Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to support perpetrator behaviour change programmes to support services to work together to tackle high-harm perpetrators of domestic violence.

The Government is committed to ensuring that abusive behaviour is tackled directly with perpetrators of abuse and the root causes of domestic abuse are addressed.

This is why in the financial year 2020/21 we committed £10 million to tackle perpetrators of domestic abuse. From this we awarded over £7 million to Police and Crime Commissioners to support the introduction of innovative approaches to preventing domestic abuse, including the expansion of interventions such as the Drive Project that work with high harm perpetrators of domestic abuse.

For the year 2021/22 we have £25 million - more than doubling the funding for tackling domestic abuse perpetrators. Building on the success of last year’s fund, I am pleased to confirm that on Friday 21st May we launched a new Perpetrator Programme Fund for Police and Crime Commissioners to bid into totalling £11.1m. The purpose of this fund is to support the introduction of more perpetrator programmes. The competition will be live for six weeks, closing on 2nd July.

With the remainder of the £25 million funding, we will be considering how we can best support the projects we funded in 20/21, as well as continuing to build up our evidence base by investing in research, technology and innovation to tackle perpetrators and keep victims safe.