Asked by: Ashley Fox (Conservative - Bridgwater)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether she has made an assessment of the potential impact of the Spending Review 2025 on the safeguarding of victims of (a) sexual and (b) domestic abuse.
Answered by Alex Davies-Jones - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The Government recognises the scale of violence against women and girls and is treating it as a national emergency. A new cross-government strategy to tackle this will be published this summer.
Action has already been taken by piloting Domestic Abuse Protection Orders; introducing new offences for sexually explicit deepfakes, intimate image abuse and spiking and providing free transcripts of sentencing remarks to victims of sexual offences in the Crown Court.
We will also establish specialist rape and sexual offences teams in every police force and introduce free independent legal advice for victims of adult rape.