What is the Perpetrators & Housing Working Group

As a sub-group of the DAHA led-National Domestic Abuse and Housing Policy and Practice Group, the Perpetrators and Housing Working Group brings together local and national housing and domestic abuse sector partners to influence policy and practice that addresses perpetrator housing.

Domestic abuse is not acceptable or inevitable. Perpetrators must be recognised as the cause of harm and to eradicate it, we need a holistic response for perpetrators as well as support for victims. Understanding and addressing how a perpetrator’s housing circumstances impact victim-survivor safety and housing security, is a necessary element of a holistic response to perpetrators.

Perpetrator work should never come at a cost to victim-survivor services, the two must complement each other. Victim-survivors’ expressed needs and assessment of their own risks must be at the centre of any response to perpetrators.

Our objectives
  • To influence policymakers to address perpetrator housing, both as a part of the development of a statutory perpetrator strategy to domestic abuse and violence against women and girls and of the government’s rough sleeping strategy.
  • To understand and evidence the links between perpetrator housing and victim-survivor safety and housing security and the costs and benefits of perpetrator housing responses.
  • To map and monitor local perpetrator housing strategies and initiatives and champion a recognised standard of best practice based on mutually defined principles.
  • To place a perpetrator housing response within the wider Whole Housing Approach and within a Coordinated Community Response to domestic abuse, which places the responsibility on all agencies to play a role in holding perpetrators to account and supporting victim-survivors to access safety and housing security.

Our Members

Barking & Dagenham Council, Chartered Institute of Housing, Camden Council, Crisis, the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance (DAHA), Drive, Gentoo Housing Association, Homeless Link, Housing First, Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC), National Housing Federation, Peabody Housing Association, Rise Mutual, Safer London, Safer Merthyr Tydfil, Shelter, Social Finance, Standing Together, St Mungo’s.

Group Responses

Accommodation for Perpetrators of Domestic Abuse - Discussion Paper - April 2021

National Group letter to Eddie Hughes, Minister of Housing - March 2021