Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to (a) evaluate and (b) review the violence against women and girls strategy.

The ambitious cross-Government Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy set out a series of measures to help ensure that women and girls are safe everywhere - at home, online, at work and in public. This was followed by a complementary Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan, published in March 2022. So far, we have completed 69% of the commitments across both strategy documents.

Delivery is overseen by a cross-Government VAWG Ministerial Steering Group (VAWG MSG). The last VAWG MSG took place on 1^st May and was chaired by the Home Secretary. Part of the meeting focused on accelerating delivery of the remaining strategy commitments.

Many of our interventions are funded through grants awarded to third parties. These grants are actively monitored with recipients providing regular monitoring and end of financial year reports.

We are assessing the overall impact of measures set out in the strategies against the ambition to increase support to victims and survivors and bring more perpetrators to justice.

Our long-term ambition is to reduce the prevalence of violence against women. This is monitored via the published crime statistics, which include police recorded crime and Crime Survey for England and Wales data, as well as via other published criminal justice agency data. The latest data can be found here: Crime in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk).

Estimates from the 2022/23 CSEW showed that 5.1% of adults aged 16 to 59 years experienced domestic abuse in the previous year (Domestic abuse prevalence and victim characteristics - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)). This was a statistically significant decrease compared with the year ending March 2020 (6.1%), a year largely unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the same period, the prevalence of sexual assault and stalking has remained stable with no statistically significant changes.