Speeches by Phillips.

“I am not from the Department that deals with legal aid.”

“There is a case precedent where that is not taken into account. There was a case that was fought. I cannot remember the name of the case, but there is a case that was fought.”

“I have to say, funnily enough, when going through my correspondence in the car on the way down and signing it off, I thought, “Has Karren Brady taken over?” Then, when I saw it was your name at the end, I just thought that I must have read it wrong at the beginning. I apologise for that.”

“Agreed.”

“I am Jess Phillips. I am the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls.”

“It is an evergreen issue that there are 43 different police forces and very little power to tell them exactly what they have to do on certain things. That is why we set up the national centre specifically because I do not think that what the West Midlands police does on terrorism, for example, is wildly different from …”

“We take on board the criticisms that have been laid out, and other strategies and suggestions made. We also live in an environment of not just Select Committees but also, for example, the Angiolini inquiry and the IICSA review, making sure that we look at what has been suggested. I personally get very sick of people sa…”

“The strategy was published in December, and so what is it now? We are four months into the strategy publication, which has 259 commitments in it. We have a really specific cross-Government focus on 15 of those as a priority. That is not to say that others are cast by the wayside; there are expectations on the Governmen…”

“That was one of the specific criticisms that had been made and has been worked on, and I will hand over to Gisela who actually did some of the specific work. The fundamental difference was the definition that the Government were working to and that used by police forces, which is quite a fundamental issue. I will hand …”

“My response to that is I hope that their Ministers also get scrutinised for it. It is very easy to become the face of a thing and then the expectation is—and I am sure you will have felt this in your time at the Home Office—“Oh, that is the Home Office’s responsibility.” The whole point is that the violence against wom…”

“That is the VAWG board, yes. I am never bored on that, actually. I like to give out gold stars and whatever the opposite of gold stars is. That has representation from 14 different Government Departments, including those in the devolved Administrations as well. That is where we track the progress of the violence agains…”

“The way in which the violence against women and girls strategy is governed is that the main board that you identify is the inter-ministerial group on violence against women and girls.”

“I also have their phone numbers.”

“When the safer streets mission board chooses that it is focusing on VAWG, VAWG has absolutely been discussed there.”

“I would like to stress that I am not the whole of it.”

“Not the whole of it.”

“No, it would have doubled. The number of reported rapes would have doubled; the number of rapes would have halved. That is why the basis for the metric that we are measuring is not based on reported crime figures, because in violence against women and girls reported crime figures, while an important measure, are comple…”

“We agreed as the inter-ministerial group that we have to focus on the 15 most cross-Government and manifesto commitments in the violence against women and girls strategy. We work as that group on the progress of those, and different Government Departments are expected to bring to that group, and prior to that group, th…”

“It is bimonthly, so we meet every other month.”

“It is absolutely cross-departmental, and ensuring that people can access support is absolutely part of the strategy. As I said to you in the debates, I am not in the weeds. I am not in the weeds of what they are doing about GPs either. I am not in the weeds of what the Ministry of Justice is specifically doing on those…”