Women’s Aid updates proposed funding settlement
In light of the welcome commitment from the Labour government to halve VAWG in a decade, there is renewed urgency to ensure that women’s services are sustainably funded to support all survivors. In our report Investing to Save, we set out a minimum annual funding settlement for specialist domestic abuse services for women and children across England. This is based on a methodology that can found in our earlier paper, Funding specialist support for domestic abuse services. In these reports we made it clear that the success of this funding in meeting the needs of women and children was contingent on ring-fenced funding for expert services run ‘by and for’ Black and minoritised women, d/Deaf and disabled women, and the LGBT+ community. In our submission to the Government’s Autumn spending review, we have now updated this funding settlement to a total of a minimum of £516 million per year in England, including a minimum of £178 million ring-fenced funding for the specialist ‘by and for’ sector. This is based on an estimate calculated by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner (available here) for the recommended minimum annual settlement for the ‘by and for’ sector.
The total minimum funding settlement of £516m includes £228m for refuge services (of which £78m to be ring-fenced for the ‘by and for’ sector) to be funded via the Statutory Duty to fund safe accommodation for survivors of domestic abuse, which forms Part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, combined with £288m statutory funding for community-based support services (of which £100m to be ring-fenced for the ‘by and for’ sector), committed to within the Victims and Courts Bill. In our report, Funding Safer Futures, we have estimated that the previous government spent an estimated £195 million on local domestic abuse support services in England in 2023-24. This investment falls £321 million short of the minimum of £516 million needed to properly fund specialist women’s domestic abuse services. We recommend that The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) should commit to £228 million per year for funding refuge services, delivered by restricting the £125 million for the Part 4 statutory duty currently spent to specialist women’s refuges and ‘by and for’ services and delivering an additional £103 million to make up the shortfall. For community-based support services, the Home Office, Ministry of Justice, Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and Department for Education (DfE) should deliver the £288 million required. We suggest this is delivered by restricting the current £67.8 million spent by the Home Office and Ministry of Justice to funding community-based support services run by specialist women’s domestic abuse services and ‘by and for’ services and delivering an additional £220 million to make up the shortfall. We also recommend further research to better understand the funding and commissioning of services, in particular the barriers facing ‘by and for’ services.
Without dedicated investment, survivors will continue to face barriers accessing the lifesaving support they urgently need. Furthermore, in 2017, the economic and social costs of domestic abuse in England were estimated to be approximately £66 billion. Women’s Aid and ResPublica have estimated this to be nearly £78 billion in 2022. These figures do not account for the cost of child survivors. Women and children who experience domestic abuse often suffer physical and emotional harm and, without the right specialist support, often put a strain on a wide range of public services and are not able to live independent and stable lives. As an economic analysis commissioned by Women’s Aid shows, for every pound invested in domestic abuse support services we will see a saving to the public purse of at least £9. By committing to the funding proposals outlined in our submission in the upcoming budget and spending review, there will be long overdue savings to the public purse, but most importantly, the lives of women and child survivors will be saved and they will be able to recover and live lives that are free from abuse.
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