What a surprise, another Tory plan to protect women has failed – the 888 app was never going to work

An initiative backed by the government was scrapped earlier this week, but it garnered so little attention, you would be forgiven for not noticing.

In October 2021, then Home Secretary Priti Patel announced her support for a phone service to help protect women who were travelling home alone. 

Proposed by BT, who also manage the 999 number, the scheme would involve calling or texting 888 at the beginning of a journey. 

The user’s phone would then be tracked by GPS with the app sending a message to check whether the user had got home.

If a reply wasn’t received, emergency contacts would be notified, and then the police.

The 888 scheme was conceived by BT Chief Executive Philip Jansen in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard and was publicly supported by Priti Patel, who presumably wanted to prove just how seriously her government took women’s safety.

It was an obvious cause to get behind at the time, but as the women’s movement all too well, it’s deeds not words that make the difference.

It was a nice idea, but it will take more than nice ideas to end violence against women.

In the end, 888 never happened. Priti Patel got the plaudits for backing the scheme, but not any results. And women are no safer than they were in 2021.

When Rishi Sunak entered No 10 a year later, he too underlined the importance of women’s safety. 

‘I want to make sure that my kids and everyone else can walk around safely. That’s what any parent wants for their children.’

Yet he did not mention the 888 scheme, or how the estimated £50million project was going.

Months on from that, there are still unanswered questions about 888.

Had it received funding from the government? Was it in development? If not, was there an alternative plan in place?

We don’t have a definitive answer, but what we do know for certain is that 888 has now been abandoned.

What we also know is how many women feel their safety is increasingly being used as a PR opportunity by the Conservatives, with very little substance to back it up.

Our PM says he cares about the safety of women, yet the only policy he has backed in the name of ‘women’s safety’ is a policy to reduce the rights of trans people by blocking the Gender Recognition Reform Act that was passed by the Scottish Parliament. 

He claims that stopping trans women from accessing single sex spaces somehow protects women. 

Even though trans women are not the problem – violent and abusive cis men are.

Sunak said the case of Isla Bryson – a trans rapist of women – highlighted the challenges of the issue when defending his stance, even though Isla was always going to be housed separately to female prisoners.

We all know of male police officers who have been found guilty of using their position of authority in order rape female victims, so is the logical endpoint of Sunak’s position be banning all men from joining the police force?

Of course not.

If he cares so much about women’s safety – as he claims – why didn’t he back Labour’s plan to have rape and serious sexual offences units in every police force in the UK?

I can’t help but feel that women’s safety is only mentioned by Sunak when it can be used as an opportunity to score political or ideological points. His commitment to real, substantial safety measures appears to be lacking.

And if even the government backed substantial efforts, the proposed 888 scheme was nothing of the sort.

Yet again, the plan was for women to take more ownership over their own safety, rather than for the state to commit to putting in the work to end male violence.

Being tracked by GPS would do little to stop a woman from being attacked by a predator. 

All it does is alert the police to where our bodies might be found – it does nothing to actually prevent violence.

When I first heard about the 888 scheme, I was surprised to hear that the government actually wanted there to be an alert system in place if a woman went missing. 

Particularly considering the fact that relatives of missing women have found themselves initially brushed off by police.

Last month, the mother of a woman who went missing after a night out was reportedly told by officers to stop ringing them and that her daughter was probably just hungover. 

In fact her daughter, 20-year-old Sophie Russon had been killed in a car crash along with two others.

The 888 scheme was clearly never workable. It was an idea cooked up by a well-meaning, but misguided male executive at BT.

The proposed £50million that would have been needed to fund the scheme could instead have been directed to sexual assault and rape crisis centres. 

It could have been spent on reducing the record backlog of rape cases in our court system.

Instead, 888 was an empty promise of an empty gesture. 

Even if it had been fully funded and rolled out, I don’t believe that it would have prevented a single act of violence against women.

A BT spokesperson told HuffPost: ‘It became clear over the course of our work that it does not make sense, as we thought initially, to launch a new BT service, but rather to share our learnings for the wider benefit of others already working on this.’

The company said any woman who are concerned for their safety should continue to contact 999 instead.

Once again, nothing has changed.

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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