Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many requests under the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme by (a) women and (b) men have (i) been made and (ii) been successful in each police force since the introduction of that scheme.

The Home Office does not hold the information requested. Individual police forces are responsible for collecting information relating to the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme.

As part of its commitment to take forward the recommendations arising from the report published in March 2014 by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary "Everyone’s business: Improving the police response to domestic abuse", the Home Office is taking forward proposals to develop national data standards that enable consistent and comparable data on domestic abuse to be collected by the police and submitted as part of the Annual Data Return from April 2015. We also plan to evaluate by the end of the financial year how roll-out of the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme has been implemented, and we will be working with the police to collect data on the number of national disclosures to support this evaluation.

In addition, the police are incorporating the Scheme into their action plans setting out how they are taking steps to improve their approach to domestic abuse.