Will you be dedicating specific funding to evaluation as part of your bigger spending review bid to make sure you and other Departments are evaluating the new strategy?

Yes, we will do that. We are already doing that with individual initiatives, both within the Home Office and other Government Departments. My colleagues on the panel may want to say something about what they are doing specifically in those initiatives. As I mentioned earlier, for both domestic abuse protection orders and Raneem’s law, we have specific bits of evaluation tied to those. In the case of DAPOs, we are doing that through an independent provider, which is one of the best‑in-class ways of evaluating. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster announced a £100 million Cabinet Office fund for test-and-learn initiatives, which we are also bidding into specifically in relation to violence against women and girls. We have another potential route for assessing and evaluating whether initiatives are successful or not. One of the themes of this afternoon has been whether we can show progress over the course of the 10 years. This is one of the best ways of being able to fail fast, if programmes show that they are not making the impact we might want them to, and scale up fast the things that show they can, at least in certain areas, have a profound impact.

In my own area, the West Yorkshire Mayor and West Yorkshire police have brought together a dedicated joint unit that has done a lot of innovations, such as supporting schools to deliver lessons around keeping safe and understanding the law on spiking. They are doing a lot on that. They also had a public-facing campaign called Just Don’t, which is very much aimed towards men and boys. There is a lot going on locally on the ground. On the previous panel, we heard from Women’s Aid. They have 200 members doing all sorts of innovative programmes on the ground, and yet we have failed to really learn systematically from those initiatives, particularly at a local or regional level. In the case of West Yorkshire, there is some really excellent practice going on at that regional level. In addition to evaluating the top-down parts of the strategy, how are you making sure there is also funding to accelerate the evaluation, learning and spread of all these really great initiatives that are already going on?

There is good variation and potentially problematic variation going on at the moment. If I take domestic abuse as an example, we do not want to mandate a single approach to domestic abuse that takes place everywhere in the country because to do so would both stifle local innovation and make an assumption that every community and every family is identical. We absolutely want local variation and an ability for brilliant local providers to be able to do what works locally. That is why we want to use this test-and-learn approach and that is why so much of our funding goes to small NGOs, which can have that kind of outreach and impact. It absolutely will be part of the strategy pre-recess to make sure we are supporting those organisations to do evaluation effectively. There are other examples where we just know certain things work really effectively and that the right approach is, frankly, to do them once nationally. That is why the national centre for VAWG and public protection, which Nicole Jacobs mentioned in the earlier session, is so important. This is a new team being set up in the College of Policing, sponsored by Chief Constable Maggie Blyth, who is the national police lead for violence against women and girls. It will be up and running in April. It will bring together all of the approaches that the police use, including some of the examples that you mentioned from West Yorkshire, and identify those that are best in class. This is not just about encouragement. It is saying, in effect, “We, the police, are going to take this approach nationally because we think in this area it works really well”. In doing that, they are explicitly learning from what works well in relation to counterterrorism, where we do not have that same variation. We have a single way of doing things locally, run from the centre. That is the approach that we and the police are keen that we should take through this new national centre.

That sounds excellent in terms of the College of Policing. On the Education Endowment Foundation, Early Intervention Foundation and the rest of the What Works network, how are we making sure the evidence base is there?

Just to give an example, Foundations, which is the What Works Centre for Children and Families, has identified domestic abuse and what works in relation to domestic abuse and children’s services as one of their five big priorities going forward. We are funding them £8 million this year and we are going to continue to fund them next year. They are looking at the pipeline of potential interventions with perpetrators, victims of domestic abuse and children. They picked eight of those programmes to do randomised controlled trials on next year to see what the impacts are. If they prove to be successful, they can then start to issue guidance to recommend their adoption. We have past evidence of them doing that with family group conferencing based on the randomised controlled trial of that. That is now being rolled out nationally and it is being legislated for. We have a mechanism with which to translate this very robust evaluation into practice on the ground.

