Oral Answers to Questions
Jess Phillips Excerpts(5 days, 2 hours ago)
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Michelle Welsh (Sherwood Forest) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
The Government have an ambitious programme to reform and improve how child exploitation is tackled. We are introducing a new offence of child criminal exploitation, establishing the independent inquiry into grooming gangs and the national policing operation, and expanding programmes to improve support to child victims of exploitation and trafficking.
Michelle Welsh
In the UK, a child is reported missing every three minutes. These children are often the most vulnerable in society, as going missing can be a key warning sign of exploitation. Despite the clear connection, the term “child criminal exploitation” is not included in the Department for Education’s 2014 statutory guidance on missing children. Given the Home Office also holds responsibility for protecting missing children, does the Minister agree that Departments must work together to urgently update the guidance, so that relevant safeguarding partners can understand the risks, spot the signs and work together effectively to keep children safe?
Jess Phillips
I absolutely agree. The Home Office is working closely with other Departments to ensure that, where someone goes missing, there is a joined-up response, through child protection reforms, updating key multi-agency safeguarding guidance and the better use of technology—for instance our investment in the tackling organised exploitation programme.
Sir Gavin Williamson (Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge) (Con)
With the Government’s plans to regionalise police forces and the potential scrapping of Staffordshire constabulary, many involved in the care of vulnerable young people fear that there will be less focus on protecting children as fewer senior police officers will be working with local authorities to ensure that they are cared for. What actions will the Minister take to ensure that that does not happen?
Jess Phillips
The right hon. Gentleman raises a key point about how safeguarding will be rooted at the heart of the reforms that will be brought forward. I work frequently with the Minister for Children and others to ensure that whatever local multi-agency hubs are set up are fit for now and for the future. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that I will take what he has said in good faith and ensure that that is the case.
Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)
Online cowards such as Andrew Tate make money by radicalising boys into viewing women as prey, which has been laid bare once again by Louis Theroux’s documentary “Manosphere”. Meanwhile, we have religious preachers encouraging men to beat and rape their wives if they refuse to give them sex at their request. Will the Home Secretary therefore issue statutory guidance requiring police forces to use existing incitement legislation to prosecute those who incite sexual violence against women and girls, and will she share what a difference that could make? The reality is that we have the laws, but they are not being used in creative ways to crack down on those who use their voices in this way.
Jess Phillips
I feel equally disgusted by the examples that the hon. Lady has laid out. The violence against women and girls strategy makes it very clear that in tackling online misogyny, the Government will look across regulation, legislation and education to do everything necessary to protect both the girls and the boys in our country.
Robin Swann (South Antrim) (UUP)
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
Sadly, as technology becomes entwined in our day-to-day lives, we recognise the threat that tech-enabled harm poses, which is why the violence against women and girls strategy sets out how we are seeking to tackle it. I am pleased to say that, from 1 April, measures under the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Act 2023 will come into force, making it an offence to film where the intent is to cause harassment, alarm or distress because of the victim’s sex.
Wera Hobhouse
Secretly filmed videos of women on nights out have been viewed more than 3 billion times over the last three years, and the videos are often accompanied by vile, degrading comments. These videos have real victims, but they sit in a legal grey area between voyeurism and harassment, so there is very little that the police can currently do. Will the Minister discuss this legal grey area with me, and possibly look at strengthening the law?
Jess Phillips
I am more than happy to discuss the issue with the hon. Lady. I spent this morning in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology with the violence against women and girls sector and Ofcom to look at some of those gaps that she has identified. We will do whatever we can, but absolutely, where it is harassment and is in the public realm, it should be covered by the public sex-based harassment law, but I am more than happy to meet her.
Fred Thomas (Plymouth Moor View) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
Economic abuse can have devastating impacts on victims, even after the relationship ends. The VAWG strategy included ambitious commitments to tackle economic abuse, and it was considered as a cross-cutting theme in HM Treasury’s financial inclusion strategy. Since 2022, we have funded Surviving Economic Abuse to the tune of £767,000 to strengthen financial systems, raise awareness and support victims.
Fred Thomas
Abusive ex-partners often continue their abuse by withholding funds from children and former partners, deliberately causing financial hardship. That has a huge impact on survivors, forcing them into contact with the perpetrator and enabling their abuser to continue to influence their lives. In Plymouth, I have a constituent who left an abusive relationship, but is now owed £48,000 in child maintenance payments. Despite court orders and liability orders being in place, the money continues not to be paid. Sadly, this is not a rare case limited to Plymouth; I know from speaking to my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes) earlier that this is a national problem. How is the Home Office working with the DWP and other agencies to close enforcement gaps and tackle financial abuse effectively?
Jess Phillips
It is not unusual to hear of such cases, and that is why the Department for Work and Pensions sits on the interministerial group on violence against women and girls. The VAWG strategy commits to removing direct pay, which will enable the Child Maintenance Service to manage and transfer payments, preventing the system from being used as a tool of abuse, which has in the past had fatal consequences.
John Milne (Horsham) (LD)
Following on from the previous question, financial abuse between couples sadly does not always end in separation, and many women struggle to access child maintenance safely. Is the Home Office working with DWP colleagues to strengthen income assessments, such as by using His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs data, and to remove the 2% collect and pay surcharge so survivors can secure child support without direct contact with their abuser?
Jess Phillips
As I said in answer to the previous question, the Department for Work and Pensions is absolutely fundamental and a core part of the interministerial group that works on the violence against women and girls strategy because of the financial tools—not just through mortgages and other assets—that people have and use in cases of domestic abuse and coercive control. It is absolutely vital that we ensure that our benefit system and the state systems that relate to children are not used as a tool for abusers.
Harpreet Uppal (Huddersfield) (Lab)
Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
We are delivering the cross-Government freedom from violence and abuse strategy, published in December, which sets out concrete actions for halving VAWG in a decade by preventing violence and abuse, pursuing perpetrators, and supporting victims. As part of that, we have already launched our behaviour change campaign, rolled out domestic abuse protection orders, and embedded domestic abuse specialists in police control rooms under Raneem’s law.
Catherine Fookes
Survivors in Monmouthshire tell me that economic abuse not only featured in their relationships, but stopped them rebuilding their lives long after they left. For some, the separation compromised their business. Others face continued control through child maintenance disputes. In what measurable ways will the VAWG strategy tackle economic abuse, and how will progress on that be reported to the House and elsewhere?
Jess Phillips
In the launch of the violence against women and girls strategy, I committed to annually updating the House on progress across a number of metrics—both the overarching metrics, and those that sit in different Government Departments, some of which are having to take responsibility for this issue for the first time. On working with the financial sector and regulators, the strategy talks about exploring how financial products, including joint mortgages, can be used as a tool of abuse. We will work with Departments, such as the Treasury, on exactly how we can monitor progress against all our aims, and I will report on that annually.
Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)
One of my constituents suffered such coercive violence that her partner forced her to allow him back into the home. She could not tell anyone, and he continued to assault her daily. She reported the behaviour to the police, but they did very little. He is in prison for less than five years, and authorities are concerned that he will target her again when he is released. What is the Minister doing to ensure that women are properly protected against coercive violence, and that ex-partners face justice, so that we end this awful cycle of violence?
Jess Phillips
I send all my sympathy to the hon. Gentleman’s constituent, who sounds like she has had a terrible ordeal. Off the top of my head, one measure that the Government have rolled out is the domestic abuse protection order, which gives police the power of arrest, if it is breached. It is the first domestic abuse order that can be taken out for coercive and controlling behaviour. The evidence so far on the police response to those orders, compared with other orders, has been really heartening. We will roll them out across the country.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
Kirith Entwistle (Bolton North East) (Lab)
I am currently supporting a constituent who, after leaving her abuser, was locked out of her home, left with thousands of pounds of arrears that had been run up in her name, and denied access to her own bank account. Does the Minister agree that post-separation abuse is too often overlooked and still not recognised widely enough? What steps is she taking to better protect victims?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The violence against women and girls strategy will focus on the specific issue of ensuring that services such as the police get it right about post-separation coercive and controlling behaviour.
Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)
Domestic Abuse Survivors: Government Support
Jess Phillips Excerpts(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Ben Maguire
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on being such a champion on this issue, and I completely agree with his condemnation of Travelodge’s frankly despicable response. His point regarding Airbnb is interesting, and I have been making the same point recently, because it crosses over with the Travelodge issue.
I am sure that many Members have heard from survivors in their constituencies who tell them they have spent all their savings on legal fees or they have accrued tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt. We know that survivors often face crippling financial barriers when trying to protect themselves and, in many cases, their children. Would the Minister tell me why the review period for the threshold has not yet been changed and why the gap between those who are eligible for legal aid and those who can afford to pay for legal services has not received closer scrutiny during the means test review?
The previous Government completed their review in 2022 and then proposed new criteria in 2023. Implementation was later delayed and, as far as I am aware, the current Government have not yet indicated that they intend to progress the work. I would therefore appreciate an update from the Minister on the status of the legal aid means test review.
I welcome the Government’s steps to include economic abuse in the Domestic Abuse Act, but claiming that if a victim can prove they are economically abused, they will become exempt from the means test is a bit like asking victims who are under a severe threat to their health—in the most vulnerable state of their life—to sift through a haystack to find a purposefully and impossibly well-hidden needle. The £100,000 capital exemption recently introduced for the means test has been powerfully rejected by Women’s Aid and domestic abuse charities, which say that it does not go nearly far enough.
Sitting on a £1 million property that is co-owned with their perpetrator, who—guess what?—will not sell, excludes someone from any legal support. Such trapped capital should not be included in the financial eligibility calculation. I would go as far as stating that such inaccessible capital should be exempt from the means test, particularly as many victims are too afraid to leave their homes with their children as they are not certain that the family courts will bring them a positive outcome, as I have highlighted in Louise’s case.
According to the Surviving Economic Abuse 2026 report, almost 1 million women in the UK who experienced economic abuse last year said that the abuse prevented them from leaving their dangerous abuser. In the worst-case scenario, that decision, which is forced on them via our systematic failure to understand the reality of domestic abuse for victims, can be fatal. Another recent study covering a 12-year period, which included 400 homicide reviews, found that one person died every 19 days in cases that involved economic abuse. In other words, every three weeks a victim dies because an abuser uses economic abuse as a tool of control.
Refuge recently evidenced how 75 women were killed as a result of domestic homicide in the year ending 2025. Those numbers should spark outrage across our society. This final act of violence could have been prevented had there been proper legal resources in place for victims, or proper housing support that meant victims could be safe. Too many victims are forced to return to their perpetrators because they do not receive the levels of legal support needed to continue with the legal process. That means that many are unable to obtain things such as protective orders against their perpetrator, or obtain safe child contact arrangements.
Victims could even end up homeless. Those brave victim survivors who do leave their homes and apply for urgent homelessness protection can receive immediate legal support, but they end up having to go through the legal aid means test. If they are seen to have an income above the threshold, they have to support their own legal representation, when it is actually their abuser who has forced them out. Victims therefore become stuck between staying in their family home and enduring their suffering, or ending up potentially homeless—due to, again, this destructive means test.
A Cornish women’s protection centre recently reached out to me, detailing the following case that it was dealing with—for which I have again changed the name. Katy’s ex-partner abused and controlled her, both during and after their relationship ended. The ex-partner controlled contact with their children and locked Katy out of their property, resulting in her sleeping on the streets. During the family court process, which lasted 18 months, Katy had no legal aid or legal advice, and minimal support throughout the court proceedings, representing herself at the family court.
Eventually, the judge granted a non-molestation order, an occupation order, a prohibited steps order, and a full care order for the children. However, after achieving that without any access to legal advice, Katy and her children have still not been given access to their home and remain homeless. Reporting by Women’s Aid reinforces this reality. Survivors frequently cannot secure a legal aid solicitor due to the combined effects of eligibility barriers and a national shortage of legal aid providers. That leaves many women unable to challenge refusals, missing deadlines and remaining in unsafe or unsuitable accommodation because they cannot navigate the process alone.
All of that continues despite official homelessness data showing that large numbers of households become homeless or are threatened with homelessness due to domestic abuse, which means they should be treated as vulnerable and properly protected, not forced through a rigid financial test that was never designed for people fleeing violence.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
Just to be clear, there are no legal ramifications of the homelessness test in part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act. There is a homelessness duty; in the vast majority of cases, people do not have to undertake legal action in order for the homelessness duty to apply to them.
Ben Maguire
I thank the Minister. Perhaps she can follow up on that point in her speech.
I ask the Government urgently to reform evidence requirements for economic abuse in favour of more accessible evidential criteria. The lack of clarity regarding acceptable forms of evidence causes already limited legal aid solicitors to pre-emptively refuse to take on survivors’ cases. Having discussed and highlighted countless reasons to reform the legal aid means test for victims of domestic abuse, I must ask why legal aid is barely mentioned in the VAWG strategy, despite it being such a vital tool for victims to seek justice and crucial support.
The Justice Secretary in the previous Government, Alex Chalk, is acknowledged by many in the women’s rights sector to have been open to committing to reform the legal aid barriers that victims face. I am sure, and hopeful, that the Government will be open to working with all of us to fix the legal aid means test, which, as I hope I have set out clearly, is the biggest obstacle to so many victims. I recently launched a petition to reform the means test, and I hope to widen the campaign further.
