The kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 sparked a nationwide conversation about women’s safety on the streets.

In the weeks after her death – at the hands of disgraced Met officer Wayne Couzens – readers expressed their concerns to this newspaper, with the majority of 800 survey respondents saying they often or usually feel unsafe.

Seventy-seven per cent from Barking and Dagenham said they often or usually felt unsafe living in the borough, with 67pc saying so in Redbridge, 66pc in Newham and 53pc in Havering.

In response to the public’s concern, the Met introduced an action plan on violence against women and girls, which aimed to increase the number of perpetrators brought to justice and raise women’s confidence in the police.

Initiatives included walk and talk sessions, where female officers walk the streets with women from the community and listen to their concerns; Safe Connection, which sees control rooms verify the identity of a lone plain-clothed male police officer if they have stopped a lone woman; and the Street Safe app, where people can anonymously tap on a location where they feel unsafe.

A year on, we want to find out whether anything has really changed – so we are once again asking women across north and east London to tell us how safe they feel on the street in their area.