Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they have made in rolling out the "Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) 100" approach to every police force in the country.
As part of this Government's ambitious goal to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade, we have committed to use every tool available to protect more women and girls from harm, to relentlessly target perpetrators including via methods used to tackle terrorism and serious organised crime, and other measures to improve the police response to VAWG.
Working closely with the National Police Chiefs' Council and the College of Policing, the Home Office is overseeing the development of a new national approach for the use of data-driven tools and algorithms to identify and pursue offenders involved in domestic abuse, sexual assault, harassment, and stalking. Recognising the range of applicable technologies already in use across police forces in England and Wales, the new framework will support forces to meet their local need while standardising the use of these tools, ensuring those who pose the greatest threat are identified and managed through the criminal justice system or community-based, multi-agency interventions.
In February, we announced £13.1 million funding to launch a new National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection to improve the policing response to VAWG and child sexual abuse. Centralising policing expertise to tackle these crimes will drive national coordination. The creation of the Centre is a key step in delivering on the Government's public protection priorities through bringing together expertise to drive organisational change and improve practice, and work on the use of data-driven tools in VAWG policing is central to this.
Later this year we will publish a cross-government VAWG strategy, unpinning the ambitious agenda to halve VAWG and tackle the most prolific and harmful perpetrators.