In terms of being mission-led, it may be sensible to get a group of What Works centres together to have a joined-up evaluation and evidence strategy around these different areas, given that it touches on so many of their remits.

We are seeking to do exactly that. That is partly through organisations such as the Youth Endowment Fund, which has been an incredibly effective partner for the mission as a whole and will often join up individual Government Departments, and through organisations such as UK Research and Investment and others, which are bringing together the What Works groups as a whole on behalf of all five missions to be able to do exactly that.

That is very reassuring. There was one final question, Chair, which is about learning internationally, if we have time for that. We heard from the panel about the programme in Victoria, Australia. I have recently been out in Zimbabwe looking at the impact of UK aid in a gender-based violence initiative. That is one of the interesting ways that we can have reverse innovation in a low-income setting, in a country where unfortunately there are very high rates of gender-based violence. They were looking at how to do more community-based interventions. How is the UK, through the violence against women and girls strategy, learning from both good and perhaps less successful examples from abroad?

The evidence sprint has looked at evidence of what has worked effectively around the world, including in European countries. For example, the Scandinavian countries have invested heavily in different kinds of work around violence against women and girls. We have a very close relationship with our Australian, Canadian and US opposite numbers, both in their Government structures and with their academic communities. It is not a surprise that Australia has come up lots of times both in the pre-session and this conversation. Both Australia as a country and the individual states have sought to do some really innovative things. All of that is being gathered together and reflected in the evidence sprint. Both Matthew and I worked together at DFID. Some of the work that DFID and now the FCDO has done in relation to gender-based violence is world-leading. Nicole and others are absolutely right to say we must not assume that what works in a particular part of the US or a particular part of Africa will work in the UK, but we should equally not assume it will not. There is very good evidence in low-income and middle-income countries of some really effective interventions that have made a real difference particularly in relation to domestic abuse. It is absolutely right for us to learn from that in the UK.

I would really encourage that in terms of getting value out of UK aid. We may as well be in a position to learn. Hopefully you are in touch with some of your former colleagues at FCDO to make sure we can learn globally from as many examples of good practice as possible.

I am all in favour of using an evidence-based review to inform strategy, but I nearly lost the will to live when I read paragraph 16 when it said the Home Office intends to use the review’s findings to inform a new theory of change to underpin future strategy. Despite the review being due to complete in spring 2025, the scope of the review was still evolving in 2024. Richard has said just now that you are trying to find out what works and what does not work. You have been at this as a Department for 10 years. Meanwhile, the whole problem has got decisively worse. There are a lot more victims of violence against women and girls. This does seem still a fairly chaotic strategy-making process, does it not?

No, not at all. I was glad with the first part of your question about the need for evidence in the strategy; I got more disappointed as you went on. It is really important that we spend the first six months of this 10-year period understanding where the gaps are in the evidence and filling those gaps in ways that Richard has just been discussing. When the strategy comes out by the summer recess, it will be all the stronger for that. As one of the panellists said in your earlier panel, there are no end of strategies, frankly, in this area. The strategy itself is not going to be the be-all and end-all. It is a necessary but not sufficient part of eventual success. We are gearing up for success. Investing the first six months in really understanding what works is a good investment of time. Particularly, it has not been the only thing we have been doing over those six months. If it had been the only thing, perhaps I might have shared some of your frustration. Alongside that evidence sprint, we have been cracking on with all sorts of other parts of making progress to tackle violence against women and girls, including Raneem’s law, the new offence on stalking, some of the tech things that Talitha was talking about and so on.

You kindly wrote to the Committee on 31 January, unusually after the NAO’s report was produced, with a great long series of things you were going to do. One thing that particularly caught my eye was the Government adopting a single consistent definition of violence against women and girls. The police, who are operationally independent, have adopted their own definition. If all the agencies that have levers to pull in this area cannot even agree a single definition, how are we going to proceed?

This goes to what Richard was talking about earlier in relation to the crime survey for England and Wales versus police recorded crime.

