Domestic Abuse Offences

Danny Chambers Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. The law is already going some way to achieve that. Domestic abuse is already an aggravating factor in sentencing at the back end, but it is not an aggravating factor at the front end in terms of the offence for which people can be convicted. We know there is a precedent for making domestic abuse an aggravating factor. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 introduced a number of aggravating factors, and it was extended to include racially and religiously aggravated offences. We ought to amend that legislation to include domestic abuse.

However, this is about far more than being able to include or exclude domestic abusers from early release schemes. This is also about data. I asked the Ministry of Justice a very simple written parliamentary question just before Christmas: how many domestic abusers are currently in prison and what is their reoffending rate? The response was:

“It is not possible to robustly calculate the number of domestic abusers in prison or their reoffending rate. This is because these crimes are recorded under the specific offences for which they are prosecuted”.

In other words, we do not know how many domestic abusers there are because there is no specific offence of domestic abuse in law. Instead, they are convicted of, for example, offences under the Offences against the Person Act 1861. This is a national scandal. We should know how many domestic abusers there are in prison.

The Government have a powerful ambition, which I fully support, to halve violence against women and girls over the next decade, but how can we possibly know whether we are achieving it if we do not know how many domestic abusers are in prison at any given time? More than that, if we are serious about reducing reoffending—I dedicated my career before coming into this place to doing exactly that kind of work—how can we know what kind of interventions are the most successful if we have no way of measuring that because there is no specific offence of domestic abuse in law?

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

I commend my hon. Friend for speaking so eloquently and movingly about his personal experiences. There is a recognised link between animal abuse and domestic abuse. I pay tribute to organisations such as the Links Group that train veterinary professionals to recognise when the cases they are seeing may be indicators of abuse or domestic abuse, which ties in exactly with what he is saying. If there is no specific offence of domestic abuse, it is really hard to signpost and give guidance to everyone in the community on how to proceed, so that people are identified and helped at an early stage.