Halving VAWG Requires Infrastructure-Scale Investment, Not Carceral Growth
Centre for the Prevention of Violence Against Women and Girls (CPVAWG)
Published: 11 June 2025
The June 2025 Spending Review sets out a blueprint for economic expansion and digital transformation. Positioned as a plan to reduce inequality and restore national resilience, the document introduces major financial commitments - £7 billion for prison expansion, £2 billion for AI infrastructure, and enhanced funding for defence and skills. Absent from this vision, however, is any targeted investment to address one of the UK’s most persistent national emergencies: violence against women and girls (VAWG).
This oversight is neither procedural nor trivial. It highlights a deeper strategic contradiction: a government that commits in rhetoric to halving VAWG by 2030 but fails to fund the systems capable of realising that commitment.
While the Spending Review includes a real-terms cut of 1.4% to the Home Office - the lead department for coordinating the national VAWG strategy - it simultaneously invests heavily in law enforcement and carceral infrastructure. There is no mention of specialist VAWG services, no additional funding for domestic abuse or sexual violence response, and no commitment to ring-fenced or multi-year funding models for community-based interventions.
This signals a persistent failure to treat safety for women and girls as infrastructure - something that must be planned, funded, and built across systems, not delegated to fragmented frontline services operating in scarcity.
The government’s language around “public safety” remains narrow. It is framed through a lens of enforcement rather than prevention, with limited engagement in what makes individuals and communities safe in the long term: stable housing, trauma-informed healthcare, access to support services, economic autonomy, and early intervention.
This narrowness is especially visible in the £2 billion allocation to the AI Action Plan. Described as a flagship initiative to establish the UK as a global leader in “safe and responsible AI,” the plan provides no detail on gendered harms. There is no reference to deepfake abuse, AI-facilitated stalking, or algorithmic bias in police or immigration technologies - issues already documented extensively by civil society, particularly in the context of online violence, misinformation, and image-based abuse.
Nor is there investment in public sector capability to understand or respond to these risks. VAWG experts, digital rights advocates, and survivor-led organisations remain systematically excluded from shaping what “safe AI” means in practice.
A whole-society approach to safety requires whole-system engagement. Yet the review fails to acknowledge how economic, technological, and security strategies interact with gendered violence. VAWG is treated as a marginal issue rather than a structural concern with national consequences.
The absence of targeted investment is not due to a lack of evidence. In a 2024 letter endorsed by 25 specialist organisations, civil society leaders outlined a funding roadmap including: £516 million per year for domestic abuse services, £178 million in ring-fenced funding for ‘by and for’ organisations, and £127.9 million for sexual abuse services. These figures were grounded in operational need - not aspiration.
What is funded communicates what is valued. The review increases spending on incarceration while ignoring the social, psychological, and economic costs of interpersonal violence. It expands digital infrastructure without building protective frameworks. It funds police capacity but not survivor recovery.
At CPVAWG, we propose that halving VAWG requires treating safety as national infrastructure. That means:
Embedding gender-responsive budgeting in departmental strategies.
Publishing a national VAWG investment framework with annual milestones.
Establishing ring-fenced, multi-year funding for specialist and minoritised-led services.
Integrating digital safeguarding into AI governance.
Reforming public systems to deliver trauma-informed support, particularly in health, housing, and education.
The cost of inaction is quantifiable. VAWG imposes financial strain across policing, healthcare, mental health, social services, and the justice system. But more importantly, it represents a sustained loss of trust, dignity, and life chances for those affected. Failing to fund prevention is not fiscally neutral—it is structurally expensive and socially corrosive.
“We do not need more declarations. We need implementation architecture. If safety is a national goal, then it must have a budget.”
– Farah Benis, Founder, CPVAWG
We urge the government to align its stated commitment to halving VAWG with a spending strategy that reflects urgency, scale, and accountability. Prevention is not an afterthought. It is a public good that demands the same planning and protection afforded to physical infrastructure, national security, and technological innovation.
This is the difference between aspiration and delivery. Between symbolic commitment and strategic governance. Between rhetoric - and results.
Media contact
pr@cpvawg.org
