Politics
The House | Political Tetris: How Fragmentation Is Forcing Parties Into Complex Coalition Building
13 min read
May’s local elections meant more councils than ever ruled by more than one party. Zoe Crowther investigates what might be a sign of things to come for Westminster. Illustration by Tracy Worrall
In the election for Birmingham City Council, no party came close to the 51 seats needed for a majority. Reform UK ended up with 23 seats, while the Greens have 19, Labour 17, the Conservatives 16, the Liberal Democrats 12, and a group of independents under the umbrella of ‘Better Birmingham’ has seven councillors. And yet, while Reform emerged as the largest party on the council, every other party ruled out working with them – leaving them effectively unable to govern. Labour, meanwhile, decided not to seek to form an administration, with the group leader ruling out joining a governing coalition.
That left the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Better Birmingham to strike a deal, forming a coalition-style administration made up of 38 councillors – but still short of a majority. Lib Dem councillor Roger Harmer has become council leader, but the Greens will take over the leadership in 2028 under a rotation agreement. All three groups will be represented on the council’s cabinet.
Birmingham is the prime example of a phenomenon being seen across the country, with 23 councils of the 136 up for election this year pushed into no overall political control. Where rainbow coalitions have emerged to lead these councils, the trend is clear: rather than share power with Reform, almost every other political group would prefer to co-operate with one another.
You can broadly split the multi-party arrangements on English councils into different categories: the ‘anyone but Reform’ coalitions; the ‘anyone but Labour’ coalitions; and the ‘necessary to govern’ coalitions, where parties have been forced to accept the support of other parties or independents to govern effectively.
With the national polling looking as fractured as it does on a local level, political parties are scratching their heads over what the implications of these forms of local co-operation might have for the political picture in Westminster.
According to Green and Lib Dem councillors, the directives coming from their national parties on striking arrangements with other parties have been relaxed. Sources in both camps describe themselves as “bottom-up” and “democratic”, meaning local party groups have widely been allowed to organise their own negotiations without input from the national parties. And both the Greens and Lib Dems see blocking Reform from local power as a key priority.
In Newcastle, the Labour vote collapsed but the Liberal Democrats and Greens formed a confidence-and-supply arrangement that locked out Reform, despite it being the second-largest party. Lib Dem council leader Colin Ferguson and Green councillor Nick Hartley claim the reaction from Newcastle residents to the arrangement has been “overwhelmingly positive”. They insist that people want more “grown-up politics” that crosses political divides.
Hartley says they want the arrangement to show a way of “doing things differently” and suggests there could be “lessons learned for parliamentarians” going into a future general election.
The Greens appear more open to multi-party arrangements than any of the other parties. Green MP Siân Berry says increasing numbers of councils are demonstrating that parties can work together when no one commands a majority. She tells The House she plans to keep in contact with Green leaders who have made power-sharing arrangements on councils to learn from their experiences working with other parties.
Berry rejects the idea that such arrangements are “back-room deals”. Still, she admits the party would have to consider the extent to which Green voters would tolerate further arrangements between the Greens and other parties, including Labour.
The Local Government Association Green Group has just been established, which plans to put together a set of principles to guide Green-led councils around the country to ensure national cohesion on policy and negotiations with other parties.
Both the Greens and Lib Dems want to see a voting system with proportional representation introduced before the next general election, with Berry saying that under first-past-the-post, the “risk of Reform getting a majority on a tiny percentage of the vote at Westminster is very, very high”. She adds: “And then there is no possible way that making arrangements between the other parties can help us.”
The Lib Dems have benefited from the fragmented two-party system in local elections. The Lib Dem identity is partly built around being anti-Labour in some areas and anti-Tory in others. This dual identity plays out in the sort of multi-party deals that it does across the country.
The flexibility helps explain why the Lib Dems are leading councils where they do not have the most seats. In the case of Birmingham, where a Lib Dem councillor is leading the council, the party is in fact the fifth-largest group.
And yet deputy Lib Dem leader Daisy Cooper tells The House that these local-level coalitions and arrangements cannot be considered as a predictor of how a national coalition in Westminster might take place.
“It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how these things work,” she says. “Different political parties have been in different coalitions in local government for decades, and it’s the nature of local politics, because local authorities are less partisan because they have fewer powers… That’s really quite different from the cut and thrust of what happens in Westminster.”
