Domestic violence screening tool should be replaced, Jess Phillips says
The main screening tool used to determine which domestic violence victims need support has “obvious problems” and should be replaced, the UK safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, has said.Phillips is reviewing systems, including the Dash (domestic abuse, stalking, harassment and “honour-based” violence) questionnaire, largely relied on by police, social services and healthcare workers across the UK since 2009 to assess risk.Academics and others working in the sector have raised concerns about the 27-question tool, which assesses answers to decide which respondents are deemed high risk so they can be referred to specialist care.Phillips told the BBC’s File on 4 that she was reviewing the entire system supporting victims but said it would not change overnight.“My instinct is that the tool doesn’t work, but until I can replace it with something that does, we have to make the very best of the system that we have,” Phillips said.
Any risk assessment tool was “only as good as the person who is using it” and people had been killed even when deemed to be at high risk, she said,“The grading system won’t immediately protect you,It is the systems that flow from those risk assessments that matter much, much, much more than the score,”Families of women who were murdered after not being graded as high risk are exploring legal action against the institutions they believe failed their loved ones,A number of academic studies, some dating back almost a decade, have looked into how Dash is performing and have found that it is unable to identify high-risk victims accurately.
A study from the London School of Economics published in 2020, analysing Greater Manchester police data, found that in almost nine out of 10 repeat cases of violence, victims had previously been classed as standard or medium risk by officers using Dash.In 2022, academics from Manchester and Seville Universities analysed anonymous police force data and found 96% of victims who were judged retrospectively as high risk had been classed previously as “standard” or “medium” risk by Dash.“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,” Dr Heather Strang, the director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology at the University of Cambridge, told the BBC.Nour Norris, whose sister Khaola Saleem and niece Raneem Oudeh, were stabbed to death by her niece’s ex-partner in 2018, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme their risk was downgraded “to a tick-box exercise”.Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotion“Raneem was failed because her risk was downgraded to a tick box exercise,” Norris said.
“That’s how simple it is, and we can’t allow victim safety to be dependent on which police force is going to answer their call.In other words, the system is just a tick box.“In order for us to save lives like Raneem’s and many victims’ as we speak today, we must evolve the system and reform the police and change the justice system in many ways.This system has to be evolving all the time.”Phillips’ comments come after the government said new measures would be introduced to crack down on so-called “honour-based” abuse, which is motivated by the perception that a person has brought shame to themselves, their family or the community.
Related crimes include female genital mutilation, forced marriage and murder.There were 108 domestic homicides in England and Wales in the year to March 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics.New statutory guidance and a legal definition of “honour-based” abuse will be brought in to help combat the crime.The Home Office will pilot a study looking at how widespread this crime is, a community awareness campaign will be launched and teachers, police officers, social workers and healthcare professionals will receive more training under the new policies.
Annual energy bills set to rise £35 in October, Trump slaps 50% tariff on India – business live
The energy regulator for Britain, Ofgem, has said it will increase the cap on energy bills from October by 2%, the equivalent of a £35 rise in annual bills for the average