Domestic Violence

(asked on 20th September 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to help ensure consistency in police force’s response to domestic violence across the country.


Answered by
Rachel Maclean Portrait
Rachel Maclean
This question was answered on 30th September 2021

The Government is committed to clamping down on domestic abuse. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 achieved Royal Assent in April and is a game- changing piece of legislation which transforms our response to these crimes. We plan to publish the Domestic Abuse Strategy later this year. It will seek to transform the whole of society’s response to domestic abuse, including by strengthening the systems in place to tackle it and through a focus on pursuing perpetrators of these crimes.

The College of Policing has issued guidance to all police forces on the ‘Identification, assessment and management of serial or potentially dangerous domestic abuse and stalking perpetrators’. The key principles set out that forces should have processes in place to identify serial or potentially dangerous domestic abuse or stalking perpetrators and ensure that information about the perpetrator is recorded on the Police National Computer, the Police National Database or ViSOR as appropriate.

The Domestic Abuse Matters training developed by the College of Policing in partnership with SafeLives and has been delivered to 27 forces as of April 2021, with a further six forces in discussion. We continue to work closely with the College to see what more can be done to encourage take up of the Domestic Abuse Matters programme. We look forward to working with DCC Maggie Blyth as the new NPCC national VAWG lead, a key recommendation of the first ever VAWG strategy which reported this summer.

Our landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021 places the guidance on which the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (also known as Clare’s Law) is based into statute. This will place a duty on the police to apply the guidance unless there is good reason not to and will strengthen the visibility and consistent operation of the scheme across England and Wales.

We are also working to address the recommendations made in the HMICFRS review of policing domestic abuse in the pandemic.

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