Domestic Abuse Commissioner Raises Alarm Over Learning from Domestic Abuse Related Deaths

The Domestic Abuse Commissioner highlights an alarming lack of funding for understanding and preventing deaths linked to domestic abuse, essential for informing Domestic Abuse Risk Assessments.

Since 2011, local councils have been required to conduct domestic homicide reviews (DHRs), costing an average of £10,000, but no funding has been provided for addressing the issues raised within them. In 2016, the scope of DHRs was expanded to include domestic-abuse-related suicides, also without additional funding, resulting in an increase in review cases.

This demand comes at a time when local authorities are facing budget cuts, leaving them with limited resources to manage public services and conduct crucial reviews to inform safe practice. As a result, local areas have expressed concerns to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner about their ability to carry out reviews without dedicated funding.

Dame Nicole Jacobs, Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, said:

When someone loses their life to domestic abuse, we should be doing all we can to learn from this tragedy and ensure it never happens again. While I’m pleased to see the government reaffirm its commitment to deliver a digital oversight tool, the lack of dedicated funding to ensure councils can conduct these potentially life-saving reviews is deeply concerning – particularly when councils are telling me they will struggle to commission them if further resource isn’t found.

Read the Domestic Abuse Commissioner's full press release here

Lessons from Serious Case and Domestic Homicide Reviews

Learning from Case Reviews underpins DVACT-PAI's Standards for Domestic Abuse Risk Assessors.

Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) have consistently raised the issue of inadequate risk assessment and poor understanding of the role played by coercive control in working with vulnerable families. In 2011 we undertook a comprehensive analysis of Serious Case Reviews (SCRs) where domestic abuse was identified as a key factor in the death or serious harm of a child. Consistent themes emerged showing that professionals involved in child care tended to have a poor understanding of risk and that as a result assessments were inadequate. In 2025 DVACT-PAI repeated the exercise with findings showing that poor risk assessments continued to be a significant factor in 32% of cases and that an alarming 59% of cases showed professionals had insufficient understanding or a lack of confidence about domestic abuse and its nuances.

This suggests that more work needs to be done towards improving expertise and risk assessment in cases where children are at risk of serious harm due to domestic abuse, with DHRs playing a pivotal role in informing those factors that must be considered within them.

You can view the full standards document and our Register of Expert Domestic Abuse Risk Assessors here.

About DVACT-PAI

DVACT-PAI are a team of domestic abuse experts, available throughout the UK, who provide assessments, programmes, consultancy and training to local authorities and the family courts. Our experts have decades of experience working directly with domestic abuse perpetrators and victims, as specialist assessors and as expert witnesses in the family courts.

​DV-ACT was formed with the aim of using our expertise to help safeguard children from abuse, this is at the heart of everything that we do. To read more about us please visit our post - Who are DVACT-PAI?