How much more loss—how many more needless deaths—do we as a country need to endure? How many more debates are needed in this place for the Government to consider the issue properly? Until they commit to removing the legal aid means test for all domestic abuse victims and survivors, including those who are not currently accessing universal credit or fleeing the abuser, I hope to see urgent implementation of the delayed legal aid reforms, as pushed for by the VAWG sector. Those include the mandatory disregarding of inaccessible capital for victims of domestic abuse; the raising of the income threshold, which needs to include an annual review of the means test; and reformed evidence requirements when trying to prove economic abuse.
I will end my speech there, in the hope that, by the time of the next Westminster Hall debate on domestic abuse, we will have seen tangible progress to show survivors that we stand with them, we fight with them and we will do everything we possibly can to change the system for them.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg.
I find myself in the difficult position that the debate was tabled for response by the Home Office, but almost its entire thrust is legal aid, which is the responsibility of the Ministry of Justice. I will do my very best to answer the points made by the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire), but this is one of the main cultural changes that I wish to achieve with regard to violence against women and girls across the Government and across the country. Not a single one of the matters relating to violence against women and girls that he carefully alluded to—issues faced by victims of domestic abuse such as housing and homelessness, the family court, and issues to do with benefits and child maintenance—is the responsibility of the Home Office, and yet whenever there is an issue related to domestic abuse, people look to the Home Office. It is a cultural and an institutional failing that has led to a lack of advancement in this space. I will answer the hon. Member’s questions as best I can, but he will get a much more thorough response on the specificity of legal aid from the Ministers who are responsible for legal aid.
Ben Maguire
I acknowledge and appreciate the Minister’s point about this not being the responsibility of the Home Office. I will say, though, that I excitedly awaited the VAWG strategy to see a cross-departmental approach to this vital issue—not action by one Department or another, but a whole-of-Government approach. I hope that she might agree with me on that point.
Jess Phillips
I hope that the hon. Member appreciates that that is exactly what this is. I only make the point because there is so often a risk in this place, and in the Government, of one person who cares a huge amount about something becoming the responsible party for it, always.
I will move on to the hon. Gentleman’s broader points. As he stated, the Ministry of Justice is conducting a review of the domestic abuse evidence requirements that need to be satisfied in order to access legal aid for private family matters, to ensure that those requirements are not a barrier to accessing legal aid for victims of domestic abuse.
I intervened on the hon. Member on his point about homelessness. I speak as somebody who, this week alone, has handled more than 10 cases of homelessness relating to domestic abuse. Not a single one of those interacted with the legal aid system, because, thanks to part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act, which I fought very heavily for, there is a duty on every tier 1 and unitary local authority area, with funding provided by the Government, to provide accommodation and house people. I would not want the message to go out from here that people will end up on the streets.
Of course, there need to be massive improvements in the manner in which refuge accommodation is commissioned. That is committed to in the violence against women and girls strategy. We also need to be clear what we mean by the term “refuge”, because one man’s—well, one woman’s—refuge accommodation may not be another’s. As we heard from our friend from Northern Ireland, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), the housing of children in refuge accommodation is patchy across the entire country. Looking at how we commission that homelessness service is a huge and fundamental part of this.
Josh Fenton-Glynn (Calder Valley) (Lab)
As a recovering councillor, I remember that my council used to commission a lot of these services through the WomenCentre in Calderdale, which was very good at preventing homelessness and other shocks. I often find—this might come back to the Home Office question—that a lot of post-separation problems happen because of post-separation economic abuse. Perhaps, in the longer term, we need to look at that from a legislative angle, so that post-separation abuse is better recognised in law, and then set up services to better prevent it.
Jess Phillips
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I was also—I feel like I have been here for ages—part of work with Surviving Economic Abuse, which the hon. Member for North Cornwall mentioned a number of times, to amend the Domestic Abuse Act to ensure that our legislation with respect to controlling or coercive behaviour included behaviour post-separation, because of the level of risk for people post-separation, which both my hon. Friend and the hon. Member alluded to. Over the years, there has been quite a lot of investment in getting somebody out in a crisis, rather than addressing the massive issues that occur in people’s lives afterwards. It is as if we tick a box when somebody leaves their home, and do not think about all the ramifications in their lives. My hon. Friend and I have worked very closely on that issue with regard to the family court and the presumption of contact, which has also been mentioned.
Alex McIntyre
Before she moves on from the subject of housing, does the Minister agree that the partnership between Women’s Aid, Airbnb and the Mayor of London is a really exciting pilot project for those people for whom refuges might not be the right place?
Jess Phillips
I absolutely agree. When I was running refuge accommodation, we were moving from the era of everybody living in communal refuges to a new era of people needing separate accommodation. Some of that was about the rules on safeguarding with regard to which children could and could not live together, and about boys over the age of 16—actually, I think the age threshold was 14. As somebody who has adult male children, I would not want to flee to somewhere they could not live. That is hugely important.
The hon. Member for North Cornwall made a very important case for the need for legal aid thresholds. As somebody who has managed to amend our legal aid laws to carve out victims of domestic violence, I absolutely agree with him that we need to ensure that people can access the right legal services when they need them. If we had a lawyer from the Ministry of Justice in front of us, they would almost certainly be able to give a considerably more thorough answer, but there is relevant case law. For example, if someone’s asset is a house that they co-own, it cannot be included in the means test.
There are a number of issues, and we need to look at whether the threshold is right. My threshold is that I believe somebody when they tell me that they are a victim of domestic abuse, but I understand that the burden of evidence has to be slightly higher for Government Departments or legal departments. In the strategy, we have committed to addressing tenancies and the economic abuse of those who do not own houses, but who live in either social housing or privately rented properties. We have to look at the threshold for exactly what evidence is needed, and make sure that it is fair and balanced.
Adam Dance
One of the issues that we find in rural communities is that when someone flees domestic abuse and is rehoused, they are taken further afield because there is no housing nearby. They cannot meet their family or see their friends because of the lack of rural transport links. It is great to see what is happening here in London, but does the Minister believe that rural communities need more funding to support domestic abuse victims?
Jess Phillips
I will be down in Devon and Cornwall next week for both business and pleasure—I have turned business into a bit of pleasure as the recess comes along. I would like to thank Airbnb for that. [Laughter.]
The issue of need and how we commission services in rural areas has never been properly considered. On the basis of a headcount, we provide funding from lots of different Government Departments and lots of different sources. Whether that it is through part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act or through police and crime commissioners, the Government send finances to local areas, and it is for them to decide. North Cornwall is quite different from east Birmingham, and it is for local authorities to make decisions.
On the commissioning arrangements, do I think that rurality has been understood as a specific need in the same way as poverty or police data? I am not sure that it always has been—but what do I know? We are undertaking a huge piece of work on commissioning, and in fact I have reached out to some Liberal Democrat colleagues who represent rural areas to look at what we could be doing to make sure that we are getting the commissioning right. I am sure that the services that I am visiting in Devon and Cornwall next week will have some excellent ideas for me.
Adam Dance
I am from Somerset. Will the Minister meet me to have a conversation about these issues?
Jess Phillips
Of course. I did not mean to exclude Somerset or anywhere else, rural or otherwise. I would gladly meet the hon. Gentleman—I would gladly meet anybody. I do not wish to cause him offence, but I would dance with the devil to make women and children safer, so I would happily meet him to talk about Somerset.
I will conclude my remarks by saying that we have a cross-Government strategy, and that the points that the hon. Member for North Cornwall passionately highlighted will inform how we measure our progress. I always welcome people pushing not just my Department but every Department to do the very best that it can on violence against women and girls.
Question put and agreed to.
Small Religious Organisations: Safeguarding
Jess Phillips Excerpts(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) for his speech, and I am grateful to other Members for their important contributions today. I welcome the opportunity to talk about the Government’s commitment to safeguarding and protecting children and adults from harm across all settings, including within religious and faith communities. I want to give a special mention to my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire for securing this debate and for the compassion, thoroughness and persistence that he has shown this House on this issue.
Let me first be clear that this Government recognise the central role of faith in our national life, and we are committed to building a Britain where all communities feel safe and where the contributions of people of faith and belief are warmly welcomed and richly valued, as are the contributions of those who, like myself, have no faith—well, I have a lot of faith, but none that would be recognised or organised.
The insights of faith and belief groups should and do play an important role in the national conversation around safeguarding children and preventing violence against women and girls. The other central point to make at the outset is that the Government utterly condemn all acts of psychological, emotional, physical and sexual abuse against children and adults in all settings, including religious settings of any size or denomination. All such acts should be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice. As with every case of abuse, my thoughts are first and foremost with the victims and survivors.
As this House knows, we are taking forward an ambitious range of measures to improve safeguarding and child protection. Through the violence against women and girls strategy published last year, which deploys the full power of the state to achieve this aim, and through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, we are strengthening multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and improving information sharing. We are also taking forward work to safeguard and protect children from harm in out-of-school settings, including religious organisations offering education in their own faith.
All out-of-school settings have a legal duty to safeguard and protect children from harm in their care. To support them in meeting this duty, the Department for Education has published guidance setting out the safeguarding standard that they should meet and last year launched a call for evidence to gather views on potential approaches to strengthening safeguarding further, including regulation. The Department for Education is currently analysing the responses and continuing engagement with key stakeholders, and will respond in due course.
We are also taking action on the recommendations of IICSA, which have been mentioned, including establishing a child protection authority to improve the national oversight and leadership of child protection and introducing through the Crime and Policing Bill a mandatory duty to report child sexual abuse. The duty will create a culture of knowledge, confidence and openness among those most likely to be alerted to child sexual abuse. It will help children and young people to trust that their voices will be heard when they speak out. The duty will apply to those working or volunteering with children in faith settings. There will be no exceptions based on religious practices. We will continue to engage with groups that may be impacted to help them manage the implementation of this new duty.
My hon. Friend raised some specific points about the Government’s mandatory reporting duty, which I would like to address. We are grateful for the expertise of the child protection sector in shaping the new duty. Our shared aim is to have a regime that is effective for children and workable for professionals.
For the avoidance of doubt, the organisations that my hon. Friend mentioned have always fully supported the Government policy of not applying criminal sanctions to the failure to report. It is true that they also advocate for robust action against the deliberate concealment of abuse, but there is a qualitative difference between a lapse in reporting and taking active steps to deter it, or destroying or concealing evidence. The Crime and Policing Bill reflects that distinction by creating a criminal offence of obstructing a reporter from carrying out their duty, punishable by up to seven years in prison. The question of whether failures to report should be subject to sanctions was fully considered during the Bill’s parliamentary passage. Earlier today, on Report in the other place, the House rejected a proposition to amend the Bill to that effect.
The question of what triggers the duty—for example, whether to include the observation of signs and indicators —is a separate matter, although I recognise that, because these issues are often debated in tandem, some conflation may have crept in. The Government have not claimed the same stakeholder endorsement for our chosen threshold for the duty. Although some stakeholders favour adding recognised indicators or reasonable suspicion that abuse has occurred, as I have set out previously the Government’s view is that we need to deliver a model that is clear, proportionate and operable, anchored in direct disclosure, witnessing or recorded material. As with all aspects of the duty, we will keep that under review, but we are confident that the Bill as drafted strikes the right balance.
Let me respond to some of the points that have been raised. I often feel anxious that people think that any organisation that they raise will not be considered as part of the duty, but most people in positions of trust—we do not need to name them—are covered by the duty because they work in regulated activity with children. That is the core definition in the Bill for a mandated reporter. In other words, if a person’s role as a sports coach already brings them into regular close contact with children, they are in scope.
Helen Hayes
My constituent is a survivor of abuse within a religious organisation, and she represents a larger group of survivors at the same organisation. She has found the Charity Commission to be utterly ineffectual and far too slow in dealing with her complaint. When I wrote to the Minister about this issue, she referred me to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. When I wrote to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, I was referred back to the Home Office. The religious organisation continues to operate with the suspicion that the practices that led to the abuse claimed by my constituent are continuing. We are a couple of years down the line in raising these concerns, so will the Minister advise me how I can get some traction on behalf of my constituent to ensure that her allegations and those of other survivors of the organisation are properly dealt with, and that the organisation cannot continue to operate with the same practices?
Jess Phillips
I am more than happy to look directly into that case. My hon. Friend highlights an important problem: we need clarity about who is responsible in the system. First and foremost, if child abuse in an institution is raised with anyone, it should be reported to the police, with the support of the victim. I do not know the details of that case, but I will come on to the issues that my hon. Friend raised about the Charity Commission. As a constituency MP, I have had to raise such issues with the Charity Commission. We need to ensure that the regime of regulation in our charitable sector is as robust as it can be on safeguarding, as well as on financial irregularity and other things. I do not disagree with what my hon. Friend said.
Tessa Munt
If I may, I would like to explore what happens with the Minister. There is mistrust of external agencies, and in a lot of these small, high-demand religious organisations—those that look like cults—people may not realise that they have any capacity or agency to report.
Jess Phillips
With the mandatory reporting duty, a huge body of work will go into guidance about how to report. However small—however nervous—they are covered by the duty.
I have only three minutes still to speak. To the issue of faith-based charities promoting misogyny, I hear the concerns raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire. The Charity Commission has apparently reviewed the National Secular Society report on religious charities promoting misogyny and confirmed that it has already assessed and responded to a number of incidents. I will follow up on that action, and I will gladly meet him once I have a fully robust answer. He invites me to annoy, I suppose, the Treasury—I do not think he used those words—but I agree with him that, as in the examples he gave, the idea that an organisation can promote the hatred of women or the supplication of people’s wives and also be considered a charity is an alien one. I will follow up on that.
Furthermore, as the Prime Minister announced recently, the Government are already working with the commission on plans to give it additional powers to help tackle extremist abuse, which will bar anyone convicted of hate crimes from serving as a trustee and make it easier for the commission to act against anyone undertaking that. The changes will be made after a public consultation that is coming this month, which I invite everybody to take part in.
