Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee
12 March 2026
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Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee House of Lords
01:04 - 04:07
Speaker 1
Two one. Good morning, and welcome to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act, Committee. And we're looking at, the impact of the legislation which was introduced in 2021. And and it brought in a number of new offenses and and was hoping to create a new culture of response to domestic violence. And and so here we are taking evidence from, first of all, in the first panel, our senior police officers about the impact on policing.
So if I might, first of all, introduce our our witnesses for this session, we have assistant commissioner Louisa Rolfe. It's very nice to see you. She's the national police chiefs on the National Police Chiefs Council. Lisa began her police career with Avon and Somerset, and she spent twenty five years becoming the head of the CID there, developing developing specialist units in organized crime, counterterrorism intelligence, and and many different areas of crime investigation. And she moved to the West Midlands Police in December 2016.
And on her appointment as its deputy chief constable, there was great celebration. She's led diversity in domestic abuse, and she became the lead on the latter for the National Police Chiefs Council. And so it's really great to have you with all that expertise coming here today. And we also have Helen Millichap, and Helen Millichap is the deputy assistant commissioner of this same police chief's council, and, again, someone with considerable experience in dealing with violence against women and girls. And and she has really been involved greatly with public protection.
And so it's wonderful to see you, and thank you for coming and being with us today and bringing your expertise too. Now I'm going to start off with sort of really the general feeling that you have about the impact of this new law. You know that it introduced new abuse offenses, coercive and controlling behavior, and understanding that abuse, domestic abuse went beyond the use of violence, psychological and emotional abuse, financial abuse, and the introduction of an offense of nonfatal strangulation. And I really just wanted to ask you about what the challenges were for the police in facing such a a new framework and a a new set of offenses, and whether whether they really are understood by the police and and being used in their responses to domestic violence. And then I'll ask you about whether there are ways that you would recommend that we might take things forward.
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