Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she plans to take to ensure that a multi-agency approach is taken to address gender-based violence; and if she will make a statement.

The Coalition Government has made the tackling of violence against women and girls a high priority. Our approach is set out in our strategy, ‘Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls’ published in November 2010, together with a
supporting Action Plan. A revised version of the Action Plan was published in March 2014 and contains 150 actions across Government departments.

The Home Secretary chairs the Inter-Ministerial Group on violence against women and girls which meets quarterly and oversees the co-ordination of cross-departmental activity to tackle violence against women and girls.

For the first time, this Government has put stable funding in place, ring-fencing nearly £40 million for specialist local domestic and sexual violence support services, rape crisis centres, and national helplines. Local domestic and sexual abuse co-ordinators provide an important local strategic lead on this issue, linking statutory and voluntary partner agencies and promoting and improving multi-agency approaches to tackling sexual and domestic violence.

In July, we published a report to share findings from the Home Office funded project to better understand the multi-agency information sharing models that are in place. These models, the most common of which is referred to as a
Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH), aim to improve the safeguarding response for children and vulnerable adults through better information sharing and high quality and timely safeguarding responses.