I will speak to the Department of Health and Social Care on medical coercion. I do not lead on that as a Minister, but I do not disagree with my hon. Friend that people must be able to make those decisions in full view.
I thank my hon. Friends for their contributions. I promise that we will continue to try to work together, because we all want the same thing.
Question put and agreed to.
Identification of Victims of Modern Slavery: Call for Evidence
Jess Phillips Excerpts(1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
On 16 July 2025, I announced a public call for evidence on identification of victims of modern slavery. The goal of this call for evidence was to hear views from stakeholders on the definitions of a victim of modern slavery, identification and decision-making processes, and futureproofing the modern slavery system.
Today, I am pleased to publish the report on the summary of responses. The call for evidence closed on 8 October 2025, and the Home Office received 119 responses from those with an interest and experience in modern slavery, including people with lived experience of modern slavery, non-governmental and civil society organisations, local authorities, academics, law enforcement, first responders, parliamentarians, and members of the public. We also ran a series of 10 stakeholder engagement workshops with NGOs, local and devolved governments, first responders, law enforcement, statutory partners, and academics. I greatly appreciate all the responses we received.
Over the coming months, we will carefully consider the evidence received to inform further legislative and policy development to ensure the effectiveness of the system for identifying victims of modern slavery. This includes commitments made to reform the modern slavery system set out in the statement on restoring order and control: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/asylum-and-returns-policy-statement/restoring-order-and-control-a-statement-on-the-governments-asylum-and-returns-policy
A copy of the summary of responses report will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and published on gov.uk.
[HCWS1351]
Police Grant Report
Jess Phillips Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Chris Philp
Roger Hirst, in common with many police and crime commissioners, has done a valiant job in the face of inadequate funding. However, as he said himself:
“The Government settlement is insufficient to cover rising costs.”
Let us look at outcomes, which the Minister mentioned. It is a matter of deep concern that, under this Labour Government, shoplifting has gone up by 10%, to record levels, robbery from business premises is up by 66% in the past year, antisocial behaviour has gone up, rape has gone up by 7%, and sexual offences have gone up by 8%.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
When the right hon. Gentleman says that rape has gone up, does he mean that the recorded crime of rape has gone up? Does he recognise that all Members of this House should celebrate when women feel more comfortable in coming forward?
Chris Philp
That is not what the hon. Lady was saying when the rape figures were going up under the last Government.
Chris Philp
Once is enough.
Reported rapes are going up, which reflects increased levels of offending. That is a serious concern.
Jess Phillips
What is actually going up is rape charging. To put the record straight, I never criticised increased reporting of rape. What I criticised was the decimation of rape charging under the right hon. Gentleman’s Government, which led to the worst record in history.
Chris Philp
The hon. Lady will know that the change in the rape charge rate followed the disclosure rule changes after the Liam Allan case back in 2017. The last Government set up Operation Soteria and a rape taskforce, which were designed to increase rape charging rates. Indeed, they were increasing prior to the last election, and I very much hope that this Government are continuing the work of Operation Soteria, which was started by the last Government.
On the police reforms that the Minister referred to, some functions, such as counter-terrorism and fighting serious and organised crime, may well be better provided on a national basis. However, we oppose the creation of approximately 10 regional mega-forces, which will see county forces essentially abolished and merged into enormous entities that are far removed from the communities they serve. That will inevitably see resources drawn away from towns and villages and given to large cities, and there is no evidence that large forces are either more efficient or better performing.
In fact, the two arguably worst-performing forces in the country, the Met and West Midlands, are also the largest forces in the country. The history of Police Scotland, which was created by merging eight police forces into one, has not been a particularly happy episode, and it is certainly not a good case study for what is being proposed. I ask the Minister to think again about the creation of mega-forces, given that the examples of the West Midlands, the Met and Police Scotland indicate that large police forces do not perform well.
There is one area where I agree with the Minister, and where I actively support what she is trying to do: the use of technology in catching criminals, and in particular the use of live facial recognition. She and I have both seen that being used very effectively in Croydon town centre, and indeed across London, where 963 arrests have occurred in the past year as a result of using live facial recognition of criminals who would not otherwise have been caught, including a man wanted for a double rape dating back eight years. He would not have been caught, but for the use of live facial recognition. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s plans for rolling out this technology across the country and accelerating its use dramatically.
I would like an assurance that the Minister’s consultation on the use of the technology will be carefully calibrated, because there is a risk that people on the fringes—left and right—who do not like it will lobby her and try to persuade her to introduce all kinds of rules, regulations and red tape. If she gives in to their requests, she may end up inadvertently creating a bureaucratic system that, in practice, is very difficult for the police to operate. I urge her to think about the mainstream majority, who strongly support this technology. In Croydon, the public certainly support the technology, because they understand that it catches criminals and that if someone is not on the watch list, their image is immediately and automatically deleted. I ask the Minister to make sure that if she does change the rules, she does so in a way that is quite light-touch, and that it does not end up strangling what could be one of the most promising and effective crime-fighting technologies that this country has seen for many decades. I really hope that is the approach she plans to take.
Matt Vickers
When the Conservatives last left office, we had record numbers of police on the streets. I do not know how many police officers we had on the streets when the Liberal Democrats last left office. [Interruption.] I will make some progress.
In terms of headcount, the picture is starker. In March 2024, under the previous Government, there were 149,769 officers—the highest number since records began. As of September 2025, that number stands at 147,621—a decrease of more than 2,000. When the Minister speaks about supporting the police, the House is entitled to ask a simple question: how can the Government support policing while presiding over fewer police?
Worryingly, the bad news does not stop there. The number of officers in the British Transport police and the number of staff in the National Crime Agency have also decreased, all while the Government announce a national police service that will be created from organisations such as the NCA. The staff who will make up that service are leaving. That is critical because the grant that we are discussing comes against the backdrop of many forces warning about their long-term financial stability.
As the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council said:
“The overall financial picture remains challenging. Many forces are planning service reductions, with consequences for officer numbers, staff capacity and overall resilience.”
That is a direct consequence of the Government’s decisions. There are real funding challenges, here and now, with real consequences for forces and communities across the country. The Association of Police and Crime Commissioners says that this year’s settlement leaves police forces with a shortfall that could be as high as £500 million.
Labour’s own police and crime commissioners across the country have spoken out on the challenges. In my own part of the world, Labour PCC Matt Storey has said that Cleveland police have to operate with
“one hand behind their back”,
and that funding has
“failed to keep pace with the level of inflation, while other funding has been removed and re-allocated”,
making it impossible to maintain current levels of service. I understand that he has written to the Minister on three occasions and is still awaiting a response. Durham’s Labour police and crime commissioner has been even more direct in her criticism. She said that the Labour Government have
“consistently demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of policing and community safety.”
The Minister will no doubt point with great enthusiasm to headline figures. Such spin fails to acknowledge inflation, pay awards and the ongoing cost of the Government’s jobs tax. Many at home will be stunned that our police forces were subjected to hundreds of millions of pounds of costs by way of the national insurance increase, and that the Government have actually taxed the police off our streets. This settlement is not the straightforward increase that the Minister claims it is. It relies heavily on the police precept, pushing more of the burden on to local taxpayers, while forces face rising costs and rising demand.
In 2023, an MP told this House that the then Government’s approach was to
“put up local taxes, put up council tax, push the problem on to local forces”,
and that
“Ministers have chosen to heap the burden on to hard-pressed local taxpayers through the precept.”—[Official Report, 8 February 2023; Vol. 727, c. 935.]
Any idea who that might have been? [Interruption.] Yes, it was the current Policing Minister. Given the Government’s fondness for U-turns, I am not surprised by the Minister’s change of view.
Jess Phillips
If the shadow Minister was so upset about this, why did he not do anything about it?
Matt Vickers
An increasing burden is being put on local taxpayers. Members can say one thing in opposition, but then they enter government and have to make real choices. Labour’s choices have meant cuts to police numbers, increases in the burden on local taxpayers, and spiralling levels of retail crime and robbery against businesses.
The consequences of that approach are as obvious today as they were then. The reliance on the police precept entrenches a postcode lottery in policing. Areas with strong council tax bases can raise more; areas with weaker council tax bases cannot. Yet the need for policing does not neatly align with local prosperity. Criminals do not check council tax bands before committing burglary. Nor do they decide where to operate based on local authority revenue forecasts. Yet under this Government’s model, two communities can face the same crime pressures but receive very different policing capacity simply because one can raise more money than the other. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what changed her mind about increasing the burden on local taxpayers for funding the police. Given the articulate case made by my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty)—and by the Minister when in opposition—will she tell us when the funding formula review will take place?
The pressures on policing are not diminishing; they are growing. Forces are dealing with county lines, drug gangs exploiting children, organised crime operating across borders, cyber-crime and fraud expanding at an industrial scale, and domestic abuse cases that require extensive time, safeguarding and specialist capacity. They are also dealing with public order demands, which have become increasingly routine. This is a modern landscape of threats that requires modern capacity, and it cannot be met with funding settlements designed for ministerial speeches rather than frontline realities. This settlement will ultimately be judged not by the Minister’s tone, but by its results.
This debate comes down to the difference between saying and doing. The Government can say that they support policing, but too many see numbers falling. They can say that they support victims, but too many see no justice. And they can claim to be tough on crime, while quietly introducing early-release schemes that put offenders back on our streets sooner. Until the Government’s actions match their words, the public will not be convinced—and nor should they be.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
I thank all the hon. Members who have contributed to the debate—there was a big representation from the Liberal Democrats. I will not repeat the details of the settlement, as they were set out very clearly by my hon. Friend the Policing Minister. However, I will re-emphasise the importance of the significant investment in policing. It plays a key role in our programme of police reform, through which we will enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our police service, and ensure that our police are equipped for the future. The settlement also supports neighbourhood policing, which is the bedrock of the British policing model. We are listening to feedback from forces and giving them flexibility to shape their workforce and meet the demands of modern policing.
I will now come to the points raised in the debate.
Jess Phillips
The right hon. Gentleman raised many such points, so he will excuse me if I do not give way now.
It seems that the whole House can agree that no one likes the funding formula. The hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) gave an especially good trot-through of that issue. While he is not of my political stripes, he is considerably better than the previous right hon. Member for North Norfolk, who bears some responsibility for the damage that this Government are having to fix. The funding formula is fundamentally—[Interruption.] If hon. Members would like to intervene or think that I have said something that I should not have said, they should feel free to defend the former right hon. Member for North Norfolk, the one-time Prime Minister who crashed the economy.
Graham Stuart
As ever, I am afraid that this Minister gets her facts wrong. Despite that frailty, she is none the less straightforward and pretty outspoken. We get so few direct answers these days, so I look to her to provide them to two questions: are there fewer police officers now than there were when Labour came to power? And were there record numbers at that time? Are those two facts correct or are the Conservatives misleading the House, which we would not want to do?
Jess Phillips
I will come to the points that were raised in the debate, and that is one that the right hon. Gentleman raised many times.
The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) asked a specific question about the baseline. The baseline of the number of police personnel working in neighbourhood policing, which is measured from 31 March, was 17,715. Today that figure is 20,687.
I will tell a story about my recent visit to Cumbria police. I visited a call centre, where brilliant work was being done, and where I met some brilliant domestic violence advisers. However, the people staffing the call centre were warranted police officers. I do not think that warranted police officers should be staffing the call centres in police departments.
Jess Phillips
I will make some progress.
I do not think that those warranted police officers should be doing that. That is why we are tilting to increase the number of police, getting 12,000 of them from behind desks to where they need to be: working on the frontline.
The consensus from Members in the House today, including my hon. Friends the Members for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) and for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East (Andy McDonald) and others from different parties, is that some unfairness exists in the funding formula. It would be ridiculous to reform the police funding formula, carry out all of the police reforms that will come out of the planned review of policing, and then paste the funding formula on to that completely new programme.
The hon. Member for Huntingdon has already laid out his questions about the White Paper, but the point is that there will be a review of policing. I like the way hon. Members have started to use the term “mega-forces” as if they will be a bad thing. To me, they sound quite cool, like something out of “RoboCop”—which is not Government policy. It is for the hon. Gentleman and every other Member to take part in that review, ask questions, such as the ones he asked today, and represent their areas.
The hon. Members who have spoken today largely come from rural or semi-rural communities. From listening to that debate, people would be forgiven for thinking that where I live is basically a police state, where if someone calls the police, they will be out in five minutes. I recognise exactly the same issues that Members representing rural constituencies raised—that the police do not always come when people need them—and the needs of their police forces. One of the forces mentioned was West Mercia and there seemed to be an idea that that force would suck resources away from Birmingham, but I feel the same way about other bits of Birmingham, and indeed other parts of the country. That is why we need to reform the system.
I was in a meeting this morning with three of the most senior police officers in our country, who are part of the new violence against women and girls policing unit created by this Government. We were talking about the disparity between the 43 different police forces—stalking or honour crime may be tackled well in one area but not in another—and the domestic abuse risk assessments that they use. In that meeting, I thought, “Gosh, we are going to have the opportunity to start from first principles.” If I were to design the police force today on behalf of women and children in our country, I would not be designing the systems that we have today, so I ask people to enter into the issue of police reform in that spirit.
