Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has targets for the number of independent sexual violence advisers in England and Wales per head of the population; and if he will make a statement.

The Government does not hold information on the number of Independent Sexual Violence Advisers (ISVAs) employed across England and Wales, nor does it have targets on the number of ISVAs.

The cross-government Violence against Women and Girls Strategy, published in March 2016, set out that from April 2017, local services would be supported through a new VAWG Transformation Fund. This moved from a model of direct national match-funding for individual domestic and sexual violence adviser posts to funding local programmes which encourage partnership working and early intervention and prevention.

In September 2017 the Home Office published guidance setting out the expectations of the role of an ISVA, and we also published a National Statement of Expectations and Commissioning Toolkit in December 2016, which provided a national blueprint for effective local commissioning of VAWG services.