It is the definition, not how you record the statistics. It is the definition. If you cannot even agree a definition, how are we going to proceed?

The Government have agreed a definition, and they are going to proceed on the basis of that definition. The police, who are operationally independent, have a different definition because they require it for different purposes. The fact they have a different definition is not going to get in the way of the Government’s progress towards halving violence against women and girls.

It does not sound terribly joined-up to me at the moment, but there we are.

We have heard very clearly that a criminal justice approach is not going to get us anywhere near the ambition that the Government rightly have to halve violence against women and girls. It has to be prevention. We have touched briefly on some of the things that we think might work in terms of prevention, but, clearly, this is an area where we are going to have to go further and faster than potentially what the evidence is going to tell us. Can you set out your understanding, as we currently have it, of what we know or at least think might be some of the areas to prevent violence against women and girls? I recognise that may be different for different types of crime and different perpetrators.

It is a very good question, and it is very much on our minds. Perhaps we should go to Justin first on the education aspects. There is also a health aspect, a technology aspect and no doubt others.

I would flag two things. One of our big areas of focus since the election has been on family support and early help for families where there are emerging issues around domestic abuse. We took over the funding of the supporting families programme from MHCLG in April of last year. That is supporting 60,000 families across England where there are emerging issues, including domestic abuse. Our data suggests that over a quarter of those families have a domestic abuse concern. As a result of that programme, plans are being put in place to support both the victims and the children in those families. We have evidence from the outcomes data that in two thirds of the cases where there was domestic abuse the indicators of that abuse reduced. Children felt safer, perpetrators were addressing the harms that they were causing, and there was a safety plan in place around the victims. That is a targeted group of families, where there is emerging evidence of violence against women, where there are structures to support them. In the coming year, working with MHCLG, there will be a new children's social care prevention grant worth £270 million, which is going to increase investment in that early help and family support structure, so almost doubling the amount going into that area. That is now being distributed nationally. We will be publishing guidance shortly on how we expect local authorities to move forward. That will include an expectation that they should focus on violence against women in those families to help prevent that. In terms of universal prevention work, the relationships and sex education curriculum has been compulsory since 2020, and the Department invested in teacher training, webinars and so on following the implementation of that national curriculum. In May of last year, we issued a revised version of the statutory guidance on RSE, which included some of the new harms that we have been discussing in terms of online harms, online social influencers, sharing of intimate images online, upskirting and new types of offence. There is new content in that curriculum that schools are already applying. We have evaluated the impact of the RSE curriculum, and it has good awareness among school leaders and RSE leads. They use it as a checklist to check that the teaching that they are implementing is having an effect. We know from systematic reviews that a whole-school approach, providing universal education on relationships and sex, has a positive impact. The Youth Endowment Fund did a review of 16 high-quality studies and showed that, on average, that sort of education could reduce violence in teenage relationships by as much as 17%. There is very strong evidence that school-based interventions, working with the whole secondary school population, allied with teacher training and bringing in specialist expertise, if necessary, can have an impact.

The evidence suggests it could have that impact, but it is not actually working because the rates of problematic relationships, if I can put it in those terms, at a young age are not being reduced. Schools are not yet feeling equipped to address these issues, are they?

One of the problems is the gap in data that was identified earlier on what is actually happening in terms of the under-16 population and their experience of sexual harassment and sexual violence. As we discussed earlier, the ground keeps shifting in terms of where the harm is coming from, the experience of girls, and keeping the RSE curriculum up to date to deal with that is really important.

Do you think your Department is equipped to support schools to undertake effective prevention in this fast-moving arena?

We have issued the statutory guidance. We are also funding Oak National Academy to produce teaching materials to support teachers to develop this enhanced curriculum that we published last year. We had 15,000 responses to the consultation on that draft curriculum, and we will be publishing the final version later this year.