On the policing funding formula, there is no doubt, as hon. Members have mentioned—I suffer from this in Birmingham, as well—that a council tax base that is low has a disproportionate impact. When the funding formula is reformed, as part of the overall reform of policing, it will absolutely have to rely on need, deprivation and demand, as was laid out by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East. Need can do a huge amount of heavy lifting for things like seasonality, which was raised by a number of hon. Members.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jess Phillips
I will give way to the hon. Member for Huntingdon and then to my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash).
Ben Obese-Jecty
The Minister mentions the factors that will go into the police allocation formula. That formula is currently based on the 2014 population size, and density and sparsity figures from 2001. However, since that formula first came into effect, an additional 300,000 people now live in Cambridgeshire. Will that be factored into the formula? From what date will the population data be taken? Will it be the 2021 census or the 2011 census?
Jess Phillips
To answer the hon. Gentleman’s first question, yes, of course that will be factored in. Did he say 2001? I really enjoyed the conflab in the debate about who was to blame for what—it went back to things being blamed on the last Labour Government. I would like to remind hon. Members that we have to be careful about the way we are seen, because I was not old enough to vote when the last Labour Government came to power. Perhaps we should update some of the references. The idea that the figures we use will date from 2001 seems completely and utterly ridiculous, but the review that will be undertaken will look at that. All I can say is that it will be as recent as one would expect and as recent as is possible with data. [Interruption.] I can see that people are keen for me to be quiet.
Mr Brash
My hon. Friend talks about a new funding formula needing to be based on need and the challenges that the precept creates. We are never going to get fairness if the council tax system is the method of doing this. Is she ruling out getting rid of the police precept as a method of raising funding?
Jess Phillips
Far be it from me to have the authority to do that right now—I have to be honest. My colleagues who are responsible for local government and policing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed) and my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon West (Sarah Jones), are sat on the Front Bench, and they will have heard the concern about that interplay. My hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) is absolutely right: this is about need and trying to ensure that we look at the different things that different areas face.
We are committed to giving the police the resources that they need, and that is exactly what this settlement does. We want to see robust neighbourhood policing that engages with the public to build trust and confidence. We are grateful for all the work that the incredible men and women of our police service do, and we are therefore determined to provide them with the capability and flexibility that they have asked for through the funding, in order that they have the tools they require. The removal of arbitrary targets for officer numbers means that local chiefs have more flexibility to shape their workforce, meet the demands of modern policing and do the vital work behind the scenes.
This settlement is only the first step. The 2026-27 settlement provides the police with the immediate resources needed to continue their invaluable work, alongside the opportunity to invest in the future, and I commend it to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That the Police Grant Report (England and Wales) 2026–27 (HC 1638), which was laid before this House on 28 January, be approved.
Oral Answers to Questions
Jess Phillips Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
Alongside publishing the new VAWG strategy, the Government have already launched our behaviour change campaign and rolled out domestic abuse protection orders in selected areas. We are embedding domestic abuse specialists in police control rooms under Raneem’s law and strengthening the tools available to the police and courts to safeguard victims. We have also established a national policing centre for violence against women and girls and public protection with £13.1 million of funding, and have appointed Richard Wright KC to lead a review of stalking legislation.
Dr Sandher
Too many women come to my surgery with heartbreaking stories of violence and abuse, sometimes when they had left their partners. Too many people are falling through the cracks. I thank the Minister for her help with those cases, including before she came into office—it is a great comfort to me and to people across this country that she is sitting on the Front Bench—but there is a lot more that we need to do. Will the Minister please set out how this Government will help the women in my constituency in Loughborough, Shepshed and the villages to be safer?
Jess Phillips
I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words—I will continue to do that for the rest of my life. Women and girls must be safe at home and in public, which is why the Government are strengthening early intervention, improving police responses, and ensuring that women facing domestic or post-separation abuse receive protection and support. We are embedding VAWG considerations into things like transport guidance, updating national design standards to ensure public spaces are safer by design. Together, these measures will make communities across England and Wales safer, including women and girls in Loughborough, Shepshed and the villages, so that they can live confidently and without fear.
Alex McIntyre
I recently met a survivor of domestic abuse and stalking who has repeatedly moved home and then been followed by her perpetrator. She told me of the impact, not just on her but on her son, who has repeatedly had to move schools through no fault of his own. After the last move, her perpetrator was permitted to move to a caravan park just a few miles away from her new place of safety and within a few hundred yards of where her son plays football. Although an exclusion zone was put in place, her perpetrator was permitted inside it twice a week to attend parole meetings, because asking him to travel further would be “inconvenient to him”. Can the Minister give some detail on how this Government will support victims such as the one I met recently to live safely in their homes after experiencing domestic abuse?
Jess Phillips
I thank my hon. Friend for his question, and I suppose I want to say from this Dispatch Box that I want that perpetrator to be inconvenienced. Inconveniencing him is exactly what we should try to do, which is why this Government are tackling perpetrators —that is essentially about shifting the focus on to those who cause harm. We are rolling out domestic abuse protection orders, removing the burden on victims by placing stronger, enforceable prohibitions and requirements on the perpetrators, such as electronic monitoring and positive requirements to keep victims safe. Importantly, a breach of that order is a criminal offence.
Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
The child maintenance system is being used, as the Minister knows, to abuse women after they have left their relationship. One of my constituents lost her home after she was manipulated into selling it. Her ex-partner put the money into a joint account, and he then bought a new house in his own name. He left her and is now living the life of Riley while she is doing three jobs and cannot get a penny out of him in child maintenance. I have written to the Minister to ask her to meet my constituent and two other women. Will she please agree to meet us, so that we can give those women the visibility they need in holding the men to account?
Jess Phillips
The hon. Lady’s constituent’s experience is not unfamiliar to any Member of Parliament who has ever had to deal with the Child Maintenance Agency. That is why child maintenance was included in the violence against women and girls strategy. We will ensure that the abuse of women through child maintenance can no longer happen. Like always, I am more than happy to meet the hon. Lady and her constituents.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
Around one in eight women were victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse and stalking in the year to March 2025. Victim Support is concerned that there is not enough focus in the strategy and, in particular, that funding is not matching increasing demand. What assurances can the Minister give victims of stalking in Bath that there will be enough resources and funding for those services?
Jess Phillips
I give credit to the stalking victims and stalking organisations that took out a super-complaint against the previous Government, I think, on the many different areas where stalking legislation needed to change. This Government are acting on every single one of those recommendations. The violence against women and girls strategy had more than £1 billion of investment, of which £550 million will go into victim services. I can assure the hon. Member that as a victim of stalking myself, I take the issue very seriously.
Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)
When the violence against women and girls strategy was announced, I asked the Safeguarding Minister whether she had considered the impact that mass migration is having on the safety of women and girls and why it was not mentioned. I was not sure from her response then what the answer is. Can she please explain whether the Government will address that issue specifically as the strategy is implemented? If not, why not?
Jess Phillips
What I would say to the shadow Minister and to everybody is this: I do not care who you are or where you come from; if you abuse women in our country, we will come for you. There is no lever in the Home Office that I can pull to get reliable data on this issue. That is why under this Government, unlike the previous one, we will start collecting it.
Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)
Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
Our cross-cutting Government strategy commits £1 billion over the next three years to support victims of violence against women and girls, including domestic abuse. That includes a £30 million uplift under this Government on refuge and safe accommodation for victims of domestic abuse, and millions extra on funding the domestic abuse perpetrator schemes, which specifically target the repeat offenders who pose the highest risk of harm.
Olly Glover
After years of enduring domestic abuse, a constituent of mine came forward to Thames Valley police. She was badly let down by process and communication failures, resulting in the perpetrator avoiding prosecution despite a positive charging decision. She is now worried for her personal safety and has a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis. I appreciate what the Minister says she is doing to help victims of domestic violence, but what more can she do to make sure they are taken seriously so that other victims do not have the same experience as my constituent?
Jess Phillips
The hon. Gentleman makes an incredibly good point. We would save ourselves a lot of time and people a lot of harm if we just got it right in the first place. That is why the Government have invested £13.1 million specifically in a policing centre for tackling violence against women and girls, which seeks to look at all the gaps in the policing system and make nationwide standards against which the police will be held accountable.
Samantha Niblett (South Derbyshire) (Lab)
In my constituency, I am grateful to Derbyshire Wish, which provides support services to victims of domestic violence and abuse. It uses my offices for free to speak with victims of domestic violence and abuse in a safe and neutral environment. What is the Minister doing to tackle domestic violence and abuse in rural communities, where isolation plays a significant part in it going undetected?
Jess Phillips
I pay tribute to the organisation in my hon. Friend’s constituency and to all such organisations across our constituencies, and I pay tribute to her for doing that work in her own surgery. I encourage everybody to do the same—I am sure many do. Rural communities experience domestic abuse the same as those in urban areas, but they have different needs that have to be met. That is why the Government—I invite her and all Members to join me in this—will work with Members from rural areas to consider what specifically needs to be done to make sure that, when police standards are written, that isolation is fully taken into account.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
How the police respond to domestic violence incidents at the first instance oftentimes is critical for the criminal justice process, but also for interpreting events on the ground. I know the Minister—who in my view does a very good job, by the way—likes to look at best practice from across the world. Will she look at best practice in Europe, where academics have proven that when a male and a female officer respond to such incidents, the process of prosecuting is often far easier as a result of having, where possible, a mixed-gender patrol?
Jess Phillips
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that suggestion. I will ensure that our officials look up that particular study. I will do anything that shows an improvement in this area. It never surprises me that gender parity makes things better. That is another thing I have committed my life to.
Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)
I welcome the Government’s determination to tackle violence against women and girls and to support victims. Does the Minister agree that as well as improvements to our criminal justice system, improvements to our family justice system will play an important part in that?
Jess Phillips
While these are questions to the Home Office, and people will rightly bring questions about policing across the country, only 10% of domestic abuse victims will ever see the inside of a police station or interact with policing, so every other element of our system—including the family courts, the family justice system and our civil courts—absolutely has to play a part. Those things are a fundamental part of the violence against women and girls strategy.
Harpreet Uppal (Huddersfield) (Lab)
Harriet Cross (Gordon and Buchan) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
It is for the Scottish Government to undertake an inquiry because, unlike in Wales, justice is devolved in Scotland, as are education and health—all of which will be vital facets of the inquiry that will run across England and Wales. I do not disagree that there needs to be no stone left unturned in Scotland. We will make sure that anything that is found through the work of the inquiry’s committee is shared with Scotland.
Luke Myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
Will the Security Minister give us an update on the work of the defending democracy taskforce to tackle the level of disinformation on social media and in our democracy?
Digital Exploitation of Women and Girls
Jess Phillips Excerpts(2 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
As others have said, it is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Sir Mark Hendrick) for securing the debate, and to all Members who have spoken.
From the get-go, I want to set out my stall and talk about exactly how I feel about this issue. If someone makes their money through harming women, and if part of their business model is sharing terrible, sexualised, faked images of people like me—well, I am not really allowed to say what I think about that, but I want to make it completely clear that it is totally and utterly unacceptable. Discussions like this are essential, especially as we know that the technology is developing more quickly than we can write legislation.
The hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) asked why we cannot ban these things now. I remember the Online Safety Act going through Parliament, and I have to say that it is a triumph of hope over experience to think that I could just say, “Ban it now,” and that by tomorrow it would be banned. If only I wielded such a great ban hammer, I would be banning stuff all over the shop—no one would be listening to their phone out loud on the train any more. But that pace of change is not one that legislation easily keeps up with, and I say to other hon. Members who have spoken that we need to find backstops and ways to make our legislation more agile, so that it can change without having to go through some of the processes we have—I gave 10 years of my life to the Online Safety Act.
Wera Hobhouse
Is it not enforcement that is really lacking? Should legislation make enforcement the prime tool?
Jess Phillips
The hon. Lady makes an incredibly important point. She is absolutely right that we need to make sure these things are enforced. To Members who spoke about pornography, I would say that there are reasons to be cheerful about the enforcement by Ofcom. I could dance a jig because Pornhub has reported a 77% reduction in traffic since age verification stopped young people being able to access it so easily. We are in the foothills of what that legislation can do. Where pornography companies have not been undertaking age verification, Ofcom has issued £1 million fines, and changes have been made to companies’ roles in the UK, so that they meet our laws. So there are reasons to think that there is some enforcement, but I absolutely agree that we need to grapple with the agility, scale and scope of that enforcement.
I must come to the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Preston. Before I came to the debate, my colleague the Minister for victims was telling me how amazing my hon. Friend and his office have been in Preston in handling online abuse. People in our constituency offices often do not get praised for these things, but I hear that my hon. Friend has a legend working in his office.
My hon. Friend talked about the importance of education in this space, and about this being a country-wide push for change, and I could not agree more. The Government have invested in this issue, and it will be an absolutely fundamental part of the violence against women and girls strategy.
The National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection will do exactly what my hon. Friend talked about, so that the good standards, for example, in Cheshire—it is not far from him, and the anti-stalking practices are amazing and world-leading—are the same for people in the west midlands and everywhere else. My hon. Friend used the example of stalking legislation and making sure there are standardised systems and standards that police forces have to live by, which will absolutely include upskilling, when policing the digital elements of these crimes, whether it is domestic abuse or online. Stalking online is as illegal as stalking in real life—just to be clear, they are the same crime.
My hon. Friend talked about the richest man in the world. I am not sure there are many people in this building who have quite such a claim against the richest man in the world as me. What happened is unacceptable, and anyone who has existed online will know about the Grok outcry.
Some hon. Members mentioned Meta glasses. If I had been in the meeting where they floated the idea of making Meta glasses, the very first thing I would have said would have been, “These are going to be used to abuse women.” Why is that not being baked into the design of such products?
