Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 31
26th Report - Tackling Violence against Women and Girls
Published 16 May 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Tackling Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
Tech–enabled violence against women and girls refers to the use of technology to perpetrate violence, harassment, or abuse. Crimes include online harassment; image–based abuse (including the sharing of intimate imagery of perpetrator to victim, without the victim’s consent); revenge porn (the sharing of intimate images of the victim by the perpetrator, sometimes referred to as NCII (non–consensual intimate imagery)) and many more. Statistics show that tech–enabled VAWG is a rapidly evolving threat. For example, in 2015, the revenge porn helpline received 521 cases compared with 22,000 in 2024.73 Written evidence submitted by Miss Amy Moir highlighted Ofsted’s ‘Review into sexual abuse in schools and colleges’ which found that nearly 90% of girls, and nearly 50% of boys said that being sent explicit pictures of things they didn’t want to see happens a lot or sometimes to them or their peers.74
From: Public Accounts Committee, 26th Report - Tackling Violence against Women and Girls (HC 644), 16 May 2025
Government response
Latest Treasury Minutes progress report to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Twenty-sixth Report of Session 2024-26
The government responded to the whole report on 4 June 2026 (deadline 16 July 2025).
Treasury minutes: Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Twenty-sixth report from Session 2024-26
Published 18 September 2025.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it agrees with the Committee's recommendations across the areas covered, including governance, survivor engagement, funding, evidence, measurement, prevention and online safety.
- On cross-government accountability, the government says it has set up "robust governance and accountability" through the Safer Streets Mission, and that it is developing options for a cross-Whitehall team to monitor delivery of VAWG commitments.
- On funding, the Home Office will write to update the Committee once it has decisions and clarity on cross-government VAWG spending. Coordination is stated to depend on other departments completing their own internal allocation processes.
- On measuring progress, the target to halve VAWG within a decade will be set against a headline prevalence measure from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, with a target implementation date of September 2025.
- On prevention, delivery of the actions by September 2025 is stated to be "contingent on the publication of the Tackling VAWG Strategy within that timeframe". DSIT will "aim to update" the Committee in six months on early findings from Ofcom's Tracker.