The Home Office is improving collaboration with other departments, but still has a lot further to go, permanent secretary Sir Matthew Rycroft has said.
Appearing at a Public Accounts Committee session on the government’s efforts to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) on Monday, Rycroft was asked by Labour MP Nesil Caliskan why the department has “struggled to get buy-in from other departments” on VAWG efforts.
Caliskan pointed out that the oversight group established following the Home Office’s 2021 VAWG strategy only met four times in three years and asked Rycroft what the department is doing to ensure there is effective cross-departmental working on tackling VAWG.
Halving violence against women and girls in the next decade is one of the Labour government’s key pledges.
Rycroft said the new government has “elevated tackling violence against women and girls to a much higher level of priority” compared to the previous Conservative administration, which focused its efforts “most of all” on reducing homicide, serious violence and neighbourhood crime, and achieved its targets in those areas.
He said the higher prioritisation of VAWG, along with the new mission-based approach, has stimulated a more cross-government approach to the issue.
Rycroft, who is exiting his role at the end of the month, said he has been working hard to improve the Home Office’s “collaborative spirit” in his five years as the department’s perm sec.
"When I came into the Home Office, I had previously never worked in it – this was five years ago – and collaborative would not be the adjective that first came to mind in terms of my own view of what the Home Office was like as an organisation, from a position outside it,” Rycroft said.
“I have really tried to, with my senior colleagues, improve the reputation of the Home Office for its collaborative spirit. I would say there is quite a long way to go on that journey. Changing of culture as you know takes a very long time.”
Rycroft said he believes the department’s executive committee now has “a set of people who are absolutely driven to demonstrate that cross-system join-up, very much a mission-based approach, not just in the safer streets mission but in everything that we do in the Home Office now”.
He said there is “a lot further to go” to improve cross-government collaboration, adding: “But I hope that we have been moving in the right direction."
Speaking alongside the Home Office perm sec, Richard Clarke, the DG for the safer streets mission, said the department has “already got really ministerial momentum”, with the safer streets mission board meeting four times since its creation in September and the violence against women and girls sub-board meeting three times.
He added: “It’s important to emphasise as a senior civil servant just how clear to the civil service as well as publicly the prime minister is about putting missions genuinely at the heart of government.”
Clarke said he attends a regular stock take with the prime minister, home secretary and Rycroft to assess progress against the mission and that he feels “appropriately under pressure and held to account”.
“My aspiration from when I took on this role in July has been to be collaborative and demanding of my colleagues about making sure that we’re making real progress,” he added. “So I think the mission does feel different in practical terms and it certainly feels different in the sense of the expectation from the government as a whole.”
Clarke said the department is also working on specific areas where the absence of joined up data is the most significant potential barrier to delivery. He said the best example of this is, “by a long way, I think”, the criminal justice system and that the department has been working with colleagues from the Crown Prosecution Service, Attorney General's Office and Ministry of Justice to join up data across the criminal justice system.
The comments from the senior Home Office officials were backed up by senior civil servants in the Department for Education and Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government.
Asked by PAC chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown what they need from the Home Office to make efforts to tackle VAWG work better and more holistically, MHCLG social housing director Emma Payne said: “I would just echo what's been said about the cross government working.
“It really is stepping up, and there is a lot of collaboration going on: engagement at official level and ministerial level. So that's really, really positive.”
Payne added: “I agree we need to look holistically at what’s happening. Also in local places we need to look at things holistically too. That collaboration, sharing of evidence, sharing of data in understanding how things are playing out in local areas feels really important.”
Justin Russell, director general for families at the DfE, added: “I've also seen a step change in engagement on this issue across government.”
Russell said ministers and senior officials in the DfE have attended three cross-government meetings on VAWG and that he has seen “very good joint working” with the Home Office on initiatives like Operation Encompass, a scheme for the police to notify schools about domestic violence incidents.
He also pointed to the new multi-agency child protection teams involving the police, health, and children’s services within statutory partnerships to investigate, child protection cases, “a significant proportion of which are likely to involve violence against women and girls”.