Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate her Department has made of the number of women murdered by domestic abusers in (a) England and Wales and (b) Merseyside in each of the last five years.

The latest published data on the number domestic homicides between 2018/19 and 2022/23 in (a) England and Wales and (b) Merseyside can be found in the table below.

Table: Number of domestic homicides of women aged 16 and over, Merseyside and England and Wales, 2018/19 to 2022/23

The scale of violence against women and girls is intolerable and this Government will treat it as the national emergency that it is. The Government has made it our mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and tackling domestic homicide is a key part of that mission.

Domestic homicide is a horrific crime that disproportionately impacts women. Every death linked to domestic abuse should be considered for a Domestic Homicide Review (DHR) to ensure that national and local agencies, local communities and society as a whole continues to learn lessons from domestic abuse related deaths and treats every death as preventable.