Violence against Women and Girls: London

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. I thank the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) for securing this important debate and sharing her tragic experiences for the benefit of others. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) on launching the APPG for the survivors of Fayed in Harrods, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain)—a huge scandal that affects women across the country.

There has been lots of talk in recent years, and indeed in the Chamber today, about changing social attitudes—educating men to stamp out violence against women and girls at its root. We have all heard the terrifying statistics that seven out of 10 women have experienced some form of sexual harassment in public. Each London borough faces more than 2,000 domestic abuse offences and 4,000 incidents annually. Even in the context of known under-reporting, the Metropolitan police recorded an average of 24 reports of domestic violence per day in 2023. It is important that we also bring into sharper focus the crucial fact that we have a role—not just as legislators gathered here today, but in the wider public sector and its various arms of governance and jurisprudence—and a responsibility to lead from the front. I echo the call by the hon. Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) for us to become the first White Ribbon Parliament, which would make a small step in that direction.

Although it is true that, far too often, changes in this place happen because of a changing world beyond our gates, it is also true that, in many ways, society looks to the state to take the moral lead on the fundamental issues of equality and justice. When the state is failing in its duty to take that moral leadership, we do not just compound the problems; we actively undermine efforts happening across society to tackle them. Sadly, in the case of violence against women and girls, I fear that that is exactly what we are at risk of doing, if we do not redouble our efforts to stamp it out.

Perhaps nowhere is that more pressing and concerning a matter than with the Metropolitan police. It can no longer be denied or ignored that there are elements in the force who hold views entirely incompatible with the state taking this issue seriously. Although commendable work has been done by Commissioner Rowley, who I have met and I trust is treating the historic mission with the gravity required of it, recent events have underlined that this is still a serious, systemic problem. The recent revelations broadcast by the BBC’s excellent and sobering “Panorama” investigation about officers based at Charing Cross station, leading to the dismissal of four officers, was shocking and profoundly depressing. To reference just one particularly demonstrative example of the unacceptable behaviour that was uncovered, Police Sergeant Joe McIlvenny, an officer with nearly 20 years’ service in the Met, was dismissive about a pregnant woman’s allegation of rape and domestic violence after a colleague raised concerns about the decision to release the accused man on bail. He replied, “That’s what she says.”

The station had been the focus of an investigation by the police watchdog—the Independent Office for Police Conduct—into bullying and discrimination nearly four years ago. It found that some officers had discussed hitting their girlfriends, shared offensive and discriminatory comments, and joked about rape in a private group chat, and yet nothing changed. Those are not isolated incidents, nor am I latching on to the most recent example for ease. We know there is a systemic problem in the Met: the Casey review in 2023 told us that one in three female officers had experienced sexism at work, and that around one in ten had experienced sexual harassment or assault. Four years on from the death of Sarah Everard, we are left asking whether work is really happening at the pace required to root out those men from the force.

Fundamentally, this is about trust. We would always encourage any woman fleeing violence, or looking to report an assault or harassment, to find a police officer and seek their protection. That is a fundamental tenet of a free and fair society. However, like many men across London, I simply cannot provide them the total guarantee that doing so will mean they are met with the support of someone who understands and respects the problem they are facing or, more importantly, who understands and respects women themselves and all the manifold challenges they face. That is an awful place for society to be.

The uniform of the Met should be a symbol of trust, not a shield for misogyny, hatred and racism, but too many officers have broken that trust. Policing is done by consent, and trust in the police is essential for the safety of Londoners. Incidents such as the ones I have mentioned undermine that trust.

The Home Secretary has a responsibility to intervene and work with the Met to tackle this behaviour, owing to their unique role in its governance. I invite the Minister to tell us in more detail what the Government are doing not only to tackle the misogyny that spurs violence against women and girls across society but, crucially, to address it closer to home—in the arms of the state directly under the purview of the Home Office.

It is not just in policing that these issues rear their ugly heads, but across other arms of the state too. The Crown Prosecution Service, perhaps most notably, is failing victims of violence against women and girls so frequently that it undermines the confidence of women everywhere that they can ever truly seek justice. I know this quite vividly. When I met Claire Waxman in her role as Victims’ Commissioner for London, I heard about women left waiting for months, even years, with their lives on hold while cases crawl through the CPS. I have also listened to the stories of many of my constituents who have had to retreat from seeking justice, despite the awful things that have happened to them.

One constituent was kept waiting for two years while her abuser was released on bail, only to be told that, even though what had happened to her constituted common assault, a charge of actual bodily harm could not be pursued due to the time that had elapsed since the incident. That is despite the fact that several lawyers, during that period—while she was waiting powerlessly for the CPS to move forward—agreed that the incident met the threshold for ABH.

