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  • Lead Member Trafford Council
  • Participating Members Stevenage Borough Council, Swindon Borough Council, Trafford Council
  • Year 2025
  • Status Policy Labs

Principles met

  • Innovation

    We will embrace innovation in how we work with local communities to drive positive change.

  • Learning

    We will capture and ‘expand’ the experience and learning from individual projects and approaches in order to encourage broader application of co-operative principles within individual member Councils and across the Network.

  • New models of meeting priority needs

    In exploring new ways of meeting the priority needs of our communities we will encourage models, such as co-operatives and mutuals, which give greater influence and voice to staff and users. in designing and commissioning public services and in determining the use of public resources.

About the project

Introduction

The partner councils: Trafford Council, Stevenage Council and Swindon Council, have come together throughout the Policy Lab (October 2023 – March 2025) to promote learning, build collaborative relationships and demonstrate how cooperative councils can use cooperative values to drive innovation in the violence against women and girls (VAWG) sector and improve services for victims/survivors.

This Policy Lab focused on demonstrating innovative and cooperative models from places leading the way on tackling VAWG to share this learning with others. Women’s safety from violence impacts all women’s lives, with 97 percent of women aged 18 to 24 having experienced sexual harassment in public spaces and more than 70% of women of all ages having endured such behaviour.

Around one in four women (27%) have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16.

For men, the figure is around one in seven (13.9%), with 93% of perpetrators in domestic abuse cases being male.

With a national government promise to halve VAWG in a decade, this policy lab springboarded off this commitment to share creative interventions, challenge traditional approaches and seek to improve outcomes through shared expertise.

This report sets out the CCIN Values and Principles that were explored during this Policy Lab; the approach of the Policy Lab explains the activities and events that took place during the Policy Lab; the insights that came from the facilitated discussions between sector experts (which took place at the events) and then several case studies that give best practise examples that can be learnt from and replicated by others.

We hope that this report will serve as a learning document for other local authorities and their partners in the VAWG space.

 

ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT 11 September 2025

Speakers

Cllr Jim Robbins – Chair, Cooperative Councils’ Innovation Network & Leader of Swindon Borough Council
Emma Moseley – Senior Policy Manager, Trafford Council – The process
Cllr Joanne Harding – Executive Member for Finance, Change and Governance, Trafford Council – Why is this work important?
Carol Judge-Campbell – GMCA Case Study
Tania King – Domestic Abuse Liaison Officer – Stevenage Case Study 
Cllr Jim Robbins – Next steps
 
Watch the video of the online launch below.

Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Recording of the online launch

For further information contact the Project Lead:

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