How social landlords can tackle domestic abuse

Rachael Williamson, director of policy, communications and external affairs at the Chartered Institute of Housing, says this pledge has “helped drive the right kind of behaviours and training, so frontline staff are more equipped to know what to look out for”. This includes repairs staff being trained to recognise the signs of abuse when visiting a home, or allocations teams understanding coercive control.

Housing organisations also need to be aware that it is not just residents who can experience domestic abuse, and Make a Stand equips them to more effectively support colleagues who might be victim-survivors.

Collaborative working allows expertise to be shared and support to be more effective. Dr Caroline Paskell, director of strategy at research company Ipsos, discussed an innovative practice where, within one team, one member of staff was given responsibility for domestic abuse for a year, after which this responsibility was passed on to a colleague, spreading expertise throughout the organisation.

Some of the challenges in staff training include growing pressures on housing staff to deal with a wide range of issues in their daily lives, with attendees highlighting that housing work is no longer a matter of simply collecting rent arrears. Instead, a wider range of ‘soft skills’ are needed to address complex social issues when working with tenants. The fear of a ‘tick-box’ culture arose as another relevant issue, describing a situation where important policy criteria can be met superficially rather than meaningfully, sometimes due to the volume of standards that housing organisations need to adhere to.

Several of the organisations represented in the room reported being unable to recruit people with specialist knowledge of both housing and domestic abuse. Samantha Humble, assistant director of neighbourhoods at housing association Believe Housing, described it as “a really tough career”. Within her organisation, the complexities and traumatic nature of the work mean that clinical supervision is offered to some staff, highlighting the “extent of what we are dealing with on a daily basis”.

Listening to survivors

The fundamental importance of including survivors of domestic abuse in conversations came through clearly as something that should be prioritised across the sector. As well as listening to survivors on an organisational and policy level, listening to women on an individual basis – what they truly want and need – is crucial.

When a victim-survivor of domestic abuse wants to end her relationship, the onus is often on her to move out. Moving to a new home or a refuge can involve leaving a supportive local community, a network of family and friends, and employment and children’s schools.

Laura Seebohm, chief executive of WWIN Domestic Abuse Services, spoke of women being unable to afford to stay in her refuges if they work, because unless housing benefit is being claimed, the rent is out of most people’s reach.

However, assumptions should never be made without consulting a survivor about what she wants. Dr Mercy Denedo, associate professor in accounting at Durham University, has been researching gambling-related domestic abuse. “We need to understand the voice of these women and the kind of support they actually want,” she says. “Do they want to be moved or do they want to remain in that same home where they’ve been traumatised for years?”

Navigating tenancy issues

Housing associations can face difficulties around tenancies when dealing with domestic abuse cases. Among the panel, there was widespread agreement that contractual problems around joint tenancies in domestic abuse situations are a significant barrier to victim-survivors.

Even if a perpetrator agrees to leave their home, they have to consent to being removed from a joint tenancy, giving them ongoing control over their victim, including the power to end the survivor’s tenancy against her will. DAHA, Women’s Aid and Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse describe the ways a victim-survivor can end a joint tenancy as “costly, burdensome on the survivor and time consuming”.

Victoria Shannon, external affairs manager at the National Housing Federation, hears from housing associations regularly that they would benefit from a “less complex, faster mechanism by which to sever joint tenancies”. It is hoped that a new law in Scotland will facilitate that, but Michelle Meldrum, chief executive of Berwickshire Housing Association, explained that it is unclear how the current situation, involving a “lengthy court process”, would be improved.

“We need to understand the voice of these women and the kind of support they actually want”

In Wales, however, progress has already been made. Tenure reform means that tenants are now contract holders, and one of the conditions of those contracts is not to perpetrate anti-social behaviour, including domestic abuse.

One tool that housing providers already have access to but do not always use is the knowledge that survivors of domestic abuse are not supposed to lose their tenure security, although many still do. Statutory guidance from 2022 says that if a local authority offers a tenancy to someone who previously had a secure tenancy in social housing, and they are moving because of domestic abuse, they must be offered a further secure, or fully assured, tenancy.

Ms Henderson from Addressing Domestic Abuse explained that while independent domestic abuse advocates have specialist knowledge, they do not necessarily know enough about housing rights to understand that if a survivor goes into a refuge, she should not be rehoused with an introductory tenancy.

Ms Seebohm also identified rent arrears as a significant barrier to many survivors trying to get rehoused in England and Wales, especially when a woman has experienced financial abuse and has been unable to keep up with payments. However, Mr Morland explained that in Scotland, if somebody is paying off arrears regularly and has made at least one payment, they cannot be disbarred from joining a housing waiting list.

One encouraging change is that the government has removed the requirement in England for domestic abuse victims to demonstrate a local connection to an area to qualify for housing.

The role of governments and funding

Funding is a challenge for domestic abuse projects. Mr Morland observed that getting funding for domestic abuse projects is “ultimately not about the worthiness, it’s about ‘can Treasury see some value for money in it?’ And so the value for money thing has to be at the front of the argument – before the worthiness of whatever we’re trying to argue.”

Making the case for sufficient funding to adequately support survivors of abuse will probably hinge on highlighting how this reduces the need to spend money elsewhere, such as in the criminal justice system or social services, so tying domestic abuse in with related social issues can be an effective way to get ministers to pay attention.

Mr Morland advocated for reintroducing a ringfenced budget for housing and support for domestic abuse projects: “I think that’s quite achievable for victims of domestic abuse and perpetrators because it’s a scale I think that the Treasury might be more prepared to swallow than that big Supporting People budget that was billions and billions and billions overspent.”

Perpetrator housing

Often in domestic abuse cases it is victims who have to leave their homes. But the Restart project, run by The Drive Partnership, works with high-harm, high-risk perpetrators to try to prevent the family from having to move or the perpetrator returning home. It works in partnership with multiple agencies to prevent further harm.

Rehousing perpetrators is a hard sell, said Kyla Kirkpatrick, director of The Drive Partnership. Housing allocations professionals are very keen to give high priority to survivors of domestic abuse to get them rehoused, and there can be a sense that avoiding rehousing perpetrators sends a better message.

The issue, though, is the unintended consequences. If a perpetrator is homeless, the victim-survivor is far more likely to feel she must let him come back home. This can lead to further devastating long-term consequences, such as the removal of the children from the family.

The logic for rehousing perpetrators is sound, and Ms Kirkpatrick says people “get it in theory”, but putting it into practice is harder.

A support element accompanying the rehousing of perpetrators has to be present in this work, not least because of the potential threat to people in the vicinity of the perpetrator’s new home.

As Ms Humble from Believe explained: “We cannot just move somebody with no support, who has perpetrated domestic abuse, into another community where potentially there are other vulnerable people… Because then it just self-perpetuates.”

The benefits of this holistic approach for victim-survivors and their children are substantial; having a safe home and seeing that their abuser is held accountable is powerful.

Learning from what is working elsewhere, combined with valuing the expertise of people with lived experience, can help housing providers create positive change. In collaboration with effective training and proactive policies, landlords are in a unique position to make a material difference to victim-survivors’ lives.

Update: at 11.40pm, 28.08.25

This story mistakenly referred to the Drive project run by the Drive Partnership. The name of the project concerned has been corrected to the Restart project.