On your first part, which was preventing escalation, we heard a lot of evidence. Obviously, the law has changed, and children are now seen to be victims of domestic abuse, but there is clearly a huge lack of support, whether that is children’s social care, in actually being able to safeguard and prevent re-victimisation of children who are victims of domestic abuse. Again, does that sit with your Department? What more are you able to do to prevent children from becoming repeat victims of domestic abuse?

It is a joint responsibility of my Department and MHCLG in terms of the funding of children's services, but also with the Department of Health and Social Care in relation to the funding of family hubs. That is an equally important space. It is early years, universal provision, drop-in provision for families, and making sure that, where there are signs of violence against women or domestic abuse, those are being acted on. We know that two thirds of local authority family hubs have an embedded specialist domestic abuse worker, who can help to identify that and refer people on for additional help. We had very positive figures, actually, in terms of social worker recruitment. We now have the highest number of social workers on record, falling vacancy levels and falling caseload. There is some encouraging news in terms of those sorts of resources that are available.

I see that the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is going through, which will hopefully do things to improve children’s social care as well. If I may, if we have time, I will just take views on prevention from Emma at MHCLG.

I am really happy to. Justin has touched on some of the areas where DfE and MHCLG work really closely together in this space. Much of what we do in MHCLG is to support victims when they come forward for housing, but there are things we do in the prevention space as well. Obviously, safe and appropriate housing is really critical here. Government have set out their ambitions to deliver a significant increase in housing supply, including social and affordable housing. We have a significant role to play in reducing homelessness, with additional funding going into local government to support with homelessness. I might just touch on one programme that we are rolling out at the moment called Changing Futures, where we are putting in £10 million in 2025-26. This is a cross-Government collaboration, a whole-system approach, which is supporting individuals who experience multiple disadvantages, including a number who are at risk of domestic abuse. We are getting some really strong evidence from that programme about how the multi-agency, intensive, person-centred support can really help to lead to positive outcomes, including a significant reduction in instances of domestic abuse. That is just one of the examples of a project that we are rolling out in that space.

My colleague Nesil wants to come in on this. I might briefly come back, because of the evidence we have received about some of the more vulnerable groups of women, in terms of how we prevent for them.

I just wanted to discuss a little more about the cross-working between the Department of Education and local government, because, according to London Councils—I am a Member of Parliament in London, and it is not dissimilar elsewhere—40% of homelessness for women in London is due to domestic violence. The epidemic that is spoken about has very real consequences for homelessness and local government budgets too. Members of the panel have spoken about statutory responsibility, but I fear there is a disconnect between what exists as statutory responsibility and then what people are having to experience on the ground. I wonder if panel members might comment on the prospect of a new strategy, ensuring that there is that multi-agency approach, which you have all acknowledged is really important, particularly when it comes to homelessness.

I am really happy to come in on homelessness, and I am sure others will want to come in on some of the other elements. As you have said, there is a statutory duty on local authorities to support those presenting as homeless. Since 2021, victims of domestic abuse have had priority need if they present as homeless. Government are putting funding towards local authorities to support with homelessness. That has increased in the coming year. Total spend will be nearly £1 billion on homelessness services. In addition to the strategy on VAWG, Government are committed to bringing forward a homelessness strategy as well, so there will be lots of work going on in that area.

Is it your view that the housing crisis is just such a crisis that the reality is that women who are homeless and find themselves in domestic violence situations are just going to have to accept that it is really difficult because there is a housing crisis? I do not want to put words in your mouth, but there is a picture here, which is that there are not enough homes. How do we ensure a strategy to protect women and girls is going to get ahead of that, rather than just always being on the back end of what is a housing crisis? We will never tackle violence against women and girls if we cannot give them a level of assurance that they will have a safe place to live.

