Government proposals to overhaul England’s planning system fail to mention women or girls and ignore official recommendations to keep women safe made after the death of Sarah Everard, experts have told the Guardian.
Draft planning proposals – published two days before the government’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG) – are likely to “embed risk and inequality” despite the strategy’s insistence that “design and planning are critical tools” in keeping women safe, MPs campaigners and urban planners have said.
The VAWG strategy and part 2 of the Angiolini inquiry, commissioned after the murder of Everard – both published in the same month as the planning proposals – call for women’s safety to be embedded into the planning of public spaces.
But the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which sets out the government’s intent to massively increase housebuilding, has “no references whatsoever to women, girls, gendered safety, or violence against women in the built environment”, the Liberal Democrat MPs Anna Sabine and Gideon Amos said.
In a letter to the housing minister Matthew Pennycook and the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, as first reported in the Planner, they wrote: “Planning policy is one of the most powerful structural tools the state has to prevent harm before it occurs. If the NPPF is silent on gendered safety, we embed risk and inequality into the fabric of every new development.”
When contacted by the Guardian about the letter, a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) spokesperson said: “The NPPF is a planning document. It sets out guidelines for housebuilding and planning in England. The VAWG strategy is about protecting women and girls from violence and misogyny.”
They said it was “unclear as to why anyone would expect the two things to be combined” and therefore it was difficult to respond to the criticism. It is understood the ministers have not yet formally responded.
It was, said Sabine, an “incredibly arrogant” response. “If you don’t understand how women’s safety ties in with how we design new spaces, you shouldn’t be working at MHCLG,” she said.
Susannah Walker, a gender planning consultant who noticed the omission, said the proposals ignored the VAWG strategy and the second part of the report by Dame Elish Angiolini, commissioned after the murder of Everard four years ago. Everard was murdered by a serving police officer, Wayne Couzens, in March 2021 after being abducted off a London street while walking home.
Angiolini said promises of sweeping changes to make women safer as they walk the streets had been hampered by a “paralysis”, and officers tasked with “designing out” crime, which exist in every police force, were sometimes ignored and had not all “been tasked with focusing on preventing violence against women and girls”.
The VAWG strategy states that: “Women and girls must both feel safe and be safe in every aspect of public life […] Well-lit streets, accessible transport, and thoughtful urban design can deter violence, reduce opportunities for harm, and send a clear message that public spaces belong to everyone.”
Phillips has long-argued that in order to achieve the government’s stated ambition of halving VAWG in a decade, all government departments had to play a part.
If councils were not specifically instructed to consider women and girls’ safety, they would not do so, said Walker. “Councils are underfunded, so if it doesn’t go in the NPPF, then it just gets left out because it’s not mandatory,” she said. “Coming after two high-level government reports which both talk about designing space to keep women safe, this is the most extraordinary omission.”
Sabine told the Guardian she did not doubt Phillips’s commitment to get cross-departmental buy-in on ending violence against women and girls, and asked her to “march into” Pennycook’s office to change the draft framework.
“We have a world that’s largely designed by and for men,” she said. “But if you take into account women and girls’ safety, you can make very practical decisions that will really benefit women and girls’ lives.”
