Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the answer of 24 October to Question 11004 on Cars: Digital Technology, what steps her Department is taking to tackle the misuse of digitally connected cars by domestic abusers.

This Government has set out our ambition to halve violence against women and girls within a decade, and that will include tackling domestic abuse in all its forms.

Digitally connected cars could risk the safety of women and girls if perpetrators can use them to track and control their victims. Technology-facilitated domestic abuse is a particularly insidious form of domestic abuse, and the Controlling or Coercive Behaviour Statutory Guidance references such behaviours.

We will go further than before to deliver a cross-government transformative approach to halve all forms of violence against women and girls, underpinned by a new VAWG strategy to be published next year. This will include our approach to tackling technology-facilitated domestic abuse.

We are also clear that the industry must play their part in helping to prevent their technologies being used for harmful purposes through safer by design approaches. I would gladly meet with manufacturers to discuss these approaches further.