Violence against Women and Girls Strategy

Marie Goldman Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

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

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)]

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

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

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

[Marie Goldman]

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

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

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

[Jess Phillips]

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

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