The Home Office has agreed to establish a cross-Whitehall team to monitor delivery of the government’s commitment to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG).
The move was recommended in the National Audit Office’s report Tackling Violence against women and girls, which said the Home Office should establish a cross-government team, based in the department, to lead on the implementation of the new VAWG strategy.
The Home Office has made the commitment in its July 2025 Treasury minutes response to the PAC report Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls.
In the Treasury minutes, published last week, the department responded to the committee’s request to “outline precisely how the mission-led approach will hold all departments to account for their contributions to tackling violence against women and girls and ensure collective buy-in”.
As part of its response, the Home Office said it has “accepted the NAO recommendation to establish a cross-Whitehall team to monitor the delivery of VAWG commitments”. The department said it is “developing options for this joint team to align with the delivery phase of the upcoming VAWG Strategy”.
On action taken so far to get collective buy-in and hold departments to account, the Home Office said it is has “set up robust governance and accountability through the safer streets mission".
It pointed to the creation of a dedicated Violence Against Women and Girls Board, a ministerial group co-chaired by Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and VAWG at the Home Office, and the Ministry of Justice-based minister for victims and VAWG, Alex Davies-Jones, to inform and oversee the development of a new VAWG strategy. The department said this group has been “instrumental in establishing a truly cross-government vision and approach and in defining the departmental commitments and contributions”.
The Home Office also promised that the department will “shift to a delivery focus: tracking progress, holding government departments to account on delivery of commitments, reviewing new and emerging evidence on what works, and informing future policy decisions” once the VAWG strategy is published.
The department Office added that the VAWG ministerial group will report into the Safer Streets Mission Board, chaired by the home secretary and attended by secretaries of state, to ensure government is on track to meeting safer streets mission objectives.
It said these governance structures demonstrate “that the Home Office is taking a new approach to ensuring cohesion in its policy development and delivery”.
It also noted that the Safer Streets Mission Board reports into the prime minister’s regular mission stocktake meetings, and that these stocktakes “have coordinated government action on VAWG and will continue to be critical to holding government departments to account on delivery”.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledged to “halve violence against women and girls in a decade” by using “every government tool available to target perpetrators and address the root causes of abuse and violence”.
But the Home Office has come in for criticism from the NAO, PAC and Home Affairs Committee over its progress so far to build better cross-government collaboration, which is a key part of the government’s safer streets mission.
HAC warned earlier this month that “coordination remains inadequate between government departments as well as with other funding distributors – local authorities, police and crime commissioners and mayors”.
And PAC said in May that departments were “struggling to keep pace” with the evolving nature of the problem, and that the aspiration would require “urgent and coordinated action across departments”.