Would you have put Matt Hancock in charge of the Covid inquiry? Or let the bosses of Thames Water report on how well our water is regulated? Surely not. It’s absurd to ask those under scrutiny to assess the institutions in which their work has generated controversy or had a detrimental impact. Yet this government has done exactly that. It has tasked a domestic violence charity that produced a risk assessment tool that several studies have revealed to be ineffectual with looking into the effectiveness of the UK’s domestic violence strategy – specifically to provide insight into “the current systems for identifying, assessing and managing risk and the multi-agency response to domestic abuse victims”.
Domestic violence risk assessments are effectively questionnaires that help front-line services such as police and social workers determine whether a victim is at low, medium or high risk of further abuse, determining the speed and scope of support they receive from the state. The most widely used risk assessment tool, made mandatory by most commissioners, was rolled out in 2009 by the charity SafeLives, which has since received millions in public funds via government contracts to train front-line workers on how to use the tool effectively. SafeLives named the tool after itself: the SafeLives Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Harassment Risk Checklist, or Dash, for short.
However, when identifying high-risk victims, Dash has been shown to be unreliable. SafeLives continues to promote the system, years after multiple studies showed it to be faulty. One published in 2022 by Manchester and Seville universities found that it mislabelled 96 per cent of high-risk victims as being of standard or medium risk. It continued to promote Dash as “best practice” for the whole sector even after research by academics from Liverpool and Central Lancashire universities reported that just four out of the 27 questions used in Dash indicated effective risk assessment.
Heather Strang, director of a criminology centre at the University of Cambridge, told the BBC that “when it comes to the question of the reliability of Dash as a predictive tool, there is a growing consensus that Dash does not do that job at all well”. In the same article, the SafeLives CEO Ellen Miller said that the system’s failings were down to a combination of “not being updated to reflect everything we know now, and [because] it is also an issue about how it is being used”.
As evidence mounted of the failings of British front-line services and charities to identify victims of abuse, the government made the sensible decision in July to examine the country’s risk assessment system. Unfortunately, Labour then appointed the charity that built Dash to assess efficacy across the sector that is directly influenced by its controversial tool. The Home Office insists that the Dash system is not under formal review as part of the SafeLives project – but for well over a decade the charity’s tool has been embedded in many of the agencies delivering the government’s response to domestic violence. Jess Phillips, the under-secretary of state for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, has even recently admitted to the BBC that it “doesn’t work”.
This is not the first time the government has made a sham of its duty to protect abuse victims. When the Rotherham scandal (which involved the sexual exploitation of an estimated 1,400 girls) returned to public attention at the beginning of this year, Labour dithered on calling for a public inquiry, even as it became clear that one was inevitable.
In Labour’s “Mission Safety” document, one of five mission statements feeding into its 2024 manifesto, the party said that “some of the most serious violence that needs to be addressed is escalating and repeated domestic abuse where early intervention saves lives”. In March last year, Keir Starmer said he wanted to “imagine a society where violence against women is stamped out everywhere”. His government would, he pledged, halve violence against women and girls in a decade. It was a welcome statement of ambition. Strange, then, that neither its manifesto nor Starmer himself mentioned risk assessment tools – the central pathway offered by front-line services for every victim to get support.
A Home Office spokesperson pointed to the department’s forthcoming Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, billed as an “overhaul” of “the policing and criminal justice response to domestic abuse”, and said that “a new National Centre for Public Protection and VAWG will consider the adequacy of risk assessment tools available to forces to ensure consistency and best practice nationwide, pinpointing areas for improvement”. But the ongoing human cost of the current, failing risk assessment system is stark. Of the almost one million cases of domestic abuse reported per year in Britain, Dash could have misclassified thousands.
In a Reuters report earlier this month, Miller described this moment as a chance to see “how a review could work through, how a bigger rewrite could happen”. She said Dash had saved many lives and that it should be rewritten rather than replaced, then pinned the blame on the police. “The problem is not the Dash. The problem is police officers’ values and behaviours,” and added that it was up to police to safeguard people from the risk of death in their training.
Miller’s accusation omits the fact that the police flagged to His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in 2014 that with Dash there was a “mismatch between the current tool and the practical realities of front-line policing”. Plus, SafeLives delivers the training to police on how to use Dash. Reuters did not challenge Miller on either point. I can only hope the government’s findings will bring accountability. But given SafeLives is overseeing it, I wouldn’t bet on it.
This was a grave error in judgement. Phillips needs to decide what matters more: flattering the sector that nurtured her career (she worked for a charity that helped victims of domestic abuse) or women’s lives. If the party that promises to protect women cannot bring itself to face down its friends, it is not ready to face down the men who kill them.
Note: This article was updated on 28 August 2025 to reflect details provided by the Home Office on its planned guidance on the government’s multi-agency approach to domestic abuse, and on 29 August to include a response from the Home Office
[See also: Inside Your Party’s rival factions]
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