Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to (a) monitor and (b) evaluate the impact of the Forced Marriage Unit’s outreach programme in (i) raising awareness of forced marriage and (ii) delivering training to statutory agencies and voluntary and community organisations.

The Government is committed to tackling forced marriage in all its forms. The Forced Marriage Unit (FMU), a joint Home Office and Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office unit, leads on the Government’s forced marriage policy, outreach and casework. It operates both inside the UK (where support is provided to any individual) and overseas (where consular assistance is provided to British nationals, including dual nationals).

One of the FMU’s core activities is to undertake an extensive training and awareness programme targeted at statutory agencies and voluntary and community organisations. This approach aims to ensure that people working with victims are fully informed about how to approach cases of forced marriage. The unit runs monthly workshops, alternately for police officers and social workers, and the FMU also delivers bespoke presentations to individual organisations and fora on request. Through these activities, the FMU reached 1,014 professionals in 2021. The unit has also developed a free online forced marriage e-learning course for relevant professionals, which aims to enable them to recognise the warning signs of forced marriage and ensure that appropriate action is taken to help protect and support all those at risk.

The FMU solicits feedback from the attendees of its workshops, to help to ensure that it is having the greatest possible impact; as an example, feedback from the last workshop held in September 2022 for social care staff showed that:

- 76% of those who responded found the workshop extremely useful and 24% found it very useful.

- 87% of the respondents also stated that they were extremely likely to recommend the workshop to a colleague and 10% said that they were very likely to do so.