Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much funding has been provided by his Department for (a) domestic violence prevention programmes and (b) services for victims of domestic violence in (i) St Helens and (ii) Liverpool City Region.

The Government published a Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy on 8 March 2016 setting out an ambitious programme to make tackling VAWG everybody’s business, ensure victims and survivors get the support they need and inspire confidence in the Criminal Justice System to bring more perpetrators to justice as well as doing more to rehabilitate offenders.

Over this spending review period, we are providing £100m of dedicated funding to tackle VAWG. VAWG services are mainly commissioned at a local level by PCCs, local authorities and health commissioners. The Government’s VAWG National Statement of Expectations encourages service provision decisions to be taken, by commissioners, at a local level and driven by local need.

We have allocated £17 million of funding to establish the 3-year VAWG Service Transformation Fund, which is supporting projects across 41 areas in England and Wales to support, promote and embed the best local practice and drive major change across all services so that early intervention and prevention, not crisis response, is the norm.

Liverpool City Council is being supported by the VAWG Transformation Fund to deliver the ‘Liverpool Early Help for Victims of VAWG’ project. We have awarded over £400,000 to support the Council to deliver a complex needs perpetrator programme, ‘Inner Strength’, and create Early Help Hubs to improve the multi-agency response to victims of domestic abuse.

The Home Office also supports the national VAWG Helplines and recently committed funding of up to £1.1m per annum for these services until 2021. The Helplines provide essential advice and support to victims of violence and abuse; advice to friends and family who are worried about someone; guidance to those wishing to stop perpetrating abuse; as well as assisting professionals seeking specialist support for victims.