One of the things the violence against women and girls strategy has absolutely committed to is working on safety by design. In the car industry, we now take safety features for granted. If we are talking about what it was like when we were kids versus now, my dad used to put us in the back of the car and purposefully go round the corners fast so that we would smack into the window. These things are not acceptable now.
We have to go on a journey with this technology. To me, a Ring doorbell is such an obvious way to stalk somebody, as is an AirTag. I see cases again and again. It does not matter what the new technologies are; perpetrators of these abuses will find a way to use them for that purpose, so we need to design in safety functions. On the issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) about planning, I will take that away and work with him.
The Government obviously took a strong stance—I felt pleased about this—against Grok. We can see that when we stand together and people speak up, we can make change in this area, but we need to make sustainable change. We absolutely are always looking at legislative changes. As people have said, there have been a number of those. There is the issue of Grok being added into the Online Safety Act, so that there can be accountability on that basis.
In the Crime and Policing Bill, we are also banning nudification apps. I have also had it shown to me that they do not work on men and boys, which I am glad about for men’s and boys’ sake, but if you are designing something that will nudify only women, you have a problem. I do not know who I can talk to, but there is something wrong with you. Have a word with yourself; otherwise, we will have a word with you. The ban will target firms and individuals providing and supplying tools that use AI to turn images of real people into fake nudes.
There is a raft of other legislation that we are putting through and that we hope will shift the dial. Obviously, in the violence against women and girls strategy, we have made a very clear commitment to ensuring that we make it impossible for children to take and share naked images of themselves—we will make it impossible for them to do that. My hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Lola McEvoy) and others talked about children being taken from social media and on to other platforms. I have to say that encrypted spaces are the most dangerous for child abuse imagery. But to the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire, who was talking about that, I say this: 91% of all child sexual abuse images are self-made; they are made by children themselves. People have groomed them—exploited them—to make those images. It may be their peers.
We will not stop this just by looking at the issue of new AI. There is an issue with where our children can go and who has access to them. I agree with the hon. Lady’s sentiment. We have to make sure that we get this right. Even with the 10 years of work on the Online Safety Act, and with the level of detail and, I have to say, the arguments that went into it, it still has all the gaps that we are talking about, so we need to make sure we get this right and legislate in a way that can be agile for the future. That is why I think the Government need to take the time—not too much time, I agree—to make sure we do that.
Others talked about accountability and whether anyone ever actually gets punished for these things. As part of the work we are doing in the Home Office, we are expanding the use of covert officers to address violence against women and girls, and improving the capabilities to counter and reduce the highest harms. We operate a similar system with regard to child abuse online. We are now doing that also for women and girls online, recognising the level of organised crime that is behind this. The hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) talked about people who are asleep and being filmed, like Gisèle Pelicot. These issues deserve a police force specifically looking at the covert aspect, and that is what this Government are doing.
Christine Jardine (in the Chair)
I call Sir Mark Hendrick to wind up the debate extremely briefly—in about 5 seconds.
Disclosure and Barring Service
Jess Phillips Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
I thank the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) very much for securing this debate on an important issue. I am grateful to her and to all others who have contributed this evening. A good amount of ground has been covered, even in the relatively short time available, so I will respond to the various points that have been made.
First, I ask for the House’s indulgence as I set out some of the factual background of the Disclosure and Barring Service. The wider disclosure and barring regime is there to protect children and vulnerable adults through the disclosure of relevant criminal records, helping employers to make informed recruitment decisions about the suitability of an individual to work with those groups. It does so through criminal record checks, with the standard, enhanced and enhanced with barred lists levels. Increasing criminal record information is disclosed at each level. The roles and activities that are eligible for the higher-level criminal records check are set out in legislation owned by the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice. During the last reported year, the DBS issued a total of 7.2 million certificates.
The regime also allows for barring by the DBS of those who are considered to pose a risk, as has been covered. If someone is barred, they cannot work in what is defined as regulated activity in our legislation. As has been identified, regulated activity and institutions that are regulated are two different things—I make that completely clear. Examples of regulated activity include teaching, supervising children and providing health and personal care to children and adults. It does not matter whether it is voluntary or otherwise. Through the relevant arrangements, the DBS ensures that those it has barred cannot work in those roles and have access to vulnerable groups. The DBS’s most recent annual report states that 104,000 individuals are on its children and adults barred lists. I should note that the disclosure and barring regime is not, as has been pointed out, a vetting regime.
The disclosure and barring regime focuses on providing employers with information on people, whether that is criminal records, relevant police information or barred list status. This can support robust suitability decisions while allowing ex-offenders to get back into work and employment. As Parliament and the public would expect, the regime is kept under review to ensure that it is effectively delivering on its key objectives, and I am always keen to hear suggestions, especially those, as laid out by the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole, that are based in real life—IRL, as my children would say—with regard to our constituents.
We are bringing in changes to respond to the DBS-related recommendations from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse. First, a measure in the Crime and Policing Bill will prevent those on the barred list from working closely with children, even in supervised roles working alongside somebody with a DBS certificate. Currently, if a role involving teaching, instructing or supervising children is supervised by another member of staff, it is not considered to be “regulated activity” under the legislation. This means that an employer can ask only for an enhanced DBS check, which does not include a check of the barred list. That creates a risk that a barred-list individual could work as a volunteer in a school, or as an employee in a youth club or other setting, if supervised. We agree with the inquiry that the risk is too high, and we are changing the law accordingly.
Secondly, we are enabling self-employed or personal employees to access higher-level DBS checks if they work with children or vulnerable adults. The relevant provision will come into force on Wednesday—completely coincidentally! Before we made that change, people such as private tutors or paid personal carers could only access a basic DBS check, while their counterparts in settings such as schools or care homes would be expected to obtain the highest level of DBS check.
Tessa Munt
Should DBS checks not have a start date and a finish date, so that people who are not particularly worldly are clear about the beginning and the end, and understand that when the end date comes, a new check will be needed?
Jess Phillips
I will come on to that when I pick up some of the issues of portability from one person to another. However, from Wednesday those hiring personal carers, or families engaging private tutors, will have access to the same high level of check, with the same level of information, including information about whether a person is barred by the DBS.
Thirdly, we have enabled the disclosure of an individual’s barred-list status on the international child protection certificate.
Vikki Slade
Will people have to go through some of the umbrella agencies, which can charge a lot of money? Will there be a cost differential for those individuals?
Jess Phillips
That is a very good question. There does seem to be a bit of a discrepancy. I know that when the hon. Lady was looking through different regulated systems to get people checked in her own area, they were found wanting. Individuals, families or those who want to employ a tutor or a carer on a self-employed basis, whether or not that involves direct payments, will have access to the enhanced check.
I pay tribute to Richard and the campaign of his brilliant wife Louise: she is absolutely on the money. The right to ask is a fundamental part of the system, and from Wednesday—give me 48 hours—parents will have that power. If I were sending my child to a tutor—which I have done, like many other people across the country—I would be able to ask whether that tutor had had an enhanced check. It may not be possible to access all the information, but it will be possible to question and scrutinise employers as well, to ensure that that is done. Parents will have that power.
As I have said, we understand that child protection is international. The ICPC, issued by the ACRO Criminal Records Office, is used for individuals who intend to work with children overseas. We changed the relevant legislation on 18 December, reducing the risk that an overseas employer could unknowingly hire a barred person to work with children and thereby meeting the third of the inquiry’s recommendations relating to the disclosure of criminal records.
Overall, our approach is underpinned by an unwavering commitment to safeguarding through the proportionate disclosure of criminal records and other relevant information. It is of course important that we listen to, and when necessary act on, any concerns raised by individuals, including Members of Parliament, and the sectors that interact with the regime.
Tessa Munt
The Minister refers to the fact that the DBS would be able to check whether somebody who was going to work abroad had a problem with their clearance. Will that work in reverse? For example, if someone is trying to employ an au pair from another country—I do not know if people can even do that any more—could the au pair be checked before they came in and worked with children?
Jess Phillips
I will get back to the hon. Lady on the specifics of that. This is about people who are barred from working with children, and ensuring that we have enhanced international knowledge sharing. In the cases raised by the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole, the fact that it was not known that somebody had all those issues was a real failure in the system.
I want to give some attention to the requirements that the hon. Lady calls for. The Disclosure and Barring Service does one thing. It is not the regulator, and it does not regulate services; it ensures that employers have the right information. The regulation of activities sits with the relevant Departments and institutions. The rules in residential settings are different from those in the Department for Education. We need to make sure that we do not introduce regulation that means that no one can ever start any sort of group—that is certainly something we have been mindful of in our work on the duty to report cases of sexual abuse among children. However, we need to have safeguards in place. The regulation of requirements sits with the relevant individual bodies; it is not for the DBS to say what the requirements should be. However, I am absolutely open to having conversations about what should and should not be regulated when it comes to safeguarding.
I go back to where I started: regulated activity. The hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole asks for clarity in the guidance. Regulated activity is activity that involves someone working with children and vulnerable adults. Frankly, I find it quite hard to imagine that the vast majority of the cases that she has raised would not fall under the scope of regulated activity, but I will absolutely take her point away.
Before I finish, I want to pay tribute to Lauren, whose heartbreaking case was mentioned. I speak as somebody who knows what drug addiction can do, and what it costs families. I do not know the full details, but in Lauren’s case, I would consider the activity to have been regulated activity. If someone is teaching children, they are undertaking regulated activity, and parents will have the right to ask whether enhanced checks have been undertaken.
Jess Phillips
I do not think I can take any more interventions, because my time will run out. I am more than happy to meet the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole, and to work with her to make sure that we get the DBS to be the best it can be, within all the regulatory frameworks that are needed.
Tessa Munt
Madam Deputy Speaker, can you confirm that we can witter on until 10 o’clock? I believe that we are not limited.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Just to provide clarity, the Minister can indeed continue until 10 pm, but she does not have to.
Jess Phillips
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. When I woke up this morning, I did not think that this debate would start until 10 pm, so any more time is a bonus. I apologise. The last time I replied in an Adjournment debate, I ran wildly over time, and somebody had to shut me up. I did not want anyone to be put in that position again.
The portability of checks was raised. I think people do not understand quite how many DBS checks are done a year—7.3 million. It gives me some comfort that quite a lot of the workforce in our country are undertaking checks. Incidentally, we do not have to undergo checks as Members of Parliament.
Vikki Slade
There are 7.2 million checks done a year, and I am sure that means multiple checks for individuals. I used to foster, and I obviously had very enhanced DBS checks for my fostering, but I then had to get a separate DBS check to undertake my work as a school governor. Frankly, that seems crazy. As a foster carer, I was being checked in far more detail. We could reduce the burden on the DBS by having a system of single portable checks, because I do not think that 7.2 million people a year are having checks.
Jess Phillips
We recognise that people may want to use their existing DBS check when moving from one role to another, where the new role requires a check. That is exactly the point that the hon. Lady raised. It is possible for employers to accept an existing criminal record certificate, but it must be for the same type of check in the same workforce—in the instance she has given, that would be working with children—such as enhanced with barred lists checks for the children’s workforce. This is to ensure that the appropriate level of information is available. We do not want a random DBS to have been done, and for someone to just say, “Look, I’ve got a DBS”. Over the years, I too have had more DBS checks than I can count.
On the delays, the DBS has a key performance indicator of getting 80% turnaround within 14 days, and it currently reaches 75%. It has been progressively working on that and ensuring that things are done more quickly. The enhanced check relies on police forces undertaking the work, and seven months seems like a very long time, but there can be a variety of reasons why delays may arise. However, the vast majority of checks are done within 14 days. My son had an enhanced DBS the other day, and it came back in three days. I do not think the DBS knew that he was my son.
Tessa Munt
I thank the Minister greatly for giving way. I want to pick up again the point I made about whether these checks will have a clear end date on them. I also have a second question, if I am allowed to ask it. I do not expect an answer now, but it would be nice to have an answer—one of the problems one finds constantly with police forces is that they are required to do checks, but they have no ability to recover the full costs through the charging system. Such a number of checks—7.2 million—will be very expensive. Do we know the cost of a single DBS check?
Jess Phillips
We absolutely understand that. Just to be clear, police forces are paid through the DBS system to undertake the checks. The resources are given by the DBS system to police forces to undertake that work. I will ensure that the hon. Member receives the exact cost, but it comes under the costs of the DBS.
On the issue of exactly how long a DBS check lasts, there is no one simple answer, but we should encourage more people to be part of the updating system and the checking system. This system has been heavily scrutinised over the years, and it deserves that level of scrutiny, but I have seen a real effort to make sure that it is the best and the fairest that it can be, but we are always here to work for any possible improvements.
Question put and agreed to.
Oral Answers to Questions
Jess Phillips Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)
Rural life, particularly for those in farming communities, is more typically based on traditional roles, which can often see women marginalised in their role within the family and, sadly, more likely to be victims of abuse. Can the Minister assure me that with any new strategy on tackling violence against women and girls, women who live rurally will be able to access the support they need?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
Happy new year, Mr Speaker.
The violence against women and girls strategy is absolutely for every woman and girl in our country. There are specific problems faced by people in rural communities, and I will gladly work with the hon. Lady and others from rural communities to get that right.
Kim Johnson (Liverpool Riverside) (Lab)
Happy new year, Mr Speaker.
Does the Minister agree that far too much resource is being spent on exceedingly heavy-handed policing of peaceful protests, which is likely to increase with plans to restrict protests based on their supposed cumulative impact, as planned in the Crime and Policing Bill?
Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)
Thank you, Mr Speaker, and a happy new year to all.
