Speeches by Phillips.

“I thank the hon. Lady for her kind words and her reminder of the many years that passing the Online Safety Act took. Many of us will remember them—I was about to say “fondly”, but I am not sure that was necessarily always the case. First and foremost, I would not be afraid of doing any of the things that she has highli…”

“The Government have released new curricula on healthy relationships education. Working with Ofsted to ensure that schools are monitored against the delivery of that education is one of the most important things we can do. Schools just saying they do it, and then the teaching never being looked at to see whether it is a…”

“As I have said, the strategy will live and die on whether everybody takes part in it. The right hon. Gentleman has given me the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to Soroptimists from all over the country. Some of the work that appears in the strategy—specialist advocates for rape victims in courts, for example—started…”

“Again, I am poacher turned gamekeeper in ensuring that the voluntary sector is well placed to deliver much of what is in the strategy—not just classic victim support models of national or local funding, but new opportunities and new schemes in our employment and health services. I want to ensure that where those servic…”

“In the list of people who have put in effort over the years in this regard, I would like to make special mention of Baroness May, who I worked with for many years on many of these issues. In answer to the hon. Lady’s question, let me give her a really specific answer about data. She is absolutely right that data collec…”

“The scale of violence against women and girls in our country is intolerable, and this Government are treating it as a national emergency. Members are aware that we have made an unprecedented commitment to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. This effort will be underpinned by our violence against women a…”

“I will pick up on a couple of the points that the hon. Gentleman has made. On the reduction in police numbers, I noticed that the Leader of the Opposition cited those figures, too. Just to be clear, 94% of the fall that has been cited was from March to June 2024, which was before this Government were elected. I just wa…”

“I absolutely will do that. I commit to that here and will make sure that is noted down, because the strategy is not the end and it does not have all the answers. It is something that will have to be changed and worked on, and it will take everybody to do it. It is a fundamental shift. I absolutely commit to doing that.…”

“I feel every moment of disappointment that the hon. Lady feels about the failures over the years. I recall working in a service during the coalition Government, when we had to cut our child rape service and get the money from the Big Lottery Fund, because the state, in an era of austerity under that Government, took aw…”

“My hon. Friend shares my passion for this subject, and has done over many years. She is absolutely right: the data shows that nearly half of all teenage relationships between those aged 13 to 17 experience issues of control. What does that mean for both the victim’s group and the perpetrator’s group? As the mother of t…”

“I did not give all the details because, as I said in response to the question from the hon. Gentleman’s colleague, on Thursday I will announce the full details of all the metrics of action plans. They will be placed before the House on Thursday. As for the briefing, we cannot tackle violence against women and girls onl…”

“The right hon. Lady makes a pertinent point about commissioning environments. Frankly, commissioning environments, running on an annual basis, have been the scourge of every sector for many years. That is why the comprehensive spending review, running over three years, is so very important in trying to create a system …”

“Ministers from MHCLG are key partners, and housing is a huge part of the issue of, specifically, domestic abuse-related crimes. Today the MHCLG announced refuge funding of £499 million over the next three years, which represents a huge increase on what was previously being offered, as well as an extra £19 million in su…”

“I will absolutely promise this to the women across the hon. Member’s constituency, and all the constituencies represented in this Chamber—the idea that a piece of paper written by any Government will suddenly, overnight, make those women safe would be a lie, and I am not willing to do that. It is going to take a huge e…”

“Okay, I may have to stand corrected, but all I can say is that a huge amount of what is being cited on police numbers is being taken from the previous Government’s figures. In my area, we have not got up to the level of police funding that we had in 2010, so I will not take lectures from the Conservatives, given the ho…”

“Although I will not give out the detail until Thursday—I feel like I am going to say that a lot today—there is absolutely a need to look at the funding model. That is why I say that the strategy has to be different from what has been delivered before. Even if I had the moon on a stick and all the money in the world, th…”

“As somebody who has sat on a number of multi-agency risk assessment conferences over the years, what I will not do is just do what lots of people have done before. It is very easy to stand up and say, “a multi-agency response is the response to that”, but it just becomes words. It actually has to mean something. The st…”

“I absolutely agree. Schools need to play a vital part, as do the tech companies that have been identified, but absolutely there is a need for parents, who are often pulling their hair out trying to know the right thing to do. Parents who become abuse victims by children with some of those attitudes is a long under-serv…”

“The hon. Lady will have to wait to see what the strategy says. What I can say is that, because we were not waiting for the strategy, the Government announced a £53 million investment in schemes to deal with the most violent perpetrators—those most responsible for, as she says, repeat offending. We have already also sai…”

“My hon. Friend hits on a point that anyone who has actually worked with victims on the frontline would make. It is very easy in this building to only want to see criminal justice outcomes—it is a political thing that we do—but in the vast majority of cases I have handled in my life, that is not actually what people are…”