Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the Government's policies on homicide prevention.

On 17 October, the Office for National Statistics published the latest crime statistics for the year ending June 2019. These show a 5% decrease in police recorded homicide compared to the previous year. There was also a 5% decrease in attempted murder offences in the latest year compared to the previous year. The Government will continue to take decisive action to bear down on all forms of serious violence, including knife crime and domestic abuse, by giving the police the resources and powers they need to tackle and investigate these crimes. In addition, we have introduced a landmark Domestic Abuse Bill and a wide-ranging package of non-legislative measures to improve the protection available to victims and to strengthen the use of Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs), ensuring that the learning from DHRs is effectively shared and put into practice to avoid future homicides.