But she did admit that “people are desperate to try and stop Reform”.
“But I genuinely think that if you look back in just recent years, and historically, voters hate it when they think there is a stitch-up,” Cooper says.
This is a sign of things to come
Asked whether the Lib Dems have to start being more transparent about a potential future coalition, Cooper says: “It’s going to be incumbent on political parties to be really transparent with the public about what they themselves are offering and about what their priorities are.
“But the idea that we should be wasting our time and our energy right now, you know, indulging in that kind of naval gazing about who we might work with and what deals we might do, and what the red lines might be… We’ve got no idea where the country is going to be in six months, let alone in another three years.”
Increasingly, councils are also seeing the rise of organised independent groups, community alliances, resident associations, and former Labour and Conservative councillors who left their parties or were suspended – all sitting under the independent banner.
In many cases, they have slotted in to provide the numbers for multi-party arrangements headed up by other parties. The seven-member Better Birmingham group, which has formed part of the Birmingham coalition, includes councillors such as Harris Khaliq and Nosheen Khalid, who were backed by Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party.
In other areas, smaller parties have joined together to block Labour from staying in power, for example, in the London boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth.
In Southwark, the Greens and Lib Dems joined together to form an administration, with Green Party councillor James McAsh (formerly the council’s Labour leader), now leader of the council, with Lib Dem councillor Victor Chamberlain serving as deputy.
They claim Southwark Labour was uncooperative in the run-up to the elections when they were approached to discuss the possibility of making an arrangement.
Both McAsh and Chamberlain tell The House they want to push their national parties to continue to support these arrangements happening more often, and be more transparent about preparing for a national coalition.
“This is a sign of things to come,” Chamberlain says. “We are very firmly in multi-party politics in London. This is something that we can hopefully push our national parties to be more aware of and more inclusive… It’s in the interest of residents that parties should work together.”
For Labour and the Conservatives, approaching multi-party arrangements, even on a council level, has proven more complicated. Both the Tories and Labour are very wary of any perception of backroom deal-making, and see formal arrangements with the smaller parties as potentially detrimental if the mainstream parties begin to be seen as the minor players.
Labour blocked its councillors in Brent from making a deal with the Green Party, and the Labour minority administration has therefore had to make a deal with the Conservatives in order to stay in power.
However, elsewhere, Labour councillors have been permitted to enter rainbow coalitions, like in West Sussex, where the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, Labour and an independent councillor agreed a partnership to run the council.
The House understands, from speaking to multiple Labour sources, that the Labour leadership is generally hostile to the idea of any pacts or deals with other parties, not least because they believe the majority of Labour MPs would also be hostile to the idea. A senior source who worked for Starmer in opposition, confirms to The House there was an informal, unspoken accommodation with the Lib Dems in some areas ahead of the 2024 general election, but only where the Lib Dems were not directly contesting Labour for seats.
The political landscape looks very different today, with the Greens, independents, and sometimes the Lib Dems fighting Labour in areas they considered ‘safe’ just two years ago.
For Labour, advocating for multi-party deals to stop Reform makes little electoral sense when the other parties are often trying to win seats from the Labour Party. As Prime Minister Keir Starmer set out at Labour conference in the autumn, the Labour strategy will continue to set out the next general election as a Labour vs Reform fight.
For the Conservatives, their red lines have started to become clear. CCHQ has accepted a broad range of multi-party deals between Tory councillors and other parties, including Reform and Labour. According to multiple Tory sources, the one party that CCHQ will not accept deals with under any circumstances is the Green Party.
In Worcestershire, this caused tensions between the national party and its local councillors. Although Worcestershire County Council was not up for election this year, the council has been embroiled in a row over the emergence of a new four-way arrangement involving Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrats and independents to keep Reform out of power, after some Reform councillors quit and left their group short of a majority on the council.
The Conservative Party, with direct intervention by leader Kemi Badenoch, suspended the Tory group leader Adam Kent for attempting to form this arrangement, with Badenoch’s team arguing they had made clear that a deal of this kind was not authorised. Kent is now threatening legal action against the party.
