Speeches by Phillips.

“Obviously I was not responsible for previous strategies, but more broadly, strategies in the past—and certainly ones that I have worked under as both a frontline worker and as an Opposition politician campaigning in this space—were much more focused on domestic abuse initially, and then moving into the space of violenc…”

“I have to say, funnily enough, when going through my correspondence in the car on the way down and signing it off, I thought, “Has Karren Brady taken over?” Then, when I saw it was your name at the end, I just thought that I must have read it wrong at the beginning. I apologise for that.”

“We take on board the criticisms that have been laid out, and other strategies and suggestions made. We also live in an environment of not just Select Committees but also, for example, the Angiolini inquiry and the IICSA review, making sure that we look at what has been suggested. I personally get very sick of people sa…”

“The strategy was published in December, and so what is it now? We are four months into the strategy publication, which has 259 commitments in it. We have a really specific cross-Government focus on 15 of those as a priority. That is not to say that others are cast by the wayside; there are expectations on the Governmen…”

“That was one of the specific criticisms that had been made and has been worked on, and I will hand over to Gisela who actually did some of the specific work. The fundamental difference was the definition that the Government were working to and that used by police forces, which is quite a fundamental issue. I will hand …”

“My response to that is I hope that their Ministers also get scrutinised for it. It is very easy to become the face of a thing and then the expectation is—and I am sure you will have felt this in your time at the Home Office—“Oh, that is the Home Office’s responsibility.” The whole point is that the violence against wom…”

“When the safer streets mission board chooses that it is focusing on VAWG, VAWG has absolutely been discussed there.”

“I also have their phone numbers.”

“Yes. We report to No. 10. The Prime Minister takes a very keen interest in it. He has held a series of Cabinet-level meetings—of which there is one this week—where he gets the relevant Cabinet Secretaries from the different Government Departments and talks to them about progress against the strategy.”

“I have attended one where that was the case. VAWG is only one part of the overarching mission of the Home Office’s safer streets mission.”

“I would like to stress that I am not the whole of it.”

“Not the whole of it.”

“No, it would have doubled. The number of reported rapes would have doubled; the number of rapes would have halved. That is why the basis for the metric that we are measuring is not based on reported crime figures, because in violence against women and girls reported crime figures, while an important measure, are comple…”

“We agreed as the inter-ministerial group that we have to focus on the 15 most cross-Government and manifesto commitments in the violence against women and girls strategy. We work as that group on the progress of those, and different Government Departments are expected to bring to that group, and prior to that group, th…”

“Yes, pretty much. We do not have particular trouble with the attendance of Ministers from—”

“Monthly to No. 10, yes.”

“Pretty much. In some of the cases where it is a Lords Minister, because they are constantly having to rerun everything that we do in here and there is only one of them, they will always send a Commons Minister. I have to say that attendance has not been an issue.”

“Two. DWP and the Department of Health and Social Care.”

“MHCLG has a specific housing-related one—and it also deals with local commissioning, with the vast majority of it being done through local councils. As Gisela has said, the Ministry of Justice also has a stakeholder board. I attended one at DSIT recently with the violence against women and girls sector on their section…”

“It gets funded by us. It is funded directly through the IAU budget within the Home Office, and it has the long-term funding for the current spending review period. Obviously, I cannot commit to anything beyond that—or to even being here.”