Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much funding his Department has allocated to programmes aimed at tackling domestic violence in the last 12 months.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
The Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy set out an ambitious programme to make tackling VAWG everybody’s business.
Over this spending review period, we are providing £100 million of dedicated funding to tackle VAWG. VAWG services are mainly commissioned at a local level by Police and Crime Commissioners, local authorities and health commissioners. The Government’s VAWG National Statement of Expectations encourages such decisions to be taken at a local level and driven by local need.
We created a £17 million 3-year VAWG Service Transformation Fund, which is funding projects across 41 areas in England and Wales to embed local best practice and ensure that early intervention and prevention, not crisis response, is the norm. Details of the funding are available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/violence-against-women-and-girls-service-transformation-fund-successful-bids-2017-to-2020
Through the Police Transformation Fund we are spending £5.8 million to support innovative projects to tackle domestic abuse. More details of the funding are available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-transformation-fund-successful-bids-2017-to-2018
We have also announced an £8 million fund to support children affected by domestic abuse, which gives charities, local authorities and other organisations the chance to bid for money for projects designed to intervene early to help children who have been directly or indirectly affected by domestic abuse. We will announce successful bids shortly.
The Home Office also supports the national VAWG Helplines and recently committed funding of up to £1.1m per annum for these services until 2021.
Asked by: Ben Bradley (Conservative - Mansfield)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent representations he has received on the current classification level of synthetic cannabinoids.
Answered by Nick Hurd
We receive a range of representations on the current classification level of synthetic cannabinoids and we recognise how dangerous synthetic cannabinoids can be and the devastating impact that they can have on communities, families and the individuals taking them.
That is why we acted to control these substances as class B drugs under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in 2016, to give the police the powers they need to take action, including making possession illegal and delivering longer sentences for dealers.
This followed recommendations from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that their harms are commensurate with other class B drugs.
However, we will continue to monitor their impact.