The remaining Conservative councillors have withdrawn from the power-sharing arrangement, though The House understands they did so reluctantly. Many local Conservatives felt the deal was justified because Reform’s administration had become unstable and difficult to work with. This hints at a growing divide between the national Conservative position and what some Tory councillors are actually doing on the ground.
Nigel Farage is a realist, and he will know that the only way the left is going to be gone is if the right actually works together
In the remaining coalition, Green councillor Matt Jenkins is serving as council leader. He believes the larger national parties are “just living in the past” where they used to have clearer-cut majorities on councils.
“I don’t think people really understand that two-party politics went a few years ago, and now it is really multi-party politics,” he says.
According to Jenkins, the feedback from Worcestershire residents so far has been that they are glad that the Greens are working with any party, “as long as it’s to stop Reform”.
While Reform made huge gains in these elections, the fractured vote and strong anti-Reform turnout meant many councils were pushed into no overall control, leaving Reform unable to govern by itself.
In some councils, like Hartlepool, Reform has had to enlist the support of independent councillors to run an administration. In other areas, such as Redditch, Reform has had to enter informal arrangements with the Conservatives.
After the May elections, Labour was left short of a majority on Redditch Borough Council. Despite the Conservatives only holding four of the council seats, compared to Reform’s eight, the right-wing parties agreed on a confidence and supply arrangement where Conservative councillor Matthew Dormer has been appointed as leader and Reform councillors have been given largely ceremonial roles. The deal was directly approved by CCHQ.
Dormer tells The House that Reform reluctantly agreed to work with the Tories as they were “just hell-bent on getting Labour out”.
He says that while some voters backed his party to keep Reform out, he believes that Conservative supporters are broadly tolerant of such an arrangement, while many in Reform are less pleased.
“Nigel Farage is a realist, and he will know that the only way the left is going to be gone is if the right actually works together,” he says. “That has to happen, whether they want it or not.”
Reform sources see this confidence-and-supply arrangement as a necessary one to give the town a stable budget, though one senior party insider says they are aware that Reform’s supporters are “wary” of such deals.
“Many left the Tories because they felt let down,” one senior Reform insider says. “They elected us to govern, not to posture. Value for money, an end to non-jobs, and lower waste. Deliver that, and the arrangement vindicates itself.”
Reform voters and Tory voters are generally very hostile to the other party, and the national parties are acutely aware of this.
“No pacts, no deals,” a Reform spokesperson says. “Reform UK is focused on delivering for voters, not propping up the broken establishment parties.
“As we’ve previously seen in places like Bradford and Worcestershire, where ideologically different Tories and Greens have colluded, other parties will go to desperate lengths to block Reform. We will focus on delivering for the British people instead of betraying voters for the sake of political convenience.”
A Reform insider says the party’s focus in local government will be on delivery rather than “setting the world alight”. They agree there is “plainly” an establishment effort to block Farage’s party.
“Every other party is now prepared to run a rainbow coalition against us, combining for one purpose: keeping the largest party out,” they say.
They add that agreements made on local councils amounted to “working relations” between parties rather than “pacts”. “A pact is a carve-up. A working relationship is the ordinary business of passing a budget and running services.”
They believe that Reform will not work with the Greens or the Liberal Democrats under any circumstances: “I cannot conceive how we could; there is no common ground. Otherwise, the test is good faith and delivery, not the rosette.”
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Politics
The House | Reform Councillor George Finch: Nobody Deserves To Be In No 10 More Than Farage
9 min read
He’s in charge of an institution with £1.5bn assets and of services vital to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people – and he’s not yet 20 years old. Nadine Batchelor-Hunt meets Reform UK council leader George Finch
If ever there was a child of his time, it is George Finch.
“My mum was a hairdresser, my dad worked as a carpenter for the council at the time,” says Finch, Reform UK’s leader of both Warwickshire county council and Nuneaton and Bedworth borough council. “Finances were fine, but then they had me in 2006, and then obviously the financial crash happened… It destroyed what we did, and the income wasn’t sustaining a family.”
Growing up in the shadow of the crash and austerity shaped Finch – and arguably makes him perfectly attuned to the politics it has produced.
“Every system was just failing,” he says. “Everything was cut, nothing was working… and this was a kind of carbon-copy of families across Bedworth at the time… The system was completely broken. Families like mine were left and thrown to the curb.”