I will just mention a few different areas that the Department is working on in this space. To start with, I have briefly touched on the duty on local authorities to support victims of domestic abuse in safe accommodation where funding flows. That is a safe accommodation duty to support victims and survivors in a range of different types of accommodation, sometimes refuge accommodation, sometimes dispersed accommodation, sometimes sanctuary spaces where survivors and victims can stay in their own homes but with additional safety and security around it. There is that set of provisions. The funding flowing into that has increased by £30 million into 2025-26. Up to £160 million will go to local government to support there. There is then social housing, supporting people to move on. One of the things that Government have committed to do is to make some changes to the social housing allocations process so that victims and survivors of domestic abuse do not need to meet a local connection or residency test in order to be eligible for social housing in a place. The regulations for that are being finalised and they will come forward as soon as possible, so that work is ongoing. I have touched on the homelessness support, where victims of domestic abuse have a priority need if they are homeless, where additional funding is flowing in. There is a range of different things. Government have also set out a number of steps that are being taken on the supply of housing more broadly, all types of housing supply but also social and affordable housing, which I can talk about at more length, if that would be useful.

That is very helpful. Having the areas of focus on record is really useful, because it allows agencies throughout Government but also local authority partners to reference what senior officials regard as the key aspects and levers that they can utilise to support women and girls with domestic violence. Finally, I just want to talk about children and social care, because domestic abuse is the single most common factor identified by social workers nationally that prompts an assessment. I am looking for reassurance from panel members that, as part of the forthcoming VAWG strategy, as well as education, local government, social care and the learning that already exists there will be a key component as part of a prevention strategy.

We know that something like 160,000 women are identified through children’s needs assessments by children’s services every year as experiencing domestic abuse, and 55,000 children. As you say, it is a really big chunk of the social work caseload, so it is really important that frontline social work staff know how to identify risks and support the families involved. We are working on a new two-year induction curriculum for qualifying social workers, which has an enhanced component around domestic abuse and violence against women to identify that, and also an advanced practitioner’s qualification for more experienced social workers. It is a key focus of our work around CPD for social workers going forward. We also want to increase the training for family support workers so that they are also identifying early when needs need to be addressed. As I said earlier, we are more or less doubling the amount of investment going into early help and family support over the coming year to make sure those teams are in place locally.

Finally, there is a real sense that the long-term approach to tackling violence against women and girls is intricately linked to the trust and confidence in institutions in this country. That of course includes Government Departments. It includes important touchpoints such as the NHS, so medical professionals. Crucially, it also means the police. Too many women have experiences with the police at their most vulnerable moment that are appalling. It means that they either do not go to the police again, or actually they find themselves in an even more vulnerable position, because their first experience was so bad that it emboldens the person that subjected them to domestic violence. That is just one example of violence against women and girls. As part of the forthcoming VAWG strategy, how do you think we can ensure that trust and confidence in institutions is at the heart of making sure prevention is realised? That is a very immediate issue, as opposed to understanding where the gaps are for prevention. There is now dealing with that versus the long-term commitment to prevention for future generations.

The first thing I would say is that none of the senior police leaders I have worked with in the last eight months would disagree with the diagnosis that the police need to make sure they have the trust of women who are coming forward to report violence against women and girls. The establishment of the national centre for public protection is intended in part precisely to try to address the gap that reports such as the one from the Angiolini inquiry and others have already commented on. There are brilliant examples around the country of the police doing a fantastic job. The important thing is to make sure that we are supporting the police actively in that being the case absolutely everywhere. The other thing I would say goes back to what I was saying earlier about people such as midwives and health visitors. We need to be making sure that we are maximising the use of those touchpoints that have very high confidence. In the worst circumstances, we do not sufficiently make use of those positive touchpoints. The mandatory touchpoints, where women have no alternative by that point, are perceived to have failed them. If we can reverse both of those, that could have a hugely positive impact. We work as effectively as possible with health visitors, GPs and others, where we know from evidence that there is very high trust and confidence. We know that could be hugely powerful, alongside working with the police and others. Q82 Nesil Caliskan: These touchpoints are not just important for the way that women are made to feel, but there are material things around operational tasks that the police are not doing. Too often we hear cases of, “My evidence has gone missing. The footage from a camera no longer exists. I went in for four hours to give evidence, and then I had to wait another three so I could leave”. These are operational things that are quite material and are a bit about culture change, but actually a well-functioning police unit should just do these things better. I would hope that there would be an acknowledgement of that too.

