King’s Speech

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome both my noble friends to the Front Bench. As a former Prisons Minister myself, I am in awe of my noble friend Lord Timpson’s pioneering work on the rehabilitation of offenders and congratulate him on his maiden speech. My noble friend Lord Hanson is a former ministerial colleague of mine. It is an enormous pleasure to see them both here today and I look forward very much to working with them.

Until recently, I served as Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester, responsible for policing and criminal justice. I welcome all the police and justice measures in this King’s Speech. They will enable local areas such as mine to rebuild neighbourhood policing, tackle violence and anti-social behaviour—child criminal exploitation, for example—support victims and raise policing standards. However, I will focus today on violence against women and girls, an enduring global epidemic that affects women and girls of all ages, races and cultures in many different contexts, perpetrated mainly by men, who may be intimate partners, family members, colleagues, strangers or, as we have seen now, police officers charged with keeping us safe. It also damages those who witness that abuse, particularly children and young people. It includes a wide spectrum of behaviours, from street harassment, domestic violence, coercion and control, rape, sexual assault, child sexual exploitation, femicide, online abuse and more.

The common thread linking all these diverse behaviours is a culture of entitlement and misogyny among many men, who feel they can do whatever they wish to women with impunity. The need for urgent, robust action was laid bare this week, as we have heard, in the national policing statement on violence against women and girls. It painted a stark, horrific scenario: a national emergency, it said.

The report estimated that at least 2 million women every year, one in 12, will be a victim of violence. In 2022-23, about 3,000 crimes were recorded every single day—almost 20% of all recorded crimes except fraud. This is a staggering increase of 37% over the five years to 2023, and this is only recorded crimes. Many incidents go unreported because of the crisis in confidence in the police, courts and CPS, and the awareness now of police-perpetrated abuse. This is a national scandal that shames us all. The report also highlighted some worrying new trends. Perpetrators are getting younger, drawn in by toxic influencers on social media and powerful men on the world stage promoting misogyny and discrimination against women.

In Greater Manchester, we launched our 10-year gender-based violence strategy in 2021 and our experiences highlighted some valuable lessons, which I hope I can share as the Government develop their approach. The previous Government did take some steps towards tackling violence against women and girls, but these were fragmented, too weak and frankly lacked political drive. So I welcome this Government’s commitment to halve, at least, the incidence of violence against women and girls in the next decade, but our ambition must surely go further and faster when we know the risks that exist for our daughters and granddaughters, and indeed all women. I hope the Government will soon set out how they intend to achieve this aim.

From my experience, I believe it requires a high-profile, cross-government, whole-system approach, led at Cabinet level and replicated in every locality by a strong inter-agency partnership. It must address the abject failings in policing and criminal justice, but go way beyond that to include health and social care, housing, education, better support for victims and children and better management of perpetrators. It must involve survivors and draw on their lived experience and the expertise of specialist organisations, such as the excellent charity SafeLives. This is especially important for women from minority ethnic backgrounds, as we have heard already from the noble Baroness on the Cross Benches. It must also include men and enable them to voice their support for women and condemn male violence. Most importantly, it must be underpinned by a robust, sustained campaign, not only in schools and colleges but in the wider public arena, to challenge the underlying culture of entitlement and misogyny that is actually the root of violence against women and girls in all its forms.