Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to help ensure that women have confidence that they will be believed when reporting (a) assault, (b) abuse and (c) rape to the Metropolitan Police.

We are committed to playing a more active role in policing to ensure officers have the right support, to significantly improve standards across the board and to ensure justice is delivered for victims. Victims must feel confident in the police’s ability to handle their case.

We know these crimes disproportionately affect women and girls and are underreported, and we will take action to ensure victims coming forward get the response they deserve. This is why we are carefully developing options to deliver key commitments including ensuring specialist rape and sexual offence teams in all police forces and fast-tracking rape cases.

We are providing £13.1 million in 2025/26 to the new National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection (NCVPP) which is supporting all police forces, including the Metropolitan Police Service, to ensure they relentlessly pursue perpetrators who pose the greatest risk to women and use all the tools at their disposal to protect victims and get dangerous offenders off the streets. This includes continuing to drive forward Operation Soteria, which is supporting officers to build the strongest possible, suspect-focused rape cases.

Tackling violence against women and girls is a top priority for this Government and we are going further than before to deliver a cross-government transformative approach to halve violence against women and girls, underpinned by a new VAWG strategy to be published as soon as possible.