I have a constituent who was in care as a child and who was arrested at age 11, more than four decades ago, for stealing. Even though it is a minor petty crime, this juvenile crime has not been removed from their Disclosure and Barring Service certificate, and my constituent believes that this has impacted their ability to be employed in the social care sector as it appears on their DBS certificate and is not eligible for removal. Will the Home Secretary consider changes to the DBS filtering framework for petty minor offences committed by children to determine whether such offences should continue to appear on DBS certificates and later impact employment?
Jess Phillips
There is an independent system that oversees whether access to files from the DBS has been granted appropriately. If the hon. Gentleman would like to write to me on this specific case, I am more than happy to ensure that it is followed through.
Violence against Women and Girls Strategy
Jess Phillips Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)
Merry Christmas, Madam Deputy Speaker. With permission, I will make a statement on the publication of the Government’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls.
Let us start with the facts. Last year, one in every eight women was a victim of domestic abuse, stalking or sexual assault. Every day, 200 rapes are reported to the police, and many go unreported. Behind every one of those figures is a woman or girl whose life has been shattered. Behind every crime lies a perpetrator who all too often gets away scot-free.
For too long, we have accepted these statistics as simply a fact of life. Today this Government say: no more. We are calling violence against women and girls the national emergency that it is. We are committing to halve these horrific crimes within a decade, and today we publish the strategy that sets us on that journey. The strategy does something that none before it ever has. Until now, responsibility for tackling violence against women and girls has been left to only the crime-fighting departments, which work so often in isolated ways. They provide support that is vital, but it often comes too late to truly change the story.
This strategy is different. It deploys the full power of the state, across national Government and local government. It draws on the experiences of victims and the power of the third sector to transform our approach to these crimes—in our schools, in our police forces, from housing to healthcare, on our streets and behind closed doors, online and offline. The strategy is designed to deliver three goals: first, preventing boys and men from ever becoming abusers in the first place; secondly, bearing down on perpetrators so that those who have offended do not do so again; and, finally, supporting victims so that they get justice when they seek it and the closure that they deserve.
I will start with how we stop the violence before it starts. Because of the proliferation of content that has the potential to poison young minds, the need to address this issue has never been greater. Our strategy tackles radicalisation and confronts behaviour long before it spirals into abuse or violence. Education is undoubtedly the key. We must empower teachers to challenge harmful attitudes and act before they escalate. To do so, we will invest £20 million to tackle harmful attitudes in young people.
Our universal pledge is to change fundamentally how relationships, consent and attitudes can be embedded through education. That means changing the curriculum and developing training for teachers and external providers on healthy relationships and consent. We will also develop targeted programmes for those starting to exhibit harmful behaviours, and we will pilot interventions in schools, focusing in on and managing risk where abusive behaviours are starting to show. We will provide parents and frontline professionals with the support and training that they need to spot the warning signs of misogyny and act on them.
We will make the UK one of the hardest places for children to access harmful content and misogynistic influences online. We must help our parents to protect their children from harmful, poisonous content. We will ban “nudification” tools, which currently enable users to strip clothes and produce intimate images without the consent of those depicted. We will work with technology companies to make it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view nude images through nudity detection filters.
First and foremost, our goal must be to stop these crimes from ever happening. That means stopping anyone from ever becoming a perpetrator. It also means bearing down on those who commit these awful crimes. In this strategy, we set out significant new powers and tools to pursue these dangerous individuals. Today, police performance varies from force to force, with more than two thirds of rape cases seeing the victims withdraw support in some police force areas. For that reason, by 2029 every police force in England and Wales will have a specialist rape and sexual offences team, mirroring the approach taken by the Metropolitan police.
We will ensure that police forces use the same data-driven approach to tacking offenders that we apply to terrorists and serious organised criminals. New forensic technology will be used to track down rapists and sex offenders, allowing us to reopen cold cases and bring offenders to justice many years after they thought they had got away with it.
We will ramp up our efforts to take perpetrators off our streets, and we will pursue them online too. Following the approach long applied to disrupting child sex abusers, and acknowledging that violence against women and girls is increasingly happening online, we will deploy covert officers online to disrupt offending and bring criminals to justice.
We must also do more to break the cycle of offending. Through the Drive project, we are investing £53 million in ensuring that high-risk, high-harm domestic abusers are subject to intensive case management arrangements. We will also roll out domestic abuse protection orders across England and Wales. Crucially, they can be applied for by a police officer or a court—criminal or family—and, unlike other orders, they do not rely on the victim to act. In the pilot locations alone, 1,000 victims have already been protected in this way. Now, many more will be.
Where crimes are committed, it is essential that we help those who have suffered to get the justice they deserve and as much closure as is ever possible. I have spent most of my life working with the victims of these crimes, and their voices have informed every decision that we have taken. We will be backing this strategy with over £1 billion in victims funding. That includes over half a billion pounds for victims’ services and another half a billion pounds for providing safe housing for victims of abuse as they escape their abusers. As part of this investment, we will support vital victims’ helplines, set up a new service to connect victims with specialist help through their GP and provide up to £50 million for therapeutic support for child victims of sexual abuse.
In the short time I have today, I have touched on only a fraction of the measures in the strategy—one that signals, in its entirety, a transformation in the Government’s response and a Government who are rising to the challenge of the national emergency that we face. Before I finish, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all those who have helped us get to this point. I am particularly grateful to my counterpart at the Ministry of Justice, the Victims Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), for her integral role in developing the strategy, as well as to the Home Secretary; her predecessor, who is now the Foreign Secretary; the Deputy Prime Minister; and, last but by no means least, the Prime Minister and the team at No. 10—they have stepped up to the plate with leadership and ambition, and I thank them all. I would also like to thank all those across different Government Departments who I may have been slightly annoying to at times but who have stepped up admirably, from the national health service to police forces, and all my colleagues sat beside me on the Front Bench today. They have worked incredibly hard. I am also grateful for the incredible dedication of the third sector, which has, rightly, long called for the Government to do more.
Most importantly of all, I would like to thank the victims of these awful crimes—those I have met and worked with for many years, whose bravery and determination have inspired me and always will, and kept me going through what seems like a very long career when it too often felt like change was impossible. Without their support, this strategy would have been impossible. It is, above all else, for them.
I end by imploring those here and far beyond these walls to recognise that this strategy is more than a document; it is a call from a Government who recognise this as a national emergency and are willing to back up their words with action. Ending violence against women and girls is the work of us all—those who might spot a young boy at risk of turning down a darker path; those who might see troubling signs in the behaviour of their friends or perhaps even themselves. It will take all of society to step up and end the epidemic of abuse and violence that shames our country. The challenge is great, but I have never felt more confident that we can rise to it than I do today, because change is coming. We can make women and girls safe, at last. I commend this statement to the House.
Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)
I wish you a very merry Christmas, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I would like to start by thanking the Minister and the colleagues she has worked with for bringing forward this strategy today. Tackling violence against women and girls is a deeply noble aim, and one that the Opposition very much share. Women and girls face particular threats, both in the home and at the hands of strangers. Previous Conservative Governments fully understood that, which is why we took steps such as setting up the grooming gangs taskforce, introducing measures to make it easier for victims to pre-record evidence in rape cases, and rolling out 700 more independent sexual violence advisers to support and work with victims through the police and court process.
I pay particular tribute to my right hon. Friends the Members for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) and for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) for their work in leading the efforts of previous Governments on this issue, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns), who I know is looking forward to working collaboratively with the Government on next steps after she returns from maternity leave. The work of keeping us all safe is never done, so I further welcome the steps taken in this strategy to continue and enforce a lot of that work—particularly those steps to ensure national coverage of specialist rape and sexual offence police teams, to apply new forensic technology to cold cases and to roll out domestic abuse protection orders.
Truly protecting women and girls demands that we have difficult and sometimes awkward conversations—conversations about sex and consent, about private lives and criminality in the home, and about who is committing these crimes and why. Relationships between men and women and relationships between parents and children are delicate, particular and shaped by long-standing norms and beliefs. Not every country and culture in the world believes, as we do, that women are equal to men, with personal, bodily and sexual autonomy. When people from those countries and cultures come here, this can be dangerous.
Do not just take my word for it. The defence counsel for Israr Niazal, an Afghan asylum seeker convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl, argued that Niazal did not understand the age of consent or the concept of consent more broadly, because no such concept exists in Afghanistan. If we cannot be honest about this, we will fail to achieve the first of this strategy’s goals: preventing men and boys from becoming abusers.
Despite repeated attempts by my Conservative colleagues to secure the release of comprehensive data on migrant crime, the Government still refuse to publish the full breakdown. The indicative data that we have suggests shocking variations in crime rates by nationality and immigration status. According to data from the Ministry of Justice, foreign nationals make up a third of all convictions for sexual assaults against women, despite making up between 11% and 12% of the population. Afghans and Eritreans—the nationalities that made up the largest number of those on small boat crossings this year—are more than 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than British nationals.
Each and every case of sexual assault is wrong. Perpetrators must face the full force of the law, regardless of nationality, and it remains the case that, statistically, the most dangerous place for a woman to be is in her own home. But we must be able to have an informed and honest debate about whether mass migration is making this problem worse, particularly when a large number of recent migrants come here from countries where attitudes to women are very different from our own. The Minister spoke rightly of the importance of a data-driven approach, so will she work with her ministerial colleagues to release the full data on crime by nationality, including as it relates to violence against women and girls, so that we can fully understand this problem in order to tackle it?
This is relevant not only for the sort of violence and sexual violence against women and girls that has sadly always existed in this country, but for specific cultural practices that are imported and new to this country. Just this week, an article published in the British Medical Association’s academic journal highlighted how differing cultural attitudes towards women can influence behaviour. That piece, on the apparent “harms” of the global campaign against female genital mutilation, argued that in many cultures, women’s bodies
“may be perceived as belonging to a larger group…rather than being subject to individual choices and preferences.”
It went on to argue that an emphasis on women’s bodily autonomy can therefore be “traumatic” to those of other cultures. This is wrong. Individual autonomy is the bedrock of our laws, our culture and our country, as I am sure all of us in this House will agree. So finally, will the Minister please join me in affirming that whoever you are, wherever you may have come from, wherever your family may have come from, and whatever may have happened to you, if you are a woman in Britain, your body belongs to no one but yourself?
Jess Phillips
In the list of people who have put in effort over the years in this regard, I would like to make special mention of Baroness May, who I worked with for many years on many of these issues.
In answer to the hon. Lady’s question, let me give her a really specific answer about data. She is absolutely right that data collection on a variety of different issues has been neglected for some years and is not good enough. Issues relating to how we collect data, whether it is ethnicity data or other forms of data that will inform this strategy, are vital. Having been a pro-choice Member of Parliament and a pro-choice advocate my entire life, I am more than happy to stand here and say, on a woman’s right to make any decision, that, “It is nobody else’s business what I do with my body.” I hope the hon. Lady and anyone else would always join me in telling that to anyone from anywhere, including when they are of our own ranks and communities. I am more than happy to say that.
I say to the hon. Lady that this Government have deported an increased number of foreign national offenders—a 12% increase since her Government’s period in office—and have passed much stronger laws limiting the ability of asylum seekers to claim asylum in our country, and I believe that Conservative Members voted against that Bill. I also say to her that if the only crime that I had to concern myself with halving was that committed by people who arrive in our country, my job would be considerably easier. The vast majority of the data that I am talking about is about people who were born in our country abusing other people who were born in our country, from every culture and every creed. I have yet to come across any community where violence against women and girls does not happen.
Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)
I welcome the new VAWG strategy and thank the Victims Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), and the Safeguarding Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), who have both worked so hard and who are wholly committed to ending harm against women and girls.
On training for teachers, will that be co-designed alongside girls and boys, so that it is well received and up to date with the latest technology? Big tech has a huge role to play in tackling misogyny. Children are constantly targeted with information when online, including violent pornography or hateful content. We say, “Don’t look”, but the algorithms are screaming at them to look. The Women and Equalities Committee has found that tech companies such as X, Snapchat and TikTok continue to freely publish misogynistic content. Will we see this Government getting tough with big tech companies over their failure to protect children?
Jess Phillips
My hon. Friend is absolutely right when she characterises the kind of violent pornography that young people are exposed to. Among other things, part of the strategy is to ban strangulation in porn. Indeed, I am sure that everybody will go away and read the strategy and some of the guidance that comes from the review on pornography and exactly what we have to do. I am very pleased to say that since the introduction of age verification in July, Pornhub has seen a reduction of 77% in its traffic—my heart bleeds for them. We are seeing the green shoots, but my hon. Friend is right that the strategy tackles head-on how we have to work with tech companies, whether through regulation and/or collectivism, to ensure that the kind of vile crimes that we see happening to children in our country cannot happen any more.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)
I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
Jess Phillips
The hon. Lady will see from the strategy that the issue of tech is undoubtedly in there. I agree that, on assessing how well things are going, it seems quite a long time to wait until 2027. I can absolutely guarantee that I will hold tech companies accountable for their behaviours—I think it is quite famously known that a lot of them are not all that keen on me. I will also work with them on what is possible, for example on ensuring that what teachers know is adapted to the modern world—my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) asked about that. We will also need big tech brains on that, so although I will hold them accountable, it will also be important to work with them.
There is ringfenced money specifically for targeting domestic abuse and sexual violence. The strategy contains a commitment to how we give the standards of commissioning when giving out money from the centre down to areas, in order to look at exactly the issue of “by and for”, which the hon. Lady talked about, whether for older people, for veterans support, or for black and minority ethnic groups. All those “by and for” groups will have to be taken account of.
