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One landlord’s experience: what is it like going through a domestic homicide review?
Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing has first-hand experience of going through a domestic homicide review after the death of one of its tenants. What did it learn? Katharine Swindells reports
Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing has first-hand experience of going through a domestic homicide review after the death of one of its tenants. What did it learn? #UKhousing“Nobody wants to be invited to a domestic homicide review, because it means something really tragic has happened,” says Temi Bufford. As head of customer risk and vulnerabilities at Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing (MTVH), Ms Bufford leads the team of specialists who look into a customer death, conduct the organisation’s inter-agency response and feed into the ensuing multi-agency domestic homicide review.
Ms Bufford, along with her colleague Jon Foster, MTVH’s director of operational risk, are speaking to Inside Housing as part of our wide-reaching analysis of domestic homicide reviews, identifying learnings for the social housing and homelessness sector on preventing death from domestic abuse. Read our full analysis of domestic homicide reviews here.
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“When we have a death, we do a chronology,” Ms Bufford says. “We want to find out, was this customer known to us? Have we worked with them before? What were the circumstances surrounding the death? What type of customer were they?”
Following the death of Sajwa, who was killed by her brother in an MTVH property in 2019, Ms Bufford says that learnings from the case were shared across the organisation, and used as a mandatory discussion point for some teams.
There were also separate sessions, Mr Foster adds, for colleagues who had direct contact with the case, to support their well-being and reflect on their involvement in the case.
“That’s something that we’ve built on quite a lot over the last few years, how we work with those individuals directly involved, to reflect on their own practice,” he says.
It can be a delicate balance, between the reviews undertaken to support organisational learning, and potentially negative findings concerning the actions of specific staff members.
“We’re just really upfront about saying that this is about us coming together and learning, and we’ve got quite a strict view on keeping these processes separate from any [necessary] HR processes,” he says.
“It’s incredibly rare that that’s been something we’ve needed to consider, but the reality is sometimes people miss things, sometimes people aren’t performing the way they should.
“For us, there’s never been a direct causative link, but these issues often will reveal stuff, because you’re doing such a deep dive into how something’s been handled. We want to pick up on that, but we make sure we keep it very separate so people feel safe to take that learning and talk about it in a group forum.”
Since Sajwa’s death, Ms Bufford says, the organisation has heavily strengthened the link between departments that handle issues such as rent arrears and the organisation’s support offering.
“We’ve got to think, ‘Right, why isn’t this customer able to pay their rent? What’s going on for them?’ We’ve got to look at the whole picture,” she says. “Before we serve notices to quit, we want to make sure we’re getting to the bottom of exactly what’s going on in those households as much as we can.”
On the periphery
When it comes to domestic homicide reviews, says Mr Foster, often the association finds housing is “on the periphery a bit” compared to statutory partners such as the police, NHS and adult social care.
“Often what we found is there’s a bit of a lack of understanding of the role that housing can play,” he says.
“One of the things that we find ourselves doing quite a bit in these contexts is taking that panel on a bit of a journey of understanding what our role is.”
“Sometimes that means pushing for a seat at the table when we wouldn’t normally be,” Mr Foster adds. “There’s a couple of scenarios we’ve had over the years where we’ve learned of reviews happening, not just domestic homicide reviews, but we’ve not been invited to take part, even though we know that we had good learning to contribute.”
The need for systemic change
The length of time a domestic homicide review takes can also be difficult.
Mr Foster gives the example of one death that occurred in 2020. The report was completed “fairly promptly” by late 2021, but at the time of speaking with Inside Housing, it was still with the Home Office for sign-off.
“So while we’ve taken our learning and embedded it, and we’ve done our own internal checks, we can’t report that to our board because the report hasn’t been published,” he says, “which is important for giving us clarity and closure, and the opportunity to move forward.”
Once the domestic homicide review has concluded, Mr Foster says there’s rarely any follow-up by the local Community Safety Partnership to see how those learnings and recommendations have been implemented.
Meanwhile, although the domestic abuse commissioner, established in 2021 to advise the government, does have the power to hold agencies to account, these powers are usually used for large police forces or regional statutory bodies rather than individual social landlords.
“Luckily, we’re a big organisation with a big governance function, and our team is engaged at board level, so we’re quite thorough,” he says. “But I think there’s probably something around bringing groups back together to really consider how things have changed at a [systemic] level.”
It’s an issue Mr Foster thinks will only have growing importance.
“We don’t want to shy away from acknowledging it as a challenge, we are really clear on how much more risk and challenge we’re expecting to see over the coming years,” he says.
“Our resident population is only getting more vulnerable, the research is clear. So we are committed to minimising harm and learning from these [reviews] to prevent these things happening again, and we take that responsibility very seriously.”
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