There were additional strains: both of Finch’s sisters have significant health issues that continue to confront them with the harsh reality of the state of some NHS services. Speaking of one sister with a neurological disorder, he says: “Even when I’ve been in this job, I’ve spent hours and hours and hours in A&E waiting by her side on a ward where there’s kids self-harming, and it’s not right.”
If the council leader is daunted by the weight of the responsibility of his office, he does not show it. Indeed, in his telling, this is light work when compared to his previous gig as a carpenter and plasterer.
“I was working when I was 16, 17 – not on building sites but in doing up homes, carpentry, plastering, all that type of stuff,” says Finch. “I’ve done that type of stuff before, and I know what it’s like to sit in a damp house when it’s dripping, while just eating a sandwich. You don’t get a nice little tea break like you do in offices.”
He [Lee Anderson] was really my type of people… just say how it is.
Despite his tender age, Reform isn’t even Finch’s first party. “I was a young conservative who joined the Conservative Party at 16,” says Finch. “It was more the conservative values, not necessarily the party.” He speaks of his disillusionment with the party and is especially critical of Boris Johnson – describing the former prime minister as a “wet liberal in proper Conservative clothing”.
The catalyst for joining Reform UK, he says, was an encounter with Reform MP Lee Anderson at school. “I was in the politics class, and me and my mate, we love Lee Anderson,” says Finch. “He was really my type of people… just say how it is. You know, like, ‘Oh, have a lovely day, lovely ladies’… Say something like that in Warwick? ‘How dare you call me a lovely lady?!’”
Finch says he asked Anderson a question about education, namely, ‘How will Reform UK resist the wave of wokeism that’s washing across our education establishments?’. “I practiced that, because it’s so important to me,” says Finch. He recalls Anderson “spoke to so many” in the room and behaved like such “a normal chap” that when he approached Finch and asked whether he’d join Reform, he did. “He said: ‘George, you going to join?’ I went: ‘Go on, then – I’ll join tomorrow.’ So, I did. And then helped the general election candidate – we got third place, 9,000-odd votes, great from a standing start. We’re going to win at the next election.”
Asked why he was attracted to politics, he replies: “It goes to my old background: my family, my town.” Finch is sitting next to a stuffed bear clawing a tree, the symbol of the county he presides over. The bear’s name is Wendy, according to The Times, loaned to Finch’s office from a local museum – something Finch reportedly made an early priority upon taking office.
Bedworth, the town he is from, is in the borough of Nuneaton and Bedworth in North Warwickshire. The last coal mine in the town closed in 1982, ending a long history of coal mining dating back centuries; in many ways, it is typical of the area Reform must win to make it to No 10. “It’s been totally forgotten about, even though it is a town that’s got a huge pride in what it does,” says Finch.
In the several years since then, Finch has enjoyed a meteoric rise. He says his priorities locally have been to “change the entire foundation of which the council is built on” – describing running two councils as “phenomenal”. He says highways, crime awareness and prevention and finances are all areas where he’s seeking improvements, as well as home school transport, which he says costs the council £50m a year. The way he speaks about local issues makes it clear he sees Reform’s record in local government as an opportunity to gain the electorate’s confidence, saying it’s “the only chance” the party has to prove itself to the people. “We have to work as hard as we can to get the best value for money for taxpayers, voters,” says Finch. “If we get local champions, we’re winners.”
But it has not been plain sailing; Finch narrowly won a no-confidence motion earlier this year by one vote – something he dismisses as a “farce” that “backfired”. The Green Party tabled the motion concerning Finch’s remarks relating to the rape of a 12-year-old girl in Warwickshire, and a dispute with county council chief executive Monica Fogarty over Pride flags. On the former, Finch had risked contempt of court after sharing details about the suspects and accusing the police of attempting to cover up their immigration status – claims which Warwickshire police rejected.
I haven’t got a problem with young kids and women coming over on boats – if they have got a genuine refugee status and they need genuine help
Finch defends himself, telling The House he “had to fight tooth and nail for transparency”. “They’ll refute that,” says Finch, saying that they argued for the need to preserve community cohesion. He recalls being told, “’You don’t want riots like in Epping’.” He replied: “‘We won’t have riots in Epping if we tell them the truth’… And I put a statement out: no riot.”
