Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many Domestic Homicide Reviews were awaiting their first assessment by the Home Office Quality Assurance Board on 1 September 2026; and what the median time was between submission by a Community Safety Partnership and that first assessment in the most recent year for which figures are available.

Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews (DARDRs), previously known as Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs), offer a vital opportunity for national and local agencies, local communities, and society as a whole to learn lessons from fatal domestic abuse and to treat every death as preventable.

The Home Office is reforming DARDRs to improve their efficiency, enhance accountability, and ensure that recommendations are disseminated and embedded more swiftly. An updated version of the statutory guidance that underpins DARDRs was published on 15 September 2026.

The statutory guidance sets out the importance of involving family and friends closely in the DARDR process. The 2016 DHR guidance (used for cases commissioned before 15 September 2026) outlines that the review Chair should provide the family with ‘regular engagement and updates on progress through the advocate, including the timeline expected for publication’.

Historically there have been significant delays in the DARDR quality assurance (QA) process. To resolve this, we have reformed the QA process and introduced a new DARDR Quality Assurance Board, appointing three new public office holders. The Board members bring decades of frontline experience and are experts in domestic 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.

As of 1 September 2026, there were 62 reviews awaiting quality assurance. We have successfully reduced the backlog from 11 months in September 2025, to a report being heard within 6 weeks of submission in September 2026. We do not hold the information on the number of outstanding DARDRs commissioned before the 15 September 2026.

The Home Office has committed to funding and delivering an oversight mechanism for recommendations made as part of DARDRs. This work is currently underway, and further details will be announced in due course. In December 2025 we published the Freedom from Violence and Abuse, Cross Governmental Strategy and Action Plan. This outlines that going forward all national recommendations from DARDRs will be shared with the Ministerial Violence Against Women and Girls Board, which will provide governance to ensure that recommendations lead to meaningful change and drive accountability.