2. What steps his Department is taking through the criminal justice system to help tackle violence against women and girls.

Our violence against women and girls strategy, which the Government published before Christmas, sets out exactly how we will achieve our mission to halve the number of these terrible crimes. The Ministry of Justice is investing more than half a billion pounds in victim support services over the next three years, alongside rolling out free independent legal advisers for all adult victims of rape.

I welcome the new legal adviser service as a first step towards levelling the horribly unequal access to legal services available to victims as compared with suspects. However, only £3 million has been provided a year for the next two years to fund that service. Given the record highs of more than 12,500 sexual offence cases awaiting trial in the Crown courts, including Oxfordshire’s Crown court that serves my Witney constituency, does the Minister believe that funding to be anywhere near enough?

The funding of £6 million over two years will enable us to introduce independent legal advisers for all adult rape victims, and that is alongside the support package we are introducing in our courts system. We are expanding on Operation Soteria to ensure that rape victims get the support they need. The investment in support services is only one part of a much bigger package to ensure that victims are put back at the heart of the justice system.

I call the Chair of the Select Committee.

I know that Members from all parts of the House support the Government’s aim to halve violence against women and girls. The metric on which that is based, the crime survey for England, deals with those aged 16 and over, but girls under 16 are also substantially at risk. How will they be included in the recording and monitoring process to ensure that their needs are also addressed?

I welcome the scrutiny from my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee. We have been resolutely clear that the violence against women and girls strategy covers everyone, including children, those under the age of 16 and men and boys. We will be ensuring that the data captures a broad spectrum so that we are able to account for things. I recently met stakeholders who are concerned about the rise in domestic crimes committed against children and pre-teens, including in relationships they are getting into, and how we can best support them. I am working with colleagues across Government on that to ensure that we capture these things correctly, so that young people are not excluded from the data.

Violence against women and girls comes in many forms. I have discovered that, incredibly, while current legislation provides some protection for women and girls against revenge porn, it offers no such protection where images are clothed but accompanied by offensive material. Will the Minister take a long, hard look at that to see how the law can be strengthened so that those protections are afforded?

I welcome that question. Just last week I was in the United States discussing the fact that the UK is a world leader in tackling non-consensual online intimate image abuse, and the proliferation of such abuse on social media platforms. We have been tackling it when individuals are clothed but there is offensive material on top of those images—for example, semen imagery. That is a vile, degrading crime that affects many people, and we are determined to tackle this degrading form of abuse wherever it occurs, including when individuals are clothed. If they are being degraded, and if it is non-consensual, this Government will come for those responsible.

Given the recent high-profile case involving the hotel chain Travelodge, which I know the Minister has been involved in, does she agree that tackling violence against women and girls must include clearer legal duties for companies to co-operate fully with the safeguarding expectations of customers?

I thank my hon. Friend, and my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Margaret Mullane), for all their work in shining a light on this horrific issue. I was proud to meet the chief executive of Travelodge yesterday to discuss it in detail, and the Government are looking into what more we can do. We are convening a roundtable with the relevant Ministers in the Departments for Business and Trade and for Culture, Media and Sport to discuss the tourism aspect, and what better regulation and support we can provide to keep people safe wherever they are—in hotels, in the street or online. We will ensure that women and girls are kept safe.

I call the shadow Minister.

Right now there are potentially thousands of rapists, paedophiles and perverts, who are responsible for some of the worst offences against women and girls, who this Government are going to let out of prison earlier. That is a disgrace, and at the very least the Government should be transparent about it. When I asked them to tell us what their estimates and modelling were on the number of people who were due to be let out, at first they denied they had any of that information; then they admitted that they did, but refused to publish it. Does the Minister not think that they should be transparent about the consequences of their own policies?

I will take no lectures from the hon. Member about transparency when it comes to early release schemes. It was this Government who had to pick up the mess left by the last Government when we came to office, because our prisons were full. Instead of dealing with the issue, they ran away and called a general election. It was this Government who introduced risk assessments to prevent violent perpetrators of crimes against women and girls from being released early in our early release scheme, whereas the Conservatives’ early release scheme included no such protections. I will take no lectures from the hon. Member about how we protect women and girls.

I wish that the Minister got as angry about the fact that her Government are releasing thousands of rapists, paedophiles and perverts from prison early. If the Government will not tell us about the reality of the consequences, surely they should at least tell the victims. One of the worst aspects of this policy is the fact that many of those victims will have been given an estimated date for when the perpetrators would be released. That date will now be brought forward, and the perpetrators will get out of prison earlier than the victims were led to believe. Does the Minister think that, at the very least, the Government should write to the victims in advance to let them know that they are letting the perpetrators of those horrendous crimes out of prison earlier?

I will tell you what makes me angry, Mr Speaker: it is the fact that the last Government presided over an increase in the number of crimes of violence against women and girls of 37% in just five years. That was not a Government who tackled violence against women and girls. That was not a Government who took it seriously. As for communication and notification, it is this Government who are introducing the victim contact scheme in our Victims and Courts Bill to ensure that victims are notified, which the last Government refused to do. It is this Government who are writing to victims to ensure that they are given information. I will take no lectures about how the last Government tackled these crimes; it is this Government who are getting on with the job.