There is growing speculation that Rupert Lowe’s breakaway party, Restore Britain, could put pressure on Reform at the next general election, given its standing in the polls for the Makerfield by-election. The race is expected to be tight between Labour’s Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and Reform UK’s Robert Kenyon, meaning any votes lost to Restore may cost Reform the election – something to which Finch is very much alive.
Finch says he is waiting to see the results in Makerfield before passing judgement but likens Restore to the British National Party (BNP) and questions whether its social media presence is “matching up” to votes. “What are their policies?” asks Finch. “What are their people? Look at other political parties in the past, when they stand a load of candidates – parties like BNP and Ukip… you can see their candidates and what they stand for.”
Finch tells The House he believes a Restore government would deport people based on their colour, and believes a lot of Restore voters do not realise this – nor do the two previously Reform Warwickshire councillors who have defected to the party. “[Gurkhas would] be gone… no excuse, no reason; gone, just because of their colour,” claims Finch.
While it’s obvious Finch sees Reform as different to Restore, he describes immigration as “terrible, terrible, terrible” and “a complete failure”, defending Reform’s Zia Yusuf’s remarks on deporting legal immigrants living in social housing.
“Zia is absolutely right, and we’re looking at it on the borough council,” says Finch. “Social housing, council housing, should be there for British nationals – British citizens.”
Finch also says veterans and care leavers should be at the top of housing lists, “not asylum seekers, not illegal immigrants” – though he does express some sympathy for women and children arriving on small boats. “I haven’t got a problem with young kids and women coming over on boats – if they have got a genuine refugee status and they need genuine help,” says Finch. “I haven’t got a problem with that, but I’m not seeing that materialise on the boats.”
The council leader is also dismissive of allegations that Reform’s agenda is racist, saying people “need to understand our policies a bit more”. “Those people that are just ignorant, they go: ‘Oh, you’re all racist’,” says Finch. “Well, if you sit down with me for an hour, I can tell you that I’m not racist.”
Sitting beneath a framed Reform football shirt reading ‘FARAGE’, Finch insists the party is not a “one-man band”, but one of policies, local champions, councillors, council leaders and MPs, as well as its high-profile leader. “I know what it’s like in a head office, I’ve seen it – I’ve seen the way it works,” he says. He adds that no politician alive deserves the keys to No 10 more than Nigel Farage. “He’s changed his country for the better – and he’s not even been elected to British Parliament until recently,” says the 19-year-old. “So, he deserves it.”
Finch also praises the recent policy announcement on tax-free overtime by the party. “The no tax on overtime – great policy… In the town centre, they love that policy,” says Finch. “I think it’s great. We have our own policies, we are our own party, we’ve got fresh-thinking people.”
As the interview winds down, we circle back to whether Finch has ambitions beyond leafy Warwickshire, a question side-stepped earlier on.
“To become a Member of Parliament for North Warwickshire and Bedworth, or the East, or wherever: it’d be a great honour to serve locally, in my home town – but I’m not focused on that at the moment,” he says. “When a general election comes, we’ll see, but I am 100 per cent committed to these two councils. That’s a new line – these two councils – because that’s why people get elected.”
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(Alamy)
7 min read
A data investigation by The House has revealed a rise in violence against women and girls despite Labour’s 2024 pledge to halve it. Cristina Trujillo reports
The Labour government is on a mission to halve violence against women and girls (Vawg) in the next 10 years – one of its most ambitious manifesto policies at the last general election. Yet a data investigation by The House has revealed that since 2024 Vawg has actually increased in the UK – despite a downward trend before that.
There were eight per cent more sexual offences in the UK in 2025 than in 2024, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, with stalking and harassment and domestic abuse also increasing. Although the Home Office tells The House that an increase in reporting to the police does not necessarily mean that Vawg has also risen, the self-completion Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) also shows some metrics increasing.
The news comes after Jess Phillips resigned as safeguarding minister last month, publishing a scathing letter that laid the blame for inaction over online child sex abuse squarely on Keir Starmer. It is “deeds, not words” that matter, she warned, using the suffragette refrain.
Birmingham City University criminologist Dr Max Hart says the increase in police-recorded offences and growing use of specialist services likely show different systems capturing different parts of an underlying rise.
