Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to protect people whose partners fraudulently take out debts in their name without their knowledge.

Our landmark draft Domestic Abuse Bill and consultation response, published in January, includes further measures to help tackle domestic abuse, including introducing a statutory definition of domestic abuse to include a range of behaviours that go beyond physical abuse and explicitly recognise economic abuse.

We are including economic abuse in the new statutory definition of domestic abuse to acknowledge the life-changing impact that economic abuse can have on a victim’s life.

The Joint Fraud Taskforce is leading an ambitious programme of work to prevent all forms of fraud and protect the most vulnerable in our society who are often targeted by fraudsters.

We are working closely with UK Finance to support their work to encourage banks and the wider financial services sector to improve the support they provide to victims of domestic abuse accessing their services.

We will continue to work with UK Finance to encourage banks and financial authorities to do more to support victims of domestic abuse and help them move forward to escape debt, joint accounts, and mortgages

We have provided funding to the National Skills Academy to develop and deliver financial capability training for frontline workers to support individuals who are experiencing economic domestic abuse.

We will provide approximately £250,000 until 2020 to create a national advice service for banks and building societies, increase the capacity of existing telephone casework services for victims of domestic abuse and develop resources to help people identify if they are experiencing economic abuse.