Published yesterday, the Government’s much-delayed strategy to reduce violence against women and girls (VAWG) says all the right things. It has been written by officials who take the subject seriously, and they’ve come up with a huge number of measures to make sure VAWG is reported, investigated and punished.

“The full power of the state will be deployed in the largest crackdown on violence perpetrated against women and girls in British history,” ministers say. “This will see specialist investigators apprehend, investigate and lock up rapists and sex offenders across the country.”

The scale of what they’re proposing is vast. To work, however, it requires a fully functioning criminal justice system, which is precisely what the UK doesn’t have. Police forces are so stretched that some crimes, such as shoplifting, barely get investigated at all. Trials involving the most serious offences, including rape, take years to reach court.

Prisons are so overcrowded that inmates are being released early, an emergency measure soon to be codified in law by the Government’s controversial Sentencing Bill. Some offenders will avoid prison altogether or be allowed out on licence, contradicting promises in the strategy.

VAWG will receive the same priority as tackling terrorism, which sounds impressive until you recall that this was first announced as part of the Strategic Policing Requirement in 2023. Then there is the question of cost. In essence, the Government is proposing to sweep away a system of prevention and investigation which is barely working at all, and replace it with a Rolls-Royce model of tackling VAWG.

The cost of ensuring that every police force has a specialist team to deal with rape and domestic violence isn’t known, but it appears that no new money is available. That means they will have to be funded from existing budgets, resulting either in cuts in other areas or insufficient funds to do the job properly.

Work in schools to identify and deter misogyny, while welcome, is likely to lead to an increase in reports of sexual offences. So are measures in the NHS which will lead to more crimes being referred to the police. “Funding is critical,” according to incoming Victims’ Commissioner Claire Waxman. “Driving up demand without increasing capacity puts victims at risk and threatens to destabilise the very partners the strategy relies upon.” It’s a point that might have been made by victims’ organisations, but they say they weren’t adequately consulted.

There is a clear risk of overselling Government policy, raising expectations that can’t be met in the current financial climate. Some of the rhetoric here is toe-curling, such as a press release declaring that the strategy “will leave offenders with nowhere to hide”. It sounds more like the trailer for an action movie than a serious Government policy.

It has the additional disadvantage of being untrue, unless ministers genuinely believe they can apprehend almost 200 rapists reported to the police every single day. One in eight women in England and Wales experienced sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking in the year to March 2025, amounting to hundreds of thousands of offenders.

The annual socio-economic cost is estimated to be £89.3 billion for domestic abuse, £6.6 billion for rape and £10.2 billion for other sexual offences. Yet the Government has come up with a strategy it evidently regards as essential but is not prepared to fund, even though it would save money — and lives — in the long run.

Labour came to power last year with a headline-grabbing promise to cut VAWG by half in a decade. It’s taken ministers 17 months to reveal how they intend to do it, just as everything is closing down for Christmas. Maybe the timing isn’t an accident: what they’ve finally published is a wish list of what they’d do in an ideal world. And a failing criminal justice system needs more than wishes.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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