“Schools, workplaces and online spaces are key sites whereby gendered harms are both produced, recorded and consumed. While we may have seen some formal progress in gender equality, the everyday production of misogynistic harms within these institutions remains,” he says.
“Thus, apparent changes in reporting behaviour, institutional responses and help-seeking can all impact data simultaneously as these underlying harms persist or intensify.”
Kevin Hoffin, a senior criminologist at the same university, adds: “I do believe there to be an increase in Vawg incidents over the last year, and I believe that a contributing factor [to] this is the experiences of immigrant women.”
A recent study by Women’s Aid showed that immigrant women were at an increased risk of domestic violence due to a range of structural factors, from barriers to advice to a national shortage of refuge spaces.
Hoffin points out that 31 per cent of Gen Z men agree that a wife should always obey her husband, according to a King’s College London study of 23,000 people released in March. Among Gen X men, the figure is 21 per cent – a difference of 10 percentage points. Sex offences went up in all of the UK’s Vawg hotspots – London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire – which have seen more sexual offences than anywhere else in the UK consistently since 2022, according to the ONS data.
Reports of Vawg crime are highest in London, where domestic abuse rose in problem areas from 2024 to 2025 – 14 per cent in Newham, eight per cent in Greenwich, seven per cent in Lewisham and six per cent in Ealing, Hounslow and Barking and Dagenham.
Figures obtained by The House via the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act show that in Greater Manchester in 2025, there was a reduction in rape and sexual offence crimes with female victims recorded since 2018. However, both have increased in the area since 2024, along with violent crimes against female victims. Another FOI request revealed that femicide, domestic abuse, sexual offences and rape have gone up since 2024 in the West Midlands overall, and Birmingham in particular.
Meanwhile, the CSEW estimates increases of six per cent and 45 per cent in some types of Vawg, while trialling a new survey process and split sample to combine the different types of Vawg, which estimates a decrease in certain areas.
Jo Lovett, senior research fellow at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit of London Metropolitan University, says: “The combined measure for Vawg is very new and still being developed and trialled, and it has a number of limitations, such as excluding certain forms of Vawg.”
While the new process is intended to foster a better understanding of Vawg in the long run, the ONS says the statistics produced are “subject to change as we evaluate future data and finalise methods”. While many ONS stats rose after 2024, domestic abuse, violent attacks against women and stalking and harassment fell between 2023 and 2024 in Vawg hotspots.
If there is a link between Labour’s work on tackling Vawg and an increase in reporting, it could be seen as a testament to the success of initiatives like Raneem’s Law, named after a woman who was murdered by her ex-husband in 2018, which was spearheaded in 2025 by then-home secretary Yvette Cooper. It placed domestic abuse specialists in nearly 1,000 control rooms across five police forces, aiming to increase specialist support for victims and improve emergency responses.
In 2023, Starmer made his promise to halve Vawg in 10 years following the publication of Baroness Casey’s review of policing, commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard by a Metropolitan Police officer in 2021. Lovett called this “a laudable but ambitious target”.
Confirming its pledge after its landslide 2024 electoral victory, Labour proposed the Crime and Policing Bill in February 2025, which will be the main legislative vehicle in its Vawg strategy and is now undergoing the final stages of approval.
The Online Safety Act 2023 criminalised cyberflashing and intimate image abuse, accounting for about 10,000 new crimes recorded in the year ending March 2025, while March 2026 saw Raneem’s Law finish its one-year pilot.
Labour then launched its Vawg strategy in December 2025, including new legislative proposals and funding and raising awareness around abuse, against the background of the MeToo-style discussion triggered by the Epstein files.
While this focus on Vawg may well be improving reporting rates, by empowering victims to inform authorities or police to respond, experts still cite funding and policy roadblocks.
The Vawg strategy asserts, for example, that “well-lit streets, accessible transport, and thoughtful urban design can deter violence”. But there is no mention of Vawg in the December 2025 amendments proposed to the National Planning Policy Framework, overhauling urban planning, transport and housing.
Solace Women’s Aid CEO Nahar Choudhury says: “While we welcome the fact that the government has committed more funding than ever before, there is still a long way to go to provide the sustainable support this sector needs.
“Unfortunately, the number of survivors isn’t decreasing; last year alone, Solace supported more than 17,000 women and children.” The year before, the organisation supported 14,435.