Colleagues, I sincerely invite you to consider the scale of that Orwellian, Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare: the powerlessness, anxiety and exhaustion it wrought on my constituent, and the distance we have allowed ourselves to travel as a society from the promise of justice for all by allowing the CPS to become so gridlocked. It is so backed up and broken that it is telling female victims of crime that they cannot seek justice through the state system because of the system’s own failings.

In case anyone doubts that those failings are not serious or speak to a lack of evidence, let me tell the House about another constituent of mine who was assaulted in broad daylight on public transport during rush hour, in full view of CCTV cameras, and who is still waiting now, two years later, for the CPS to move forward with charges. The situation beggars belief. It is utterly unacceptable.

I ask the Minister to outline in significant detail—and I strongly underline the word significant—what exactly the Government will do to sort this mess out. To return to the point on which I began these remarks, just as the state often looks to society for guidance on social change and progress, so too—and perhaps more powerfully, or at least more meaningfully for those of us in this place with our hands on the levers—does society look to the state for an exemplification of the kind of society we want to live in. We have a moral obligation to lead from the front.

The state will never be the active, positive player in the field that it ought to be—an ally to all those who seek to root out the misogyny that plagues us and sprouts the poison of violence against women and girls—until it is absolutely committed, acting seriously and with pace, to getting its own house in order.

The vaccine against the epidemic of violence and abuse that women face in our society will be administered in our schools, our youth centres and the hubs that remain, in our homes and community groups, in the mass media, but critically, too, on social media. It will also need to be inculcated in our police stations, court rooms, hospitals and many arms of the modern state—and, indeed, here in this Palace, which sits at the heart of the state. Only then will we see the revolution in safety that is needed for women and girls in London, and put an end to the horrifying statistics and stories that we have heard today.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Jess Phillips)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer.

First, as everybody else has done, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) who, at some personal cost to herself, always speaks up on these issues, and does so with clarity, brilliance and bravery. She always approaches the issues with solutions in mind. People across the political divide want to see solutions and to work with the Government, and that is what we should seek to do. I will go through every one of the issues raised by my hon. Friend, and then cover as many of the others as I can. I cannot promise to be completely detailed, but I can follow up with a level of detail.

I suppose I should start with the criticism that has come to me around the delay to the violence against women and girls strategy. Last week, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam) asked me in the main Chamber about the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) writing to me to ask when the strategy will be published. My answer is simple: it will be out imminently. About now, I am satisfied that the strategy is as good as it could possibly be. That has taken lots of detailed work across every Government Department. It is not just tokenistically saying, “Enough is enough.”

But I did not need to wait for a piece of paper or something to be published on a Government website. Since I have been in this position, and since this Government have been in power, we have announced that we are providing £53 million in funding over four years to roll out the Drive project across England and Wales. We are introducing a range of measures on sex offender management and stalking through the Crime and Policing Bill. We are investing £13.1 million in a new policing centre for VAWG and public protection.

We have launched the new domestic abuse protection orders—raised by a number of Members—on which the previous Government passed the legislation then did nothing for four years. We are investing nearly £20 million for frontline support to victims and in other projects, including increasing investment to organisations such as Southall Black Sisters, who have been mentioned, and specific increases to ensure that women can remain in refuge if no recourse to public funds is an issue.

In 2024, we announced a funding increase of £30 million, making a total investment of £160 million for the domestic abuse safe accommodation grant. As others have said, we have also banned strangulation in pornography and made fundamental changes to the family court—something that many in this Chamber, including myself, campaigned for a decade to get across the line. I apologise for the delay in ensuring that every Government Department was doing absolutely everything it possibly could to get to where it needs to, but that did not stop me from cracking on with as much as I possibly could in the meantime.

When I had the job of the hon. Member for Weald of Kent, sitting on the Opposition Front Bench, I spent my time, almost week in, week out, with the then safeguarding Minister—the previous Government did not call it VAWG—looking at solutions and at different places. As I said in my letter back to the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford—and I say this to the hon. Member for Weald of Kent now—my door is always open. Not once since I have been in this role has anyone from the Opposition Front-Bench team come to talk to me about possible solutions or things we could work on together, but I absolutely send out that message.

I have met with Lib Dems and Conservative Back Benchers. I feel like I see the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) more than my husband, such is our life in this place. I have met Members of every different political hue on my own side. On this we are united. The hon. Member for Weald of Kent is welcome in my office with solutions, ideas about the frontline and detail. I extend that offer with great respect, and I truly mean it. I had great relations with my counterpart before, and I never ever sought to make headlines rather than helping the frontline. As someone who has been in her position, I offer that advice.

My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse spoke clearly about the need to go beyond the criminal justice system. She and other Members, including the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Luke Taylor), mentioned the Charing Cross incidents. What can I say? It was absolutely horrifying. I do want to speak up for some, though: a female officer featured in that documentary was trying to fight for the remand of a violent offender. It is easy to forget that some brilliant people were shown in that documentary—brilliant police officers who were trying to fight for the right thing. We need to make sure that those are the people who rise to the top of the ranks in our police forces.