Ms Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank all the Ministers for their collective hard work with the Safeguarding Minister. It has been worth the wait for this strategy. She will know that for too long it has been an occupational hazard for women in this country that they get hassled wherever they go and whatever they do. Will she therefore confirm that, as part of the strategy, the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Act 2023 will come into force in April next year? That will mean that, for the first time ever, the law will recognise that misogyny causes crimes against women and girls, and the police and courts will be able to do something about it. The Minister will know that Citizens UK, the brilliant Sue Fish, Our Streets Now, the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin), and indeed the former Member for that constituency, Greg Clark, and I have been pushing for that for over a decade because we want to see women and girls as free to walk our streets as men and boys are. Will she tell us how we can now feed into the police guidance on the matter?
Jess Phillips
Absolutely, I can confirm that. I am more than happy to meet my hon. Friend and the others she has mentioned to discuss what exactly goes into the guidance. We always have to ensure not just that we write nice words on goatskin in this building, but that we make them workable in the real world. I am keen that everything in the strategy does that.
Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)
I absolutely welcome the strategy published today, and I share the Minister’s ambitions on early intervention. However, in constituencies such as mine, one of the state’s greatest failures has been the historical failure to openly and honestly confront perverse cultural attitudes behind violence and abuse against women and girls. I think of the women in my constituency specifically targeted because they were working-class, white girls. I think of the many women I have met who have poor English and little education, and who do not know about their rights or how to access support. I also think of those many women I have met in my constituency who are too scared to raise those concerns. The Minister rightly speaks of challenging misogynistic attitudes within schools, but can she assure me that the strategy will not stop at the school gate and that the Government will challenge any institution, religious or otherwise, that continues to reinforce harmful attitudes towards women and girls and puts their safety at risk?
Jess Phillips
I absolutely can confirm that. The strategy is not only about challenging institutions, whether that is children’s services, police forces or the court system; we have tried to look at wherever a person might come forward or has previously been failed, and look at ways we can seek to improve that. We cannot undermine, frankly, millennia of patriarchy overnight—if only; I’d do it if I had a magic wand—but I don’t care what it says above the door of your establishment: if you are not working with us, you are working against us.
Jess Asato (Lowestoft) (Lab)
I would like to make the House aware of my appointment as the VAWG adviser to the Secretary of State for Health, and it is the commitments made by the Department of Health and Social Care in this transformative strategy that I wish to raise. Will the Minister confirm that the roll-out of the Child House model represents a significant step in delivering against recommendation 16 of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, and that the introduction of the Steps to Safety service, which will embed specialist support workers across groups of GP practices, will play a huge role in better identifying victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence through those settings?
Jess Phillips
First and foremost, I welcome my hon. Friend—I don’t really need to welcome her to the party; she and I have been in the same meetings in the sector for about a decade.
I absolutely can confirm that. When Departments stand up and say, “We’re going to put so and so millions into this”, what I want to highlight about the measures in the strategy that my hon. Friend has spoken about is the cultural shift of not just the Minister saying, “It’s everybody’s business,” but the Health Secretary, with other Cabinet members, saying, “Okay, what does, ‘It’s everybody’s business,’ mean?” I thank the Health Secretary for making it mean that he understands that if someone is raped, stalked, harassed or domestically abused, they will be sick, and that we have a responsibility to deal with that. The idea that every child in the country will now have access where they live to what can only be described as a gold-plated system, like the one that exists in Camden and in other places across the country, frankly makes my heart sing.
Dr Luke Evans (Hinckley and Bosworth) (Con)
I have long argued in this House that when it comes to mental or physical health, it is about women and men, not women or men, and that is important. I welcome the strategy coming forward, but can I also bring a sense of caution, because terms like “toxic masculinity” and labelling young men and boys are potentially a real problem, because they see themselves as destined to cause some problem? Already some of the reporting today enhances that. What are the Government doing to ensure that we are not already socially criminalising young men and boys for having feelings about good masculinity? That is an important definition that the Government need to get right, and I would appreciate her answer on that topic.
Jess Phillips
I totally agree, and I am not a fan of the term “toxic masculinity”. As somebody who has raised two men—I used to be able to say I have children, but I have raised two men; they are very tall—I have watched over the years, since the Me Too movement and then the death of Sarah Everard, a real pouring out of emotion by women in our country that did not include men and boys in the conversation, so they went somewhere else to get their information. So much of the strategy is about inviting those young men and boys in, but also young men and boys who are victims of these crimes. Today there are terrible cases for all to see in the news of sextortion, and my hon. Friend the Victims Minister will be holding a men and boys summit, and there is a men and boys statement as part of the strategy. It is vital that we get this right because we have tried the alternative before, and it did not work.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)
We are all aware of the delays in the criminal justice system. Those can occur at any stage, but they are particularly severe when cases move from the police to the Crown Prosecution Service and then to the courts, each under a separate Department. What mechanism or, better still, individual will ensure joined-up government in tackling violence against women and girls and doing so quickly and effectively?
Jess Phillips
The backlog in our courts is one of the stickiest, most difficult issues, and it covers lots of different Departments that need to get this absolutely right. It is probably the problem that drives our collective work more than almost anything else. We are due to have 100,000 cases in the backlog by 2028 if we do not put in place real, radical change, keeping at its heart the experiences of women and girls. There are things in the strategy around legal advice for victims and greater support for independent sexual violence advisers. All those sorts of things are there, but this will require a radical change.
Monica Harding (Esher and Walton) (LD)
I pay tribute to the Minister for her work on violence against women and girls. I welcome what she said to my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) about her commitment to holding tech companies to account for their behaviours. However, during the passage of the Online Safety Act, the Minister and the Victims Minister, who was also instrumental in the development of this strategy, were at the forefront of calls for a code of practice to protect women and girls online. Now they are in government, why are they not delivering on it? It is in the Government’s gift to amend the Act to make Ofcom’s guidance the code. With the best will in the world, guidance will not make any difference to social media companies’ behaviour, nor their profit-driven models, which are the source of so much misogynistic influence, which teachers are now being expected to deal with. Why are the Government afraid to use all the tools at their disposal to hold tech firms to account for their role in fuelling misogynistic behaviour?
Jess Phillips
I thank the hon. Lady for her kind words and her reminder of the many years that passing the Online Safety Act took. Many of us will remember them—I was about to say “fondly”, but I am not sure that was necessarily always the case. First and foremost, I would not be afraid of doing any of the things that she has highlighted. The hon. Lady was not here, but the Act took 10 years to get to its current legislative state, and it has only really been rolled out since July. The Government have repeatedly said, and what they say in the strategy, is that where we need to go further, we absolutely will.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
I thank the Minister for her statement and warmly welcome this strategy. I pay tribute to her for delivering this strategy and for her years of personal commitment to the safety of women and girls. I welcome in particular the focus on educating children about misogyny and driving misogyny out of our schools. My hon. Friend will know that the Ofsted inspection framework has previously been largely silent on the issue of misogyny, allowing examples to occur where schools have been rated “outstanding” despite girls at that school having widespread experience of sexual harassment and abuse by their peers. What engagement is she having with Ofsted to ensure that all the Government’s objectives are aligned and that no school where girls routinely experience misogynistic harassment and other behaviours can be regarded as “exceptional”, “strong standard” or “expected standard” under the new framework?
Jess Phillips
The Government have released new curricula on healthy relationships education. Working with Ofsted to ensure that schools are monitored against the delivery of that education is one of the most important things we can do. Schools just saying they do it, and then the teaching never being looked at to see whether it is any good, has led to a hodgepodge and, frankly, some terrible behaviour around the country. I will absolutely take her point away and speak to my colleagues in the Department for Education, which is a fundamental pillar—I am starting to talk like a civil servant; they say “pillar” about everything—in this strategy, because if a school is not safe, how could it be “outstanding”?
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
I welcome the publication of the strategy, and acknowledge the Minister’s commitment over many years to get to this point—this must be a great moment for her.
A few weeks ago, I visited Salisbury Soroptimists, who published “Fresh Thoughts”, a document taken from Dorset and customised for Wiltshire to give information and support for women fleeing domestic abuse, through close working with Wiltshire police, Wiltshire council and the end violence against women and girls campaign in Wiltshire. After I go back and tell them about this strategy, how best can they engage with it to build on the work that the Minister has set out?
Jess Phillips
As I have said, the strategy will live and die on whether everybody takes part in it. The right hon. Gentleman has given me the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to Soroptimists from all over the country. Some of the work that appears in the strategy—specialist advocates for rape victims in courts, for example—started because of volunteer programmes run by Soroptimists in parts of the country. I want to give them the confidence that they can change Government policy, and they can work through the right hon. Gentleman’s good offices to reach out to me. They do amazing work in their local communities.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent and Rhymney) (Lab)
I warmly welcome the statement on ending violence against women and girls. Will the Minister tell us more about how she will support and empower third sector organisations such as Phoenix Domestic Abuse Services in Blaenau Gwent, which always deserve a helping hand?
Jess Phillips
Again, I am poacher turned gamekeeper in ensuring that the voluntary sector is well placed to deliver much of what is in the strategy—not just classic victim support models of national or local funding, but new opportunities and new schemes in our employment and health services. I want to ensure that where those services are operated locally, voluntary sector agencies can be part of them.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
I back the Minister’s comments about the effectiveness of public health on BBC Radio 4 this morning. I agree about the importance of conducting a public health campaign for this. Women for Refugee Women has surveyed women in the asylum system with no recourse to public funds. It found that 38% of them had stayed in abusive relationships because of their inability to access public funds, and that 38% of those women then went on to be raped. Will the Minister tell us whether the Government will agree to implement fully the Istanbul convention, including article 59, to afford real protections to all women?
Jess Phillips
I thank the hon. Lady for giving me the opportunity to say that, throughout this process, many Members from across the House have been to see me about various issues and the importance of this matter in their areas. The strategy definitely tackles issues relating to migrant women. The Government fund specialist provision for women with no recourse to public funds so that they can escape, and we have increased that funding. The type of visa they have does not matter; they can access the funding. One inclusion in parts of the Istanbul convention relates to the firewall between police and support services. I am pleased to say that that is part of our strategy, and we will look to implement it as soon as possible.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Stepney) (Lab)
I commend my hon. Friend for her tireless work to tackle violence against women and girls. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Given my experience of being stalked for many years and securing a restraining order for 12 years, I know that, when they are breached, restraining orders can be very difficult to enforce, unless the police and Crown Prosecution Service work closely together. Many women up and down the country find that really challenging when their lives are at risk. What work will be done between the police, the CPS and other support services to ensure that restraining orders are enforced and that, when they are breached, action is taken to protect women and girls?
Jess Phillips
I thank my hon. Friend for her support in the development of the strategy. One thing that makes me most proud is the advancement in refuge funding. She played no small part in pushing for that and deserves every thanks in the world, not just because she is a brilliant Member of Parliament but because of her experience—one that too many of us in this House share.
Work must be done across the board to look at exactly how protection orders work. As my hon. Friend says, people can have action taken on their restraining orders—although I am about to go to court because somebody has breached one of mine. Domestic abuse protection orders and stalking protection orders are, in my view, considerably better tools and should be used more widely. The strategy is very clear on that.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
I welcome the strategy. The Minister will well know that children from homes in which domestic violence is prevalent are all too often conditioned to believe that that is the normal way for relationships to operate. Through changes to the national curriculum in particular, will she ensure that teachers encourage children to come forward with examples of what has happened at home and elsewhere in their families? In that way, we can deal with these matters where they start: in the home.
Jess Phillips
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Anyone who has spoken to victims of domestic abuse who have interacted with children’s social care would know that there was a need for a new strategy. The strategy includes half a billion pounds for the Family First pilot across the country, which seeks to do exactly what he speaks about by ensuring that domestic abuse is dealt with through early intervention. It is now a statutory duty for schools to be informed when children are at home during, or involved in, any domestic abuse incident. We will give schools the tools to know what to do in those circumstances.
Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)
I was surprised to hear the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), say that our culture understands consent, bodily autonomy, misogyny and violence against women and girls, given that every day women experience violations of their bodies. I just do not think that that is true of our culture at all.
I have an 11-year-old son. I worry about the violent and misogynistic material that boys and young men can be exposed to, and the potential for their radicalisation. Can the Minister assure me that prevention will start at a sufficiently young age for boys, and that every boy will have access to that preventive work?
Jess Phillips
The new curriculum is for children aged four to 16. It is compulsory in schools and should be done in an age-appropriate way. Through the new funding, we will create a series of interventions, so that, if there are worries that a kid is sharing images, or young people are disclosing abuses in their relationships, for example, schools can send people for interventions. I can absolutely assure my hon. Friend—mother of a son as she is—that that provision will be age-appropriate across the board.
Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)
I was a secondary school language teacher before I came to this place, and I had to deliver lessons on relationships. I have also raised two women and two men, so I was not exactly uncomfortable around young people, but I felt uncomfortable teaching those lessons, and it seems that I am not alone. About half of secondary school teachers do not feel comfortable delivering those lessons. I know that the strategy includes training for teachers, but, with busy school days and lots of other stuff going on, is it realistic to expect yet another bit of training to result in positive outcomes? Should we not have a professional in each school to deliver those lessons?
