Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of reviewing the definition of coercive and controlling behaviour within the Serious Crime Act 2015 to include extremist groups, cults and gangs.

Controlling or coercive behaviour (CCB) is an insidious form of domestic abuse. The CCB legislative framework was introduced in 2015 and was explicitly designed to address patterns of behaviour within relationships where the perpetrator and victim are “personally connected”, as outlined in Section 2 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. Expanding CCB beyond this context would risk undermining that clarity, creating uncertainty for police to identify, investigate and prosecute this offence.

We do not intend to expand the CCB offence beyond its current scope at this time.