Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of including specific measures to improve the safety of women runners in the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy.

This Government has been clear that the level of violence against women and girls (VAWG) in our country is intolerable, and we are treating it as the national emergency that it is.

Everyone should both be and feel safe whilst going about their day-to-day lives – and we recognise the particular vulnerability that women runners may feel. We are working across Government to use every tool available to target perpetrators and address the root causes of abuse and violence to keep all women safe.

We will go further than before to deliver a transformative approach to halve VAWG in a decade, underpinned by a new VAWG strategy, which we aim to publish shortly. This will be underpinned by an analytical sprint and Theory of Change to ensure that our approach is informed by the best available evidence.