Hate Crime Law: Misogyny

Debate between Luke Myer and Marie Goldman

Monday 7th September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Luke Myer]

I absolutely agree, and I thank the hon. Member for making that point.

That takes me to the next point I wanted to raise, from the second specialist organisation that I spoke to today. ARCH Teesside does vital work supporting victims and survivors of sexual violence and preventing harm before situations escalate; it puts wraparound support around an individual. It raised with me today a practical concern about what will happen to prevention funding, particularly when police and crime commissioners are abolished from 2028. They are often a main source of funding for local specialist violence against women and girls organisations. ARCH Teesside is concerned that the need for services will not change when the structures change, and it does not have certainty about the funding currently held by PCCs.

Organisations such as ARCH need to be able to plan ahead, retain specialist staff and know what funding framework they will be working with. I will be grateful if the Minister can give some reassurance that specialist local services will not lose dedicated prevention funding as responsibilities move away from PCCs, and tell us a little about the clarity that organisations will receive about the future framework into which they will need to bid.

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point about certainty of funding. Some of the organisations that I have spoken to in my Chelmsford constituency that deal with victims of domestic abuse point out to me that often the funding is project-based. It is not about what they have tried before, have proven to work and want to continue with; they find that people say, “Oh, yes, but we’re starting this new project now, so we’re only accepting bids for new projects and things that haven’t been done before,” and all the great work that has been done before is forgotten. Does he agree that we are always going to be chasing our tails in that way, and nobody will be well served by it, and that we need certainty of funding for things that are proven to work as well as for trialling new stuff?

[Luke Myer]

I agree. This is slightly tangential to this debate—I apologise—but when I was in local government, we set up a specialist team to work with families and young people at risk of exploitation, and we gave them that sort of long-term focus and freedom to approach things in a range of different ways, rather than giving them time-limited funding, say for three months. Chopping and changing can be very disruptive for families, and it is exactly the same here.

The petitioners are right to ask Parliament to take misogyny more seriously. The Government have taken some important steps, which I welcome, but I hope they will now build on that work, look carefully at the remaining gaps in the law and, above all, make sure that the ambition of halving violence against women and girls is matched by what women experience in communities such as mine.