Yes, absolutely. That is a really good example of the sort of work that the national centre will be able to do, because these are police leaders sorting out police operational efficiency themselves with support from us. That is exactly the sort of thing I would expect them to be leaning into, or I am confident they will be leaning into.

We have had a huge amount of evidence. As I did with the previous board, I have just taken a few of those, if I may put them to you, Permanent Secretary, or anybody who wishes to. Perhaps in this case, Richard was answering a question, which is along the lines of what Nesil was asking. It is evidence from Dr Caroline Miles and Professor Rosemary Broad. Despite the high prevalence of women experiencing abuse while out running, 95% of these women had not reported that abuse to the police. That is a shocking statistic. They recommend several things, but these are the three top things they recommend, which goes to the heart of Nesil’s question: make it easier to report abuse, improve confidence in the police and improve police knowledge and action. What more can we do to bring about some of those things?

The example you give is perhaps the sharpest manifestation of a broader challenge we have of underreporting. We know that a lot of that underreporting, in part, comes because individuals do not have confidence that the issue will be taken seriously. There is both a duty on us to make it as easy as possible for people to be able to report, and there are all sorts of technological ways of doing that, and some forces do that very effectively, particularly on domestic abuse. This links also with the Government’s broader push at the moment around neighbourhood policing and ensuring that the police are visible and in communities, solving local problems. Also, at the risk of repeating myself, that is exactly the sort of thing that the national centre would want to look at: how we can make sure that people who approach the police in those circumstances get a really good service.

The hon. Member for Huntingdon asked you about emergency service control rooms, which will have an embedded domestic abuse specialist by the end of 2025. Your Minister replied saying that there are five at the moment. That is clearly all improving confidence in the police, if there is somebody there properly trained, who understands these very sensitive issues, as Nesil Caliskan was putting across. What more can you do to roll those out?

Yes, so this is Raneem’s law. These are domestic abuse specialists embedded in 999 control rooms. That is now live in the West Midlands, Northumbria, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Humberside police. With support from the Home Office, each of those five forces are implementing that in a slightly different way, in part so that we can evaluate success before rolling it out nationally. The Government are committed to doing that at pace. We will say more shortly on how we are going to do that.

This is evidence from Operation Encompass. They say Operation Encompass is a unique mechanism established in all 43 police forces in England and Wales, by which a school will be notified when the police attend a domestic incident where children are related to either adult. The Victims and Prisoners Act placed Operation Encompass onto the statute, but there is yet to be a commencement date. Can you tell us when that is likely to be? If not, you can write to the Committee. I am very happy for you to write to the Committee if you do not know.

It is in hand. It is actually happening on a voluntary basis in every police force area. Two thousand notifications a day are coming through from the police to schools, so it is being very well used, but obviously having it on that firm statutory basis would hopefully accelerate it even more.

We would be grateful if one of you could let us know when it is likely to be enacted. That would be really helpful. Does this come under education? It probably does.

We will check.

This is evidence from After Exploitation: “Modern slavery is an umbrella term for severe exploitation, including sexual, criminal and labour exploitation, domestic servitude and organ harvesting”. They say that in the strategy there is a dearth of support services by and for survivors of diverse characteristics. What can you do to make sure that is in the strategy?

We are absolutely committed to ensuring that we take an intersectional approach to the strategy, to make sure it recognises the needs of the diverse range of experience, which would include individuals of the kind that you just described. It is worth saying that, broadly speaking—we touched on this earlier in relation to child sexual exploitation and abuse—although CSEA, modern slavery and violence against women and girls all fall under me, we have quite distinct strategies for managing the three of those. Where there are overlaps between modern slavery and violence against women and girls, we will already be able to draw from the very good work that happens on modern slavery in the Home Office and across the rest of Government.

