Significant improvement is needed in cross-department coordination if the government is to achieve its target to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade, MPs have warned.
The Home Affairs Committee has said is “unconvinced” the Home Office has the “capacity or imagination” to deliver the VAWG target in a new report on funding to tackle the issue, warning that funding “remains fragmented and poorly aligned with evidence of what works”.
The committee’s work builds on a National Audit Office report in January, which found that the Home Office had failed to centrally coordinate the distribution of funding in past VAWG strategies. On the most recent VAWG strategy, published in 2021, the NAO said the “cross-departmental governance in place did not ensure all departments were prioritising the VAWG strategy’s aims and were pulling in the same direction”.
The Home Affairs Committee said its inquiry, which aimed to test whether the Home Office is funding the interventions that have the most impact on reducing VAWG, found a consistent theme: “coordination remains inadequate between government departments as well as with other funding distributors – local authorities, police and crime commissioners and mayors”.
Reducing VAWG by half over the course of a decade is a central part of the safer streets mission set out in the Labour Party’s general election manifesto last year. The Home Office is the lead department for the mission.
In its evidence to the committee, the department said: “VAWG is a cross-government issue that requires action and accountability from all parts of government – the Home Office cannot deliver on this alone.” However, it also admitted that it has not yet coordinated funding across government.
The effect of this lack of coordination is “a duplication of services, gaps in funding and inconsistent access for victims and survivors”, the committee said.
And it warned that “the repeated inability of the Home Office to meet the coordination commitments in previous VAWG strategies has eroded trust in the Home Office’s competence to deliver a coordinated response to tackle VAWG”.
“It is essential for the Home Office to rebuild this trust,” the MPs added.
The government has set up several cross-departmental boards focused on the VAWG target, but “transparency is limited and trust in the department’s ability to lead remains low”, MPs said.
“We are not convinced that the department has the capacity or imagination to deliver on its target,” they added.
To improve transparency and build up confidence and trust, the MPs said the minutes of cross-government groups that have been set up to tackle VAWG should be published “as soon as practicable” after their meetings.
“We welcome these cross-government groups and will monitor them carefully to see if they produce effective coordination of funding,” the report said. “However, cross-departmental boards need ministerial drive to deliver targets across Whitehall. There is very little public information readily available about these boards, for example their frequency or minutes of the meetings. There has been years of siloed working on VAWG, even with cross-departmental boards in place.
“Given the low levels of trust in the ability of government to coordinate its response to VAWG, it would be wise for the government to be as transparent as possible about the cross-government work that is now taking place.”
To make funding less fragmented, the report calls for mapping of where central and local government is spending money to tackle VAWG to reduce duplication of services and enable there to be fewer gaps in the services funded
It also says there needs to be a standardised definition of VAWG across government to enable consistent measurement and ensure funding has the most impact.
The report also recommends that the Home Office establish a cross-government audit to identify which data on VAWG it is necessary to collect for evaluation purposes. It says the findings of the audit should be used to establish more consistent reporting metrics across government, to both reduce the burden to funding applicants and ensure that these metrics are better linked to the effectiveness of the funded services.
Other recommendations include the need to ringfence money to invest in primary prevention in future spending reviews, and to make longer term funding for VAWG services the norm.
The Home Office has been approached for comment.