Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee — hearing of 2 July 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 02:45

Speaker 1

Good morning and welcome to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee, which is a committee that is looking at a piece of legislation passed in 2021, so five years ago, and we're looking at whether it is achieving all the things that had been hoped for at the time of it being legislated. And so this is what's called post-legislative scrutiny. And we've been hearing evidence from many people and today we're going to hear evidence from the person who probably knows so much more than any of us, the Commissioner for Domestic Abuse, and I'm going to introduce her to everyone. Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, was appointed the first Domestic Abuse Commissioner in 2019. And Dame Nicole Jacobs has dedicated her career to supporting victims and survivors.

She's got nearly 30 years experience in domestic abuse services, policy, and intervention, and during this time she's worked as an independent domestic violence advocate and coordinated the community response to domestic abuse in the United Kingdom. She also has been the CEO of Standing Together Against Domestic Violence and a lifetime's experience. It's really wonderful to see you here, Dame Nicole, and welcome. Now, we really just wanted from you first of all a quick backgrounder that we've consistently been hearing that the police still have a tendency to treat domestic abuse sort of incident by incident. You know, it's incident-based.

They're given a call out, they arrive at a scene and they deal with that particular incident, rather than focusing on a pattern of behavior and particularly there's that issue of coercion and control which was introduced into the legislation five years ago, and whether that is fully understood is one of the questions we're addressing. And so I wanted to know what you think needs to be done to sort of change the incident-based aspect of this and turn it into more of an overall understanding of the history and the patterns of behavior that might be in the background. What needs to be done to ensure that our national police forces address the current regional variations in police response, because we're hearing evidence that there is a difference in different parts of the country.

02:45 - 03:08

Speaker 3

Yes, thank you. Good morning everyone. I'm really thrilled to be here and really pleased to see all the evidence you've gathered. So I won't go into all of what you already know about this issue and I'll try to just target to your actual specific question. I think for coercive and controlling behavior, you have to get over a couple of obstacles.

The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers

Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.

The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.