Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, ⁠⁠what the reasons are for the time taken for the commissioning of Domestic Homicide Reviews, including (a) resource levels, (b) police investigations, (c) coronial proceedings and (d) capacity of independent chairs.

Domestic homicide reviews (DHR) offer a vital opportunity for national and local agencies, local communities and society as a whole to learn lessons from domestic abuse related deaths and treat every death as preventable. However, whilst the Government remains committed to the fundamental principles of the DHR process, I recognise that there is room for improvement and that more must be done to improve how DHRs are currently conducted.

DHRs are the responsibility of local Community Safety Partnerships. The Home Office provides guidance through statutory guidance; however, it does not get involved in local processes or individual cases.

The Home Office has been undertaking a programme of work to reform DHRs. The aim of these reforms is to increase efficiency, enhance accountability, and ensure that recommendations are disseminated and embedded swiftly. The Home Office is planning to publish updated statutory guidance to ensure that a more effective and streamlined process is put in place going forward. This is due to be published within the coming months.

Historically there have been significant delays in the DHR quality assurance (QA) process. To resolve this, we have now reformed the QA system and launched a new DHR Quality Assurance Board, appointing three new public office holders. The Board members bring decades of frontline experience and are experts in domestic abuse with specialisms in policing, stalking, ‘honor’-based abuse, and economic abuse. This replaces the former QA Panel and is designed to streamline review procedures, ensure consistent, high-quality feedback, and provide Community Safety Partnerships with more timely responses going forward.

Each DHR is unique, and therefore the timescales are variable, however, the statutory guidance is clear that local areas should be proportionate with scope and time frames and that any delays are clearly accounted for in the final DHR. Due to the variety of different cases, we are not able to comment on specific delays in each case.