Women’s Aid CEO Farah Nazeer says: “We welcome the publication of the government’s strategy. It contains many welcome interventions… particularly in health and education, which will be critical for meeting the government’s own goals on prevention. However, the reality [is] that the sector remains in a funding crisis.”
She adds: “Services supporting Black, minoritised and migrant women have faced unacceptable rhetoric by certain politicians, which is further entrenching a hostile environment for migrants, including victims or survivors of abuse.”
Laura Riley, vulnerable victims co-lead for the British Society of Criminology’s Vulnerability Research Network, says: “Countless cases of police misogyny have also been exposed, and this has clearly impacted women’s ability to feel safe and protected.” She also raised cultural threats from “toxic narratives from the likes of Andrew Tate… to a desire to return to a more overtly patriarchal family structure”.
“There is evidence that those who weaponise the idea of ‘protect our girls’ may also be furthering ideas that contribute to keeping women and girls from feeling safe to express their needs and views,” Riley adds.
The Home Office welcomes the increase in reporting of violence against women and girls, saying: “It is vital that victims feel empowered to come forward, knowing that they will be supported and their cases taken seriously.”
It highlights tougher restrictions on registered sex offenders and strengthened protections for victims implemented by Labour, but continues: “Violence against women and girls is a national emergency… We know there is more to do.”
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Armed Forces Minister Al Carns has resigned over the government’s plans on defence spending. (Alamy)
3 min read
Armed Forces Minister Al Carns has resigned over the government’s plans on defence spending and its Northern Ireland Legacy Bill, claiming “the deal this country makes with the people who serve it” is “broken”.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, the former marine said the proposed Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was not good enough, stating it “is neither transformative enough nor sufficiently funded”, adding that “a serious country funds its defence to meet the threat it actually faces, not the threat it wishes it faced”.
“I have sat in the rooms, seen the assessments, and spoken to the commanders who will be asked to do more with less, and I cannot in good conscience stand at the dispatch box and defend a level of investment I know to be inadequate to the task,” wrote Carns.
Carns was also critical of the Northern Ireland Legacy Bill, describing it as “unfit for purpose” and that it currently “risks failing the very veterans it claims to protect”.
“I set out the changes I believed were necessary, and the lines which I could not in good conscience go beyond,” he wrote.
“Those lines have not been accepted. I have run out of room to argue this case honourably from inside government. A serving minister cannot ask fellow veterans to trust a process he no longer trusts himself.”
He also said “the machinery of government itself has been left to decay” and that “decisions that should take days, take months”.
In his resignation letter Carns, who is reportedly prepared to run in a Labour leadership contest should one be triggered, gave a broader critique of the government, too.
“Too many working people in this country feel insecure even when they are doing everything right,” he wrote
“They work hard, contribute, pay their taxes, and still feel one setback away from trouble. Public confidence in our institutions is weakening, and politics increasingly look performative while everyday life gets harder.”
His resignation comes hours after Defence Secretary John Healey resigned over the government’s defence spending plans, saying he had been “left with no other option” after being presented with details of how much additional money the government was planning to spend on the Defence Investment Plan (DIP).
“Without a DIP that meets the moment in this way, I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe,” wrote Healey in his resignation letter.
“After explaining to you that I would not be able to accept a DIP settlement that does not give our Forces the resources they need, I am now left with no other option than to submit my resignation as your Defence Secretary.”
In an interview with PoliticsHome, Lord Hutton, defence secretary between 2008 and 2009 under former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, said Healey’s resignation was a “colossal failure of government”.
The former defence secretary said the government would need to combine borrowing with spending cuts, including welfare, to fund the necessary increase to defence spending – stating he was “utterly frustrated” the government seemed “completely unable to address” the issue.
The departure of Carns from government so soon after Healey’s will pile further pressure on Prime Minister Keir Starmer, as the embattled Prime Minister attempts to keep his government together ahead of next week’s by-election which could see Labour Manchester mayor Andy Burnham elected to parliament in Makerfield.
Burnham, who has made no secret of his leadership ambitions, admitted on the BBC’s Question Time last week that he would run in any Labour leadership contest – accusing Wes Streeting, who resigned as Health Secretary last month over Starmer’s leadership and heavy by-election losses, of starting the contest already.
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