Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps the Government is taking to prevent joint mortgages being used as a method of financial abuse.

Following our public consultation last year, on 21 January we published a landmark draft Domestic Abuse Bill, consultation response and research on the societal costs of domestic abuse. This work contains a ground-breaking series of measures to transform our response to all forms of domestic abuse – including economic abuse – by promoting awareness, supporting victims, tackling perpetrators and improving services.

We are explicitly including economic abuse in the proposed new statutory definition of domestic abuse in the draft Bill to acknowledge the life-changing impact that economic abuse can have on a victim’s life and to raise awareness of this issue amongst criminal justice agencies and frontline professionals.

In our Government consultation response published alongside the draft Bill we set out our commitment to fund the National Skills Academy £200,000 to develop and deliver financial capability training for frontline workers to support individuals who are experiencing economic abuse. We are also providing approximately £250,000 until 2020 to create a national advice service for banks and building societies, increase the capacity of existing telephone casework services for victims of domestic abuse and develop resources to help people identify if they are experiencing economic abuse.

In addition, we are working closely with UK Finance to support their work to encourage banks and the wider financial services sector to improve the support they provide to victims of domestic abuse accessing their services, such as the voluntary Code of Conduct for banks to sign up to and a Consumer Information Pack setting out for victims what support they can expect from their bank. We will continue to work with UK Finance to encourage banks and financial authorities to do more to support victims of domestic abuse and help them move forward to escape debt, joint accounts, and mortgages.

More widely, the Joint Fraud Taskforce is leading an ambitious programme of work to prevent all forms of fraud and protect the most vulnerable in our society who are often targeted by fraudsters.