An “epidemic of violence against women and girls” in the UK is getting worse despite years of government promises and strategies, a highly critical report from Whitehall’s spending watchdog has said.
The National Audit Office report comes four years after a major government response to violence against women and girls (VAWG) was launched after the murders of Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard.
The watchdog found “disjointed” efforts meant VAWG was a “significant and growing problem” affecting one in 12 women in England and Wales and causing physical, mental, social and financial harm to survivors.
A review of the previous government’s 2021 strategy to tackle VAWG found it had not helped victims or delivered long-term societal change. The review said the departments tasked with making progress lacked a clear picture of how money was being spent and what policies actually worked.
“Government’s disjointed approach to tackling the epidemic of violence against women and girls has so far failed to improve outcomes for victims,” said Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee. “It is disappointing that the Home Office does not know where money is being spent and whether it is making a difference.”
The report will put pressure on Keir Starmer’s government to urgently address concerns amid ballooning reports of violence against women and girls, which accounted for 20% of all police-recorded crime in 2022-23.
Starmer’s government has promised to halve VAWG in a decade, which campaigners said was laudable but impossible without the commitment of every government department, and without combating deep-rooted sexism and misogyny in the UK.
The prevalence of sexual assaults (the proportion of the population to have suffered an assault each year) increased from 3.4% of the population each year to 4.3% in 2023-24, while the prevalence of domestic abuse against women dropped from 9.2% to 7.4%, the report said. Police reports of rape and sexual assault increased from 34,000 to 123,000 over the same period, in part because of improved recording.
The report said that the Home Office – the main department charged with tackling VAWG – “is not currently leading an effective cross-government response”, stating: “To meet [the government’s] ambition the Home Office will need to lead a coordinated, whole-system response that addresses the causes of VAWG.”
The Labour government has told campaigners it is conducting “an analytical sprint” of VAWG policy behind the scenes, with a new strategy expected in the late spring. A Home Office spokesperson said the report exposed the previous government’s failure, and pointed to new protection orders for women experiencing domestic abuse, a review of how police deal with stalking and the embedding of domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms. The spokesperson said it was “pioneering a truly cross-government approach”.
In 2021, the then home secretary, Priti Patel, also promised to “deliver real and lasting change”, but the report said the government had “not been on track since the beginning of the VAWG strategy”. Despite having a dedicated team under the Conservatives, the National Audit Office said the department had “found it challenging to get buy-in from other government departments”. An oversight group first met a year after the launch, and a ministerial group set up to track progress met only three times in four years.
Previously, the Conservative government said it had made “significant progress” in tackling rape after a comprehensive 2021 review of the criminal justice system’s approach to it, and the introduction of the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act.
However, criticising the lack of overall progress, the report found:
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The Home Office did not have “centrally coordinated funding” for VAWG, unlike that for the 2021 illegal drugs strategy, and had underspent on its own VAWG budget by an average of 15% between 2021-22 and 2023-24.
There was no consistent definition for VAWG – the Home Office includes all victims, while police forces only include women and girls – which “made it difficult to measure progress in a consistent way”.
While 78% of the commitments in the strategy had been met by July 2024, several were not new, and “most” related to additional funding, holding meetings and publication of new guidance.
Most prevention activities introduced in recent years focused on reducing reoffending rather than avoiding initial offences, the report found.
“This confirms our concern that meaningful and dedicated primary prevention work has been sidelined,” said Andrea Simon, the director of the End Violence Against Women coalition. “The lack of attention to prevention is deplorable, especially as we know VAWG is significantly under-reported.” She added: “It is imperative that any new VAWG strategy comes with spending commitments that match the scale and seriousness of an epidemic of offending.”
Plans to increase confidence in police had been undermined by the “capacity that exists to manage increased demand”, those working in the sector told the report. Giving an example of how women are let down by the criminal justice system, the report noted that in rape cases in England and Wales, there was an average of 158 days between a police referral and a charge from the Crown Prosecution Service – for all crimes the average is 46 days.
Isabelle Younane of Women’s Aid urged the government to invest in reliable data and work with services supporting victims. “Our concern is that it was a difficult autumn budget for violence against women and girls, the sector is really struggling in terms of funding in this space,” she said, adding that the final Home Office allocation for funding to tackle VAWG had not yet been announced. “The commitment to halve VAWG is really welcome, but we can only be confident that we’re going to see a long-term change in this area if it delivers a shift in cultural attitudes.”