To do that, the Government plan to lay out, I think at the beginning of next year, a whole-systems reform of policing. Much of that will be about violence against women and girls because, for example, for the last 10 years or however long the police have never been asked to have any performance framework on violence against women and girls. We can talk about collecting data and which metrics we will use; well, based on the last decade the starting point is zero. We will take an overarching measure from the crime survey, which has been undertaken for the first time this year. The hon. Member for Weald of Kent might know that the data on which we will measure the metric was released earlier in the year.

On stalking, my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse talked about the review by Richard Wright, who I met this week. He was the prosecuting barrister in the case of Alice Ruggles—a very tragic and famous stalking case. I very much look forward to his work in respect of the legislation, which I imagine will be relatively quick. The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam and I have spoken before about what is currently wrong with the legislation for a section 2A stalking charge. I very much hope to come back and talk about that.

Domestic abuse protection orders have been hailed today in the newspapers—the photo they used of me made me realise I need to get a haircut. I cannot stress enough how I am often a bit cynical, including when we were writing domestic abuse protection orders into the law under the previous Government, who wrote nice words on goat skin. I have been a cynic about all protection orders, as a person who has them, and as a person who has worked with them and watched breaches not be followed up by policing. That leads to some of the issues everybody has spoken about in terms of confidence in policing. If an order is breached and no one does anything, you do not call the police the next time, and that might be the time you get murdered.

So I went into it trepidatiously when we came into government. The orders are now used in both the Metropolitan police area and in Greater Manchester, and they have already started to roll out to three other police forces. The plan is absolutely to roll them out across every area—I certainly want them for the women where I live. I am seeing cases of a breach of an order leading to nine months’ imprisonment within a week of the incident happening, and with the woman never having to step inside a courtroom. That is what I want to see from an order regime.

[Luke Taylor]

On that point, will the Minister give way?

[Jess Phillips]

Oh yes—the pilot is in the hon. Gentleman’s area.

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[Luke Taylor]

The feedback from the local police force in Sutton, which is part of the trial, is that they find them incredibly helpful. There is a ringing endorsement for the orders and we look forward to seeing them rolled out more broadly.

[Jess Phillips]

Honestly, police officers in the Met and in Greater Manchester, where I have visited them undertaking these orders, are so very grateful. Some tweaks have come out of the pilot, which is the reason for doing a pilot. Some of them are legislative, some are about resources and some are about offender management. The fundamental thing is that they allow the police to do proper, good old-fashioned policing. It means they are responding. We are not waiting on a victim to say, “This person breached it.” They are going out, talking to them and finding out if the order has been breached. I really want to see the state taking the administration off the woman.

It was shared with me that in just one part of the Greater Manchester pilot—I will definitely get the colloquial thing wrong if I say which bit of Greater Manchester—there had been a 76% reduction in repeat offences just in the cohort that had been given domestic abuse protection orders. Anyone who looks at the Government’s mission and who knows anything about domestic abuse and violence against women and girls will know that we cannot halve anything unless we stop the repeat. The repeat is a massive problem, so seeing a 76% reduction in that cohort already is very good.

People have spoken about employers and the need to make sure that they are included in the strategy. There was a great mention of the brilliant work done by USDAW, and organisations such as Lloyds giving staff two weeks’ paid leave. There are brilliant examples. We cannot keep saying that this is everyone’s business and not expect employers to take part. I have to say, actually, that there is quite a lot of enthusiasm—my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) said that the businesses in her area really want to take part.

On the ringfences in respect of refuge accommodation, part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 created a ringfence for housing-related statutory support. This Government have increased the amount of money in the last year by £30 million. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse gave a good example of it being done well in London, and some of the money being used for specialist “by and for” services. She identified the fact that we really need to bottom out where services are commissioned well and where they are not. It is a different story across the country, so it is nice in this debate about London to be able to say that I have seen good practice undertaken in London in this regard, through the Mayor’s office working with local councils. I have seen bad practice elsewhere. We need to make sure that there is a standard in the country, no matter where someone is. It is the same for policing and for the CPS.

As I said, I see the hon. Member for Strangford more than my husband; I feel like he has always been in the room. I have a special place in my heart for Northern Ireland and will continue to work with the devolved Administrations over there.

Many people, including my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) very clearly, mentioned the issue of David Carrick, and other issues of trust in the Metropolitan police. The first part of the Angiolini review has already reported, and reporting on the second part is imminent. The Metropolitan police promised to follow up on the Louise Casey review. I speak to Mark Rowley many times—he is actually from Birmingham—and the Home Office is making sure that the Metropolitan police is following up on all those things. More broadly, we need to change the regime and reform police vetting and standards, and disqualify people when they commit some of these crimes.

Apologies that I did not respond to everybody, but I want to give my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse her minute to wind up. I promise I will answer all questions in writing—to which everyone behind me thinks, “I wish she had not said that!”