Women’s Safety in Rural Areas

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Anna Sabine]

Certainly. That sounds excellent and I will come to lots of nerdy points about design guidance in due course.

My constituency of Frome and East Somerset is, by any measure, a beautiful part of England. It is also a place where the challenges I am describing are felt with particular intensity. Inspired by Holly, last autumn I launched a survey to hear directly from women in my constituency about how safe they feel. Their responses were sobering. Women wrote about being followed on dark country lanes that had no street lighting; about waiting for buses on isolated roads with no shelter, no CCTV and no way of summoning help; about giving up running and cycling all together, not because they lacked the inclination but because they simply did not feel safe doing so; and about the constant, exhausting vigilance required just to get home.

Coincidentally, earlier this year I was contacted separately by a brilliant urban designer called Natasha, who drew my attention to the fact that the Government have set out an excellent strategy to combat violence against women and girls, and a national planning policy framework, but at the moment the two things make no reference to each other, which is a shocking oversight.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for securing the debate. In rural constituencies such as mine and the hon. Lady’s, large stretches of unlit roads, pathways and open land, often bordered by dark fields, can create a real sense of vulnerability. Does the hon. Lady agree that future developments or planning proposals in such areas must take into account safe, well-lit corridors, especially when it comes to transport links, to ensure that women feel safe commuting to where they need to be in areas that are historically dark and isolated?

[Anna Sabine]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Member. I will talk about lighting in due course.

In her book “Invisible Women”, Caroline Criado-Perez documents how the built environment has historically been designed around a default that is male, and how data on street use, transport planning and public space has been gathered without disaggregating by sex. The result is infrastructure that works reasonably well for men and imposes a hidden cost of time, money, anxiety and constrained freedom on women. That cost is not inevitable. It is a design choice, and it can be designed out.

Women are four times more likely to experience sexual assault than men, and more than twice as likely to experience stalking. Many such offences happen not in the home but in public spaces—on paths, at bus stops, in car parks and on the routes between places. They happen disproportionately in spaces that are poorly lit, poorly overlooked and poorly served by transport.

The consequences extend far beyond the incidents themselves. Girls’ loss of freedom in public space is directly and measurably linked to poor mental health. Women who feel unsafe curtail their physical activity, social lives and working patterns. Violence against women and girls costs hundreds of lives a year, alongside widespread and serious harm that ripples outwards into health services, the economy and the fabric of communities.

To circle back to my opening point, we know what works, but the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government seems determined not to implement it. On 16 December 2025, the Government published the revised national planning policy framework, and just two days later they published their violence against women and girls strategy, rightly declaring VAWG a national emergency and committing to a whole-of-society approach to prevention. Those two documents should have been in conversation with each other, but they were not.

The revised NPPF contains no reference whatsoever to women, girls, gendered safety or violence against women in the built environment—not one. Chapter 8, on promoting healthy and safe communities, discusses safety, health and crime, but does so in entirely gender-blind terms, despite overwhelming evidence that safety is not experienced equally by all people in all spaces. A chapter about healthy and safe communities which does not acknowledge that safety is not experienced equally is not, with respect, a chapter about healthy and safe communities. It is a chapter about healthy and safe communities for some people.

In January I wrote to both the Minister for Housing and Planning and the Minister for Safeguarding to raise the issue directly. I have yet to receive a substantive response from either of them, but when The Guardian asked MHCLG for comment, the response received was frankly jaw-dropping. MHCLG said:

“The NPPF is a planning document. It sets out guidelines for housebuilding and planning in England. The VAWG strategy is about protecting women and girls from violence and misogyny.”

The Department said it was

“unclear as to why anyone would expect the two things to be combined”.

That tells us that, alarmingly, the people responsible for designing our spaces and places apparently do not understand, despite huge bodies of evidence, why planning with women in mind might be relevant or useful. That raises serious concerns not just about the policy position but about the Department’s basic understanding of the relationship between planning and women’s lives.

What makes that omission particularly hard to defend is that it was not an accident. The previous Government explicitly raised this issue in the 2022 NPPF consultation, asking whether greater emphasis should be placed on making women and girls feel safe in public places. Responses were received, but nothing changed in the December 2025 revision, under the current Government. I want to be precise about that means: MHCLG was asked whether it should do better on this issue, received evidence it should and chose not to act. That is not an oversight; it is a decision.

International best practice in gender-responsive planning is really well established: clear sight lines and natural surveillance; active street frontages that keep eyes on the street; thoughtful lighting design—not simply more but better lights, placed in the right locations; and safe, well-connected public transport routes that do not leave women stranded after dark.

Make Space for Girls, the UK campaign that has done forensic and compelling work on how public space is designed for teenagers, has shown that the spaces we build for young people—the parks, play areas and recreational spaces—are overwhelmingly designed with boys in mind. The default is a multi-use games area: a hard, caged, male-dominated space that girls report, in study after study, feeling excluded from and unsafe in. Girls do not lack interest in outdoor space; they lack outdoor spaces that were designed with them in mind. The consequence is that girls retreat indoors earlier, exercise less and lose the freedom of movement that is so fundamental to adolescent development and mental health. This is not a minor amenity issue; it is a public health issue—and it starts with planning.

The principles are well established, but without explicit inclusion in national policy, they remain optional. As a result, women’s safety in public space is a postcode lottery—and nowhere is that lottery more consequential than in rural areas where the baseline is already so much lower.

The omission also creates a tension with the Government’s international commitments. UK infrastructure policy is explicitly aligned with the UN’s sustainable development goals, including SDG 5.2, on eliminating violence against women and girls, and SDG 11.7, on safe and inclusive public spaces explicitly for women and girls. The NPPF discusses the safety and design quality of green space at length, but does not mention either of those commitments.

A further tension is emerging that I do not think has received sufficient attention—the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) alluded to it. Nature recovery and biodiversity policies are rightly being pursued with increasing ambition, with green corridors, rewilded verges and, in some cases, reduced lighting to support wildlife. Those are good objectives, but in some instances they are pursued without adequate consideration of what they mean for women’s safety. A dark, overgrown footpath may be an excellent habitat, but it may also be a route that women no longer feel able to use. We should not have to choose between environmental policy and women’s safety. Without gender-responsive planning guidance, that tension will not be managed; it will simply produce worse outcomes by default. The NPPF is not a neutral document; it is a statement of priorities, and right now it does not include women’s safety among them.