That is very helpful. The last question is a repeat of a question I asked the previous panel. The professor gave quite a strong answer on it. It is to do with the family courts, and it comes from SHERA Research Group. Their submission highlights the “institutional sex/gender-based violence within the family courts in England … Some of the above abuses are enacted by court actors, such as legal and social care professionals, with these abuses being under-recognised in family court. This includes acts such as intimidation, isolation, and causing fear through threats of and enacted harm such as child removal”. They say alienating behaviours in court are “usually a response for filing criminal reports of domestic violence and sexual abuse perpetrated by their former intimate partners”. This is serious stuff. If people are feeling intimidated in courts, as we have already heard in our previous sessions, with RASSO victims actually giving up because they cannot face the trauma anymore, we really have to find a way where victims are given really sympathetic treatment in court, so they know when they come before the court they are going to be treated properly.

Yes, absolutely. I would say two things in response to that. The first is that Justice Ministers and the judiciary themselves are absolutely committed to making sure that the family courts are a place in which victims and survivors feel supported and safe. The second thing to say is that I have been working very closely with the Director of Public Prosecutions on looking at how we can speed up the process for victims and survivors, in particular of rape and serious sexual offences—RASSO offences—in part precisely because of the attrition rate that, as you said, neither he nor I would want to be at the level it is at the moment.

I just want to draw attention to the Runnymede Trust evidence we received, which highlights that women and girls of colour are more vulnerable, as are women who are disabled, homeless, refugees and migrants. I would like to put on record my thanks and commendation to Bradford Rape Crisis, who have had a specialist service for black, Asian and minoritised women and girls run by black, Asian and minoritised women staff since 1995. Runnymede’s ask is that there should be more investment in specialist services by and for women from minoritised backgrounds, as well as a more restorative justice approach. I would like to ask that you take an intersectional lens to the strategy and, in terms of the equality impact, look at how this is going to particularly affect women from these backgrounds.

We will, and we are. Indeed, the approach that we have taken to engaging with the sector so far is the series of nine roundtables that Jess Phillips and Alex Davies-Jones have hosted with over 101 organisations, alongside Government Departments that have come together. We have deliberately, in several of those, focused specifically on so-called “by and for” services, which are some of the most powerful and effective services that we sponsor and fund at the moment.

As I flagged, there is a data gap in precisely what is happening with the under-16 group, both in terms of attitudes and in terms of behaviours. The Youth Endowment Fund annual survey that I mentioned shows worrying levels of abuse within teenage relationships—that is both physical violence but also controlling behaviours. That is a way we can start to track what is going on with that sort of activity.

As I said, the new draft guidance on RSE, which came out in May of last year, expanded the content in relation to misogynistic online influencers and the material that we expect boys to be educated about.

There is a whole range of male role models that we could be working with. There is a role for youth services, there is a role for social workers, there is a role for youth offending teams and the boys that they come into contact with. There is a role for secondary school teachers as well.

That is something that we will need to explore together with colleagues from MHCLG and MOJ, which sponsors the youth justice services as well. They will need to be involved in that discussion.

We do not have a boy-specific strand to the strategy, but it is a good point that you are making. We need to explore that.

There is one Department that we have not mentioned so far that is a really important partner for us, which is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which leads on youth strategy more broadly for Government. The work that we are doing with it on positive role models, outreach, youth clubs, youth centres and things like that would play a really important part. We heard it in the pre-session earlier. If the highest growth area at the moment, unfortunately, for both online and real-world sexual offences is in the 10 to 20 group, that is where we are going to have to focus. It will have to be boys of that age who we work with if we are going to have the most effective interactions.

Matthew, can I say a special thank you to you and wish you well in your future endeavours? Thank you for your regular appearances before this Committee. Can I thank all of our witnesses? We have covered a lot of ground today. We will be considering that evidence carefully. We will be producing a report, no doubt with recommendations. An uncorrected transcript of this hearing will be published on the Committee’s website in the coming days.