Last week (31st January 2025) the National Audit Office (NAO), the UK’s independent public spending watchdog, released their ‘Tackling violence against women and girls’ report.
The report found that the Government’s efforts to address violence against women and girls has not yet improved outcomes for victims and survivors, or women and girls more widely.
The report examines the Home Office’s leadership of the previous Government’s 2021 ‘Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls’ (VAWG) strategy, finding that it made little progress in developing measures to prevent VAWG despite that being a key tenet of its commitments in the strategy.
Some of the key findings in the report include:
- Violence against women and girls is a serious and growing problem.
The report found that violence against women and girls is growing, affecting one in 12 women and causing significant harm. - The Home Office underspent its own budget allocated to the VAWG Strategy.
The report states that between 2021-22 and 2023-24 there was an average underspend of 15%. - The Home Office and wider government have a poor understanding of what works to prevent and tackle VAWG.
- The Home Office has not made the most of the available expertise and knowledge to inform the VAWG Strategy.
Although the Home Office has consulted with third sector stakeholders, the report stated that it is not obvious how this consultation informed the strategy. - There is a lack of meaningful focus on prevention.
The VAWG plan aimed to increase confidence in the police and levels of reporting, but there was a lack of focus on the work needed to prevent and tackle violence against women and girls.
Recommendations
The current Government has set an ambition of halving violence against women and girls in a decade. The Home Office is leading this mission and developing a new VAWG strategy which is due in Spring 2025.
The report sets out several recommendations for how the current Government can meet this ambition, stating that the Home Office should:
- Establish a shared vision for how the government’s target to halve violence and women and girls will be met.
- Strengthen accountability for delivering against the government’s target.
- Embed learning and evaluation through the new strategy.
Amelia Handy, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Rape Crisis England & Wales says:
The NAO report provides a vital opportunity for this Government to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, and to ensure any future strategy is underpinned by expert advice, specialist stakeholder engagement, and buy in from all Government departments.
The promises from the current Government into responding and tackling violence against women and girls is encouraging. Yet we need much more meaningful and robust stakeholder engagement from officials and ministers to ensure that the upcoming strategy prioritises sexual violence and abuse survivors.
Key to all of this is the need for sustainable funding for specialist services that support victims and survivors. That the Home Office underspent against its annual budget for tackling VAWG, while Rape Crisis centres are fighting to stay open in the face of increasing demand is nothing short of scandalous. This must be rectified with commitments to long-term and ring-fenced funding.