4. Statement by the Leader of the House and Chief Whip: Update on Implementation of the Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:44 pm on 27 November 2018.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:44, 27 November 2018

Well, yes, thank you for those remarks. I want to pay tribute to our previous colleague Jeff Cuthbert, who is the police and crime commissioner, who has taken his passion in this regard into Gwent Police with him, and Gwent Police have indeed been good role models in this, and he's the lead police commissioner in this area. We work very closely with him to make sure that we understand what works, and, as I said, Gwent is one of the areas where we've been looking to see how we roll out the regional commissioning, because of the advanced nature of their arrangements.

David Rowlands raised an interesting point about data. That is an issue for us, and one of the reasons we're doing the review that the First Minister announced is to make sure that we do have all of the right data and, where we don't have it, we know in advance we don't have it and we put in place the right arrangements so that we can collect that data. And that data can come from all over the place: from A&E resources, from GPs, from programmes, from helplines, and all the rest of it. So, that's one of the many purposes of the review.

And just in terms of the normal behaviour and the perpetrator programmes, we know that they work. After the This Is Me campaign, we had an increased use of the Live Fear Free website by over 6,000 per cent. So, it really did work. Seven million impressions through tv and radio advertisements, a significant increase across the use of all of our social media channels—so, that's very good. We also know that calls to the helpline from concerned others doubled during the Don't Be a Bystander campaign period compared with the same period the year before. So, we know that they work and we collect the data to show that.

The last thing to say is that future campaigns are going to be focusing on coercive control. Deputy Presiding Officer, I've seen the storyboard for that; it actually moved me to tears, I have to say. We are launching those in January and we expect similar penetration and reach across the market to redouble our efforts to say what David Rowlands said, that this behaviour is simply not tolerable in any civilised society, never mind Wales.