Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of regional variations in levels of funding for services for domestic and sexual violence survivors; and if she will place a copy of that assessment in the Library.

The Government's Violence against Women and Girls Strategy (VAWG), published in March 2016, found that while some areas provision of services for VAWG survivors is excellent, too many still fall short of the best. Our ambition is to reform services to support earlier models of intervention with victims, perpetrators and their families, at the same time as maintaining crisis provision.

The strategy commits us to providing funding of £80 million for VAWG services to continue to provide a bedrock of critical services for VAWG, delivering a secure future for rape support centres, refuges and Female Genital Mutilation and Forced Marriage Units. We have set out a clear blueprint for local action though our new National Statement of Expectations (NSE) and Commissioning Toolkit, which is available to local commissioning bodies and groups.

Our move to support local services through our £15 million VAWG Service Transformation Fund will encourage better collaboration and new, joined-up approaches between local commissioners, and with specialist VAWG service providers. This will help promote better collaboration and joint leadership, encourage new approaches incorporating early intervention, and establish and embed the best ways to help victims, survivors and their families so that early intervention and prevention, not crisis response, is the norm. We will ensure that victims get the help they need when they need it.

We consulted widely with the voluntary and community sector and statutory stakeholders in the development of the strategy, the NSE and the Transformation Fund and we will continue to work with the women’s sector and local areas to monitor the level of support provided to survivors of domestic and sexual violence. We will shortly be announcing successful bids to the Service Transformation Fund.

The Prime Minister has announced a new programme of work to transform the way we think about and tackle domestic abuse and to support this programme further funding of £20 million was announced in the Budget, bringing our total support for victims of VAWG to £100 million over the course of this Parliament.