Safe Care at Home Review

1. Strengthening accountability and oversight mechanisms to better protect and support victims.
2. Strengthening training and guidance so this type of harm and relevant legislative protections are better understood by frontline professionals.
3. Improving the data and evidence available about this type of harm.

1. DHSC and the Home Office will encourage the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, the Victims’ Commissioner and the Chief Social Worker, to review, promote and disseminate best practices concerning the protection of people with care and support needs – specifically those who are at risk of being abused in their own home by the people providing their care.
2. DHSC will review sections of the Care Act 2014 guidance covering safeguarding roles and responsibilities, identifying opportunities to clarify the roles and responsibilities of government departments and statutory agencies, and rights and redress for victims and survivors. If changes to statutory guidance cannot be prioritised, DHSC will explore opportunities to develop or amend non-statutory guidance.
3. DHSC and the Home Office, working with the Chief Social Worker, will regularly bring together representatives from across government to promote better join up between departments with oversight responsibilities and monitor the progress of actions from this review, leveraging existing governance where appropriate. Attendees of this new cross-government meeting may include members of the DHSC Adult Safeguarding Forum, chaired by the Chief Social Worker and Chief Nurse convening key representatives of organisations with safeguarding duties (local authorities) and responsibilities (including the CQC, police and the NHS).

1. DHSC will explore how findings from the CQC local authority assessment framework could better support safeguarding outcomes. One of the four themes that CQC will assess local authorities on is ‘how local authorities ensure safety within the system’. This will include assessing local authorities on the following quality statement:

2. The Home Office will invest £3 million specifically for ‘by and for’ organisations over 2023/24 and 2024/25, including organisations who support victims of abuse with different protected characteristics, for example, older victims or victims living with disability.

1. DHSC will consider opportunities to strengthen the oversight of SARs, to monitor the effective implementation of SAR recommendations by reviewing the SAR national Escalation Protocol via engagement with SAB Chairs. Any updates to the protocol could learn from emerging best practice in the development of other oversight initiatives, such as the Domestic Homicide Review oversight mechanism and the Wales ‘Single Unified Safeguarding Response’.
2. DHSC will continue to engage regularly with the SAB Chairs network via their network meetings, to proactively discuss this review’s key findings on what SARs should consider (including links to other reviews and perpetrator behaviour), with a view to encouraging best practice and reflecting any relevant changes in the SAR quality markers.
3. DHSC will review the Care Act 2014 guidance sections covering safeguarding roles and responsibilities, including current guidance on SARs as part of action (b) to tackle the fragmented oversight of safeguarding of people with care and support needs in England (review of Care Act guidance sections covering safeguarding roles and responsibilities).
4. DHSC will explore commissioning another analysis of SARs, building on the SAB Chair analysis completed between 2017-19; where the SARs relate to abuse at home, identify key areas for improvement and share with relevant stakeholders, including through the new cross-government meetings referenced in action (c) to tackle the fragmented oversight of safeguarding of people with care and support needs in England. This could include looking specifically at findings from SARs that mention power of entry, and consideration should be given to reviewing power of entry related findings from SARs on a regular basis.
5. DHSC and the Home Office, working with other government departments, will consider ways in which to incorporate the voices of victims and survivors in policy-making and support operational safeguarding improvements, including where relevant the Domestic Abuse Commissioners’ lead on victim engagement.
6. DHSC will ensure actions from the review, delivered by funded partners via the sector-led improvement offer, are informed by the voices of victims and survivors with personal experience.
7. The Home Office is funding the Domestic Abuse Commissioner to develop a National Domestic Homicide and Suicide Oversight Mechanism. The mechanism will be used to strengthen the evidence base in this area and to hold national and local agencies to account in implementing learning to prevent future deaths and will draw on data from other post-death and serious incident reviews, including coroner’s reports and SARs. Home Office will consider insights and evidence from this mechanism.

