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 a domestic abuse 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 a domestic abuse offence. However, the Home Office has funded the Domestic Homicide and Suspected Victim Suicides Project since 2020. This was led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing and hosted by the Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme to monitor domestic homicides during the pandemic to build our evidence base on domestic homicides and domestic abuse perpetrators.

The first 12-month report was published on 25 August 2021 and includes the analysis that of the 58% of all suspects previously known to police as suspects (133) and four-fifths (82%) were known to police for domestic abuse offending. This was a combination of suspects known solely for domestic abuse offending and those known for both domestic and non-domestic abuse offending. Expressed as a proportion of the whole dataset, this means that 48% of suspects were previously known to police for perpetrating domestic abuse.

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 and the second year report will be published in Autumn 2023.