Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure the effective management and monitoring of serial preparators of domestic abuse.

In March 2022, we published the cross-Government Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan. The Plan delivers on the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act duty to publish a comprehensive Perpetrator Strategy. It sets out how we will bring more perpetrators to justice and reduce reoffending, including £75 million for tackling perpetrators over three years to fund interventions for perpetrators to disrupt or change their behaviour, evaluation of interventions, and further research to continue to build our understanding of ‘what works’.

Over the last three years we have been investing in increasing the availability of interventions for domestic abuse perpetrators, including behaviour change and stalking programmes, and expanding projects such as Drive. We have awarded Police and Crime Commissioners £16.9 million in the last financial year and will soon be launching the next iteration of funding for PCCs.

However, we know more needs to be done to robustly manage the most harmful perpetrators of domestic abuse. In the Domestic Abuse Plan we set out our intention to explore options for how best to do this, including through exploring the feasibility of a domestic abuse register. We are currently considering the various options for what form a perpetrator register could take – it is important this is done thoroughly so as not to cause unintended consequences.

The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 legislated for a new Domestic Abuse Protection Notice (DAPN) and civil Domestic Abuse Protection Order (DAPO). The new order will be available in all court jurisdictions and breach will be a criminal offence. In addition to prohibitions, the DAPO will be able to impose electronic monitoring requirements and referrals onto perpetrator programmes to help manage repeat offending. DAPNs and DAPOs will be piloted from Spring 2024 test their impact and effectiveness before an expected national roll-out.