Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the implications for the provision of her Department's services of the findings of the report entitled, Joining the Dots: the combined burden of violence, abuse and poverty in the lives of women, published by Agenda in September 2016; and if she will make a statement.

I recently met the Director of Agenda, on October 25 to discuss the recommendations of their report “Joining The Dots”. We are committed to working with Agenda and other organisations working in this sector to better understand and support women facing violence, abuse and poverty.

We published our Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy for this Parliament in March 2016, which included our commitment to support for the most excluded women and girls facing multiple disadvantages. The Strategy also announced increased funding of £80 million from 2016 to 2020 to protect women and girls from violence, including support for refuges and other accommodation-based services, funding to national helplines, and from 2017, the launch of the VAWG Transformation Fund.

We are committed to working across Government to deliver the commitments outlined in the Strategy. We are leading work across Government to identify those suffering multiple disadvantages, to support local commissioning of services to victims and survivors of VAWG, and to provide advice and support to local commissioners through the VAWG Transformation Fund.