Government’s process behind tackling violence against women ‘worse than under the Tories’

Leading organisations have criticised the development of the government’s flagship violence against women and girls strategy, calling the process chaotic, haphazard and “worse than under the Tories”.

Ministers are gearing up for a policy announcement blitz before the publication of the long-awaited plan next week.

Important voices in the violence against women and girls (VAWG) sector have privately accused ministers of sidelining first-hand expertise and expressed concern that the strategy will not be sufficiently radical to achieve the government’s flagship manifesto promise to halve the rate of VAWG in the UK in a decade.

Initially expected in spring, the VAWG strategy was delayed until summer and then autumn.

On Friday it emerged that schoolboys would be the target of the strategy, which the BBC reported would be built around the pillars of preventing radicalisation of young men, stopping abusers and supporting victims.

But multiple sources from organisations working in the VAWG sector said they had felt sidelined during the devising of the strategy.

One figure in the sector, comparing the past 18 months with the process before the strategy produced in 2019 by the Conservative government, said: “It is worse than under the Tories. In fact, we were so much better off under the Tories, you could get a meeting, they engaged with you. This whole process has been incredibly haphazard.”

Another figure in the sector noted that after the murder of Sarah Everard, the Conservative government reopened a public consultation. “We saw more senior ministers and had more contact with the secretary of state under the last government,” they said. “Ministers like Alex Davies-Jones and Jess Phillips have clearly worked hard on this, but it feels the machine has worked against them.”

Further concern is that the publication of the strategy, which is expected just before parliament closes for the Christmas recess, will be lost. “They’ve had 18 months and now they’re scrabbling around in the last week of parliament. It just feels like an afterthought,” said one source. “It hasn’t felt like it’s been a properly considered process where they’ve really sought the expertise in a considered way. It’s been slightly haphazard.”

On Tuesday Karen Bradley, the chair of the home affairs committee, wrote to Phillips and Davies-Jones to complain that “there has been poor engagement and transparency with VAWG stakeholders throughout the development of the VAWG strategy”. She noted that the VAWG advisory board – which contained experts to guide policy – had met only twice in person and once online and its role had been limited.

Andrea Simon, the director of the End Violence Against Women and Girls coalition, said there had been positive moves from the government, including £550m of funding for victim support, and proposed law changes to improve the fair treatment of victims in rape trials and ban depictions of strangulation in pornography. She called on the government to commit to a monitoring and evaluation structure for the strategy, to ensure accountability.

“Without that, the government will potentially fall foul of the lack of oversight we’ve seen in previous, underresourced strategies,” she said. “There has been a lot of rhetoric about commitment to halving VAWG through a cross-government approach, but that won’t stand up unless they are willing to be open, transparent, and bring in external scrutiny.”

While stories were emerging about the strategy in the press, a different figure said a full document had not been shared with even a small number of trusted parties. “You have to ask how a cross-governmental, strong strategy is being built if none of the experts are at the table,” they said.

Karen Ingala Smith, a co-founder of the Femicide Census, said it was “disappointed” not to have been invited to join the VAWG advisory board, adding that the two wider meetings she or her co-founder, Clarrie O’Callaghan, had attended felt like “box-ticking” exercises.

“It felt like it wouldn’t have mattered what we said, it wasn’t going to make any difference to what was written,” she said. “It felt perfunctory and tokenistic.”

For the past decade the Femicide Census has provided Phillips with the names of all women killed by men over a year for her to read out in parliament near International Women’s Day. The VAWG minister told the Guardian last year that ending the “scourge of femicide” would be a “fundamental part” of the government’s promise to drastically reduce violence against women and girls. “But it has been quiet since then, and we are concerned that promise will be watered down,” said Ingala Smith.

The Home Office has been approached for comment.