Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an estimate of the number of domestic abuse victims killed by a partner previously convicted of such an offence in each of the last 30 years.

The Home Office does not routinely collect data on the number of domestic abuse victims killed by a partner previously convicted of such an offence. However, the Home Office has funded the Domestic Homicide and Suspected Victim Suicides Project since 2020. This is led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing and hosted by the Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme.

The second 12-month report was published on 05 December 2022 and includes the analysis that within intimate partner homicides, the proportion of suspects previously known to police for domestic abuse was 51% in Year 1 and 63% in Year 2.

Reducing domestic homicide is a priority for the Home Office and as part of this in the Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan published in March 2022, we have committed to improving our knowledge about domestic abuse through better data. Any improvements in data on and knowledge of domestic abuse can be fed back into the system to tailor and refine the response to domestic abuse. The Home Office continue to fund the Domestic Homicide Project in order to further build the evidence base on what works to prevent domestic homicide.