Jess Phillips
As somebody who was one of those professionals who went into schools, I could not agree more with the hon. Lady. I attended the same school as the Home Secretary, so when we were building the strategy, we kept talking about which of our teachers we would not have wanted to talk to about these issues, which was quite amusing. No offence to the teachers at our school in the ‘90s, but not many of them came out well when we were thinking about talking to them about consent, pornography or other things. What is being announced today is the use of specialists, but the point is that eventually teachers have to comfortable with talking about these matters. I think that my kids’ teachers are more comfortable than mine were, but there has to be development towards that.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
I want to say a huge thank you to the Safeguarding and Victims Ministers. I was struggling not to get over-emotional as my hon. Friend was making her statement, because many of us have come to this place to make a change for the women and girls in our lives and in our constituencies. This is a watershed moment and it is a chance for us to take individual actions, bringing together good men and good women across our constituencies to speak out and speak for the kind of society we want.
If the strategy is to be truly successful, it will have to increase the confidence of victims, in which case we may see the number of incidents that are reported rise; for me, that will be an indicator of the success of the strategy. One way to increase confidence is to ensure that no matter how high-profile someone is as a self-declared misogynist, they are held to account and brought back to this country to face criminal charges here. Does my hon. Friend agree that this Government should be doing all that they can to ensure that they pursue every single rapist, abuser, perpetrator, stalker, and that that will be the way to ensure that women and girls feel confident in our police and our court system?
Jess Phillips
I thank my hon. Friend for the diplomatic manner in which she is clearly representing high-profile cases in her constituency. I absolutely agree, and it goes to a number of points made by shadow Minister, too: “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how important you are. I don’t care if you ran a big department store. I don’t care if you are a movie mogul. I don’t care which country you come from. If you do this in our country, we will come for you.”
Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)
I welcome much of the strategy and I know that it is a personal achievement for the Minister. Anybody who has spoken to a woman who recounts being attacked by her husband or boyfriend and being unsure of whether she is going to leave the room alive, knows that this country still fails to tackle violence against women and to take it seriously. I want to ask about a couple of areas where we know that the state has had a blind spot in recent years. Will she say very clearly that the crimes of the rape gangs were racially and religiously aggravated, and should be punished as such? Does she agree that if there is any law that prevents us deporting any foreign sex criminal or rapist, including the Human Rights Act 1998, we should scrap it?
Jess Phillips
No doubt when the hon. Gentleman worked for Baroness May he was heavily involved in some of this work, so I should thank him for some of things he did in that time. I will not say anything from the Dispatch Box that will affect any case by saying that it is aggravated by one thing or another. I am very proud that for the first time this Government are making grooming an aggravated offence, but without seeing all the evidence, I cannot comment on individual cases. From my years of working with the victims of grooming gangs, I know that there is absolutely no doubt, as the Home Secretary has said, that women and girls were targeted for being white and working class—I have seen that with my own eyes. I will not scrap the European human rights law, but we do not need to do that in order to deport sex offenders. We should have been doing so for a lot longer.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
I pay tribute to the Minister for her statement, and I thank her and the Victims Minister for their hard work in a truly cross-Government effort to leave VAWG offenders with nowhere to hide. For far too long and far too often, justice for victims of domestic abuse has had to be sought by parents such as Sharon Holland and by groups such as Project Resist, because the system let their daughters down. Tragically, this strategy is too late for two young women from Portsmouth: Chloe Holland and Skye Nicholls were driven to take their own lives because of coercive control by vile partner perpetrators. Will the Minister explain how the new VAWG strategy will ensure that those deaths are recognised for what they are—manslaughter? How will it tackle systematic institutional failings and support our third sector to prevent future tragedies?
Jess Phillips
I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady and pay tribute to Sharon Holland, who I have met a number of times, who campaigns fiercely on behalf of her daughter, Chloe. Suicide is a fundamental part of the strategy with regard to how we end domestic-related deaths and femicide, to call it what it is. A number of different things appear in the strategy, such as how well our domestic abuse risk assessments look for mental ill health; often, assessments are looking for instances of homicide rather than suicide. On the issue of manslaughter, my hon. Friend the Victims Minister has empowered the Law Commission to undertake a review of that exact thing, and we await its findings.
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
I welcome the strategy, and I commend the Minister for her tireless work supporting victims and trying to reduce violence against women and girls. I welcome the cross-governmental approach and the focus on prevention and public health promotion.
We know that boys as young as nine or 10 are being spoon-fed hardcore violent pornography on social media, even when they are not looking for it. Access to that type of content leads to violent sexual acts being normalised and the way that they view relationships with women becoming warped. The head of a boys’ school that has completely banned mobile phones from its estate has spoken powerfully to me about the effect of being able to have conversations with boys before they start seeing that content online.
While schools are a part of the answer, asking teachers to combat the tidal wave of indoctrination, radicalisation and normalisation that these algorithms are causing is unrealistic: those misogynistic, violent attitudes must be stopped at source. As part of this work, what action will the Government take to ensure that social media companies comply with the Online Safety Act 2023, to make Ofcom guidance statutory, and to push her colleagues across Government to legislate to get smart phones and their misogynistic content out of our schools?
Jess Phillips
A nine-year-old looking at any pornography on any social media site or any site in the UK is illegal. If there are instances of that, they should be reported. We saw a case recently of a pornography site not having age verification. It was fined £1 million by Ofcom and asked to put age verification in place. Those sites will be blocked in the UK if that is not the case. Such measures are already in place, but I ask the hon. Lady to get her schools to report those particular issues, which we will raise with Ofcom. It is important to say that misogyny existed before the internet—tackling misogyny has had to be done for quite a long time. I absolutely agree that we need to support teachers because of what young people are seeing, both inside and outside schools, and the strategy deals with that.
Gurinder Singh Josan (Smethwick) (Lab)
I thank the Minister and all those in Government who worked so hard on this strategy. The shadow Minister, through her rhetoric, does her best to demonise whole communities, but the Minister is right to recognise that abuse occurs in all communities. However, she will be aware of the need to be sensitive to cultural differences experienced by women and girls from different communities. The Minister has already recognised the value of by-and-for organisations working to provide culturally sensitive support for women and girls, and I trust that that support for those organisations will continue, but one area where progress needs to be made is in relation to honour-based abuse. Will the Minister commit to support calls from Karma Nirvana and around 60 other organisations, including Sikh Women’s Aid, for a statuary definition of honour-based abuse, to recognise honour as an aggravating factor in criminal sentencing, and to require multi-agency guidance to identify honour-based abuse?
Jess Phillips
I am very happy to say that coming up with a statutory definition of honour-based abuse, and working on statutory guidance with the organisations that my hon. Friend has identified, are very much in the strategy. I am very proud to do that, because we absolutely need cultural sensitivity in the services we provide, and we need to listen to the voices of the women in those services. It is an honour to work with those organisations, and I will continue to do so.
Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) (Con)
I will address another aspect of this strategy: how it relates to male survivors of crimes considered to be violence against women and girls. My ten-minute rule Bill earlier in the year called for a dedicated strategy for tackling interpersonal abuse and violence against men and boys, so that male survivors of rape, sexual assault, domestic abuse, forced marriage and honour-based violence receive the justice and support that they deserve. I recently met the Minister, and I thank her for her time; the discussions were very positive. I have also spoken to the Victims Minister, the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), about how to shape the strategy to support male survivors. What provisions are there in this strategy to support male survivors? Will a dedicated strategy to help male survivors be published next year?
Jess Phillips
I really thank the hon. Gentleman for his approach to this issue, and for working collectively with us. Alongside the strategy, there is a statement specifically targeted at men and boys, and there are some specific support services and policies for male survivors, but anything in the strategy, any of the legislation, and any of the support services and the commissioning are for men and boys who are victims. As he and I said, we actually need a piece of work done, because we cannot just paste what women have always used on to men. At the men and boys summit that my hon. Friend the Victims Minister will hold early in the new year, which I am sure the hon. Gentleman can be part of, we will look at exactly what that is.
Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)
May I add my personal tribute to the Minister? This work is a huge achievement for her, but not just for her; she is doing it on behalf of all women and girls in this country. She said that all of us across the country have a role to play, as individuals or organisations. She will recall that in Stevenage we have an amazing charity called Survivors Against Domestic Abuse. One of the challenges it faces is that many victims keep going back again and again, because the justice system is not strong enough for them. I am sure that SADA will welcome domestic abuse protection orders. Will she explain to SADA and other organisations how this Government will help them to provide support to women and girls who need it?
Jess Phillips
I thank my hon. Friend. Organisations such as SADA are absolutely vital to how we roll out new perpetrator schemes, so that victims do not have to do the work, and instead, there is offender management of their perpetrators, and support for victims. Lots of new national schemes will be rolled out as part of this strategy over the next three years, and I very much welcome, and will work with, all organisations across the country to get those schemes right in local areas.
Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)
From the bottom of my heart, I sincerely congratulate the Minister and the Victims Minister on all the work with victims, survivors and the sector across the country that they have put into making this happen. I was proud to work with them both to help secure the domestic abuse identifier, which is in clause 6 of the Sentencing Bill. That will tell us how many domestic abusers there are in prison and in the country at any given time, and what their reoffending rate is. I am keen to understand when the Minister expects that information and data to go online. How does she expect to use that data to monitor the impact and progress of this VAWG strategy? What will the Government do to measure the impact of the identifier?
Jess Phillips
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. I always say this, but it was a genuine pleasure to work with him on this issue, and I thank him for his leadership in this space. We obviously have to wait for the Sentencing Bill to pass, but I expect that it will throw up huge amounts of data that will be incredibly helpful. It will take a bit of time to see exactly what data we want to collect and look at, but the process can start as soon as the Sentencing Bill passes. That is certainly our ambition.
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for her leadership and determination in bringing forward this ambitious strategy. I really welcome the focus on prevention, and particularly the focus on reducing online harm for young people—the Public Accounts Committee, of which I am a member, raised that issue in its report. Bradford Rape Crisis and Staying Put provide vital support to women and girls in my constituency who have been victims of violence against women and girls. I hugely welcome the £1 billion in the statement, if I heard right, that will be invested in victim support and safe refuge. Will the Minister explain how those funds will help victims of domestic abuse in my constituency to get support and a safe place to call home?
Jess Phillips
With regard to my hon. Friend’s Rape Crisis service, there will be a specific amount of uplift to the ringfenced budget for Rape Crisis services in the country. I think Rape Crisis England and Wales asked for a 15% uplift. Funnily enough, that will be from health service funding. That is the cultural change I am talking about—people making this their business. We expect to see those uplifts, so Rape Crisis services will hopefully benefit from that.
On domestic abuse, compared with the £130 million a year under the previous Government for refuge, housing and other support, there will be £109 million extra over the three years. I hope that her organisations will be able to access that through the commissioning process, which we will redesign, so that it works better, and works over a longer period, rather than our doing this every year.
Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)
A recent Ofsted inspection of children’s services in Devon found that they
“share a determination to improve services to care leavers”.
How will the new strategy to end violence against women and girls pay particular attention to preventing harms to care leavers and care-experienced people? How will it build on the improving practice that we see in local authorities, such as in Devon?
Jess Phillips
That is absolutely a vital part of this puzzle. I have worked with the Children’s Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), in the Department for Education on the “family first” part of the strategy—the bit about children’s social care and care leavers. People often talk about grooming gangs, but we cannot talk about grooming gangs without talking about care-experienced children, and the interaction between the two. That is a vital part of getting this right. The Government also have a children in care plan that they will work towards, and I sit on the board for that.
Chris Webb (Blackpool South) (Lab)
From my time as a deputy police and crime commissioner, I know that there has been a growing pattern of violence relating to younger people, especially young boys, in Blackpool and beyond. Will the Minister set out plans to engage with young people, particularly young boys and men, to tackle that?
Jess Phillips
We have not done anywhere near enough to engage with young men and boys about their feelings on this issue, and to devise a system that is best for them. Other than saying, “six-seven”, what do I know about what it is like to be a teenage boy? Not even my children are teenagers any more. We will test a number of models, and that will have to be done in concert with young people.
Tracy Gilbert (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab)
May I welcome the strategy, and thank my hon. Friend and the ministerial team for their tireless work in tackling violence against women and girls? To meet the Government’s target of cutting violence in half, we must end the demand for commercial sexual exploitation, whether it be in pornography or prostitution. What steps will be taken, across Government Departments, through the strategy to eradicate that demand?
Jess Phillips
My hon. Friend will be pleased with the Government action that the strategy proposes with regard to some of the commercial sexual exploitation that occurs within pornography—she rightly points that out—based on Baroness Bertin’s review. Much more broadly, we must properly integrate adult sexual exploitation —including the terrible commercial sexual exploitation—into what we consider to be violence against women and girls, and have robust measures to deal with that. That is a fundamental part of changing this.
Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)
I welcome the strategy that the Minister has set out, and commend her and everyone around her for their tireless, often lifelong, work that has got us to this point. When I speak with the charitable sector and with third-sector organisations, such as Leeds Women’s Aid in my constituency, which has worked in this space for years, they keep telling me that the funding period for grants is often far too short, and grants come up for review far too frequently. They tell me that when the cost of applying for those grants and the time that staff spend applying are factored in, long-term strategic decision making in their organisations becomes really difficult. Can the Minister assure them that the strategy will address this common challenge?
Jess Phillips
As an alumni of Women’s Aid, I can absolutely do so. One of the strongest messages that came from the sector, especially the domestic abuse sector, is how crackers it is that these organisations have to apply for their funding every year. Obviously, we cannot commit funding for longer than comprehensive spending review periods, but we are committing to long-term funding going out of our door and into those organisations’ doors, under a set of standards and commissioning models that we in the Government will work to, because there are also quite a lot of complaints about localised commissioning. That is a fundamental way of allowing those organisations to grow, and to breathe again.