1. The Home Office and DHSC will consider how to support agencies with statutory responsibilities to improve training among relevant frontline professionals on existing guidance and legislation to protect adults at risk of or experiencing abuse by people providing their care in their own home. This will empower professionals to use the full range of legislative protective measures and powers available, including by working with the College of Policing on relevant training and guidance for police officers.
2. The Home Office and DHSC will consider how to use government channels to increase awareness amongst frontline staff of the prevalence and signs of abuse of adults by people providing care in their own home.
3. Government will build on existing communication activities to help to raise public awareness of this form of abuse, with a focus on economic abuse and abuse of older people.
4. As part of reforming the Domestic Homicide Review process, Home Office will launch a public consultation on the Domestic Homicide Review statutory guidance. We will use this as an opportunity to improve and strengthen guidance on how Domestic Homicide Reviews are conducted and what they must consider. This may include: (1) where possible strengthening the voices of victims, (2) improving awareness of forms of domestic abuse such as economic abuse and CCB, (3) integrating cross-government reviews such as SARs as evidence and (4) strengthening understanding and consideration of protected characteristics and intersectionality, including for example, age and disability.

1. DHSC will review any new and relevant evidence on powers of entry for social workers since this issue was last considered by government during the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. This should include Safeguarding Adult Reviews in England and the use of equivalent powers in Scotland and Wales.
2. DHSC and the Home Office will work with local authorities, the NHS and the police to identify opportunities to improve the consistency in application of risk assessment processes to better protect adults with care and support needs receiving care in their own homes from abuse, including through the sector-led improvement offer.
3. DHSC and the Home Office will work with local authorities, the NHS and the police to identify opportunities to improve reporting and recording practices to take into account economic abuse and abuse in care contexts, for example recording the use and effectiveness of court orders.
4. DHSC will explore commissioning a new, one-off qualitative survey for local authority partners to understand their views on improvements to the reporting and recording practices on this topic, via the sector-led improvement offer.
5. Home Office and Ministry of Justice will pilot the new Domestic Abuse Protection Orders in three pilot sites and will consider how to review their effectiveness during the pilot, to determine whether the new notices and orders should be rolled out nationally. Third parties (with leave of the court) will be able to apply to the family court for a Domestic Abuse Protection Order on behalf of someone else, to protect victims from all forms of domestic abuse, including non-physical abuse and controlling or coercive behaviour. The police will also be able to apply for these orders directly in the magistrates’ courts, and criminal, family and civil courts. The court will also be able to make these orders on conviction of a criminal offence involving domestic abuse.

1. The DHSC and the Home Office will work with other government departments to better understand where links have been made, and where further links could be explored between the information captured by relevant existing data sources on the prevalence and forms of abuse experienced at home by people with care and support needs by carers. Data sources could include NHS Digital SAC data, the Domestic Homicide Reviews repository, SAR library, cold case reviews, prevention of death reports, coroners’ reports, mental health risk assessments, CSEW and CQC safeguarding data.
2. The Health and Care Act 2022 includes provisions for the CQC to assess the performance of local authorities’ delivery of their adult social care duties, as set out under the Care Act 2014, including those relating to safeguarding. DHSC will work with the CQC to consider how the recommendations and outcomes of this review could inform CQC’s new assessment of local authorities.
3. To support strengthening evidence and data, the Home Office will build an online repository to hold all Domestic Homicide Reviews which will go live later this year. The repository will allow stakeholders and academics to analyse patterns in domestic homicides, coming to a fuller understanding of potential triggers and causes. Within the repository we will be collecting data on victims and perpetrators of domestic homicide who were carers, either for each other or for someone else in their lives, and other demographic data such as age. The site will be publicly accessible and safeguarding professionals will be able to search for Domestic Homicide Reviews where either the victim or perpetrator was a carer and identify themes, learning and actions that they can take away to improve their own agencies’ responses to victims of domestic abuse in the future.