Policy Tracker
Explore our recent policy plans, policy wins, and identified gaps across our three priority areas: healthcare, education and social care, and justice and law.
This tracker is not a full or final position on every policy area. We update it regularly as new evidence emerges, policies develop, and our understanding evolves. We share our thinking openly and early so others can engage with it, challenge it, and help strengthen our work.
Last updated: 18th June 2026
Healthcare
- 10-year Health Plan
- Men’s Health Strategy
- Women’s Health Strategy
- Maternity and Perinatal Investigation
- Commitment in both the Men’s and Women’s Health Strategies to researching the link between domestic abuse and pregnancy
- Promises of a national framework to help local areas create neighbourhood health plans and provide tailored, joined-up support, making it easier for victims, survivors, and people worried about their own behaviour to access integrated services, with no ‘wrong front door’
- Recognition of the relational impact between fathers’ wellbeing and babies’ development
- Health services often identify risk but lack pathways to sustained, therapeutic family support beyond crisis response
- Limited training for healthcare staff about supporting those concerned about their own harmful behaviours towards others
- The Maternity and Perinatal Investigation failed to address domestic abuse support (or lack thereof) within services
- Workforce shortages and turnover undermine relationship‑based practice, weakening early identification and support
Education and Social care
- RSE Guidance
- BSIL Strategy
- Stronger policy recognition that early years settings are critical safeguarding partners, particularly for identifying domestic abuse
- Increased focus on the first 1000/1001 days in national early years and family policy discussions
- Parliamentary scrutiny highlighting the need for specialist domestic abuse training for early years professionals
- Policy momentum towards early help and prevention, rather than solely late-stage crisis responses
- Best Start in Life Hubs/Plans could be a great foundation for early intervention and referrals; however, this largely depends on each area’s decision-making and commissioning
- Safeguarding and domestic abuse training remains inconsistent, despite clear evidence of prevalence in early years contexts
- Social care systems remain overstretched and crisis‑driven, limiting capacity for sustained early intervention
- Babies’ developmental and relational needs are still underrepresented in assessments, which often focus on immediate parental risk
- Inconsistent availability of whole‑family, long‑term therapeutic interventions that can prevent escalation into care proceedings
Law and Justice
- VAWG Strategy
- Domestic Abuse Act 2021
- The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 recognises coercive control
- The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 formally recognises children as victims in their own right, strengthening the statutory basis for intervention
- Growing acknowledgement within family justice of the need for earlier, preventative, multi‑agency responses
- Whole-family responses such as Family Group Decision-Making being prioritised; however, risks around domestic abuse are yet to be sufficiently mitigated
- Legal responses remain largely reactive, intervening once harm has escalated
- Limited alignment between family courts, criminal justice, health, and social care, resulting in fragmented support
- Insufficient use of the legal framework to mandate or enable early, therapeutic interventions for both parents
- Need for CHIDVA remits to be extended to children younger than 6 years old, or the creation of specialist early years CHIDVAs
- ‘Child-centred courts’ plans neglect analysing the behavioural and relational responses of young children and infants
- The VAWG Strategy neglects: the high risk of domestic abuse in pregnancy and early years, the impact of domestic abuse on babies and children, the importance of taking an intersectional approach to root causes of violence and abuse, and the need to provide trauma‑informed, therapeutic approaches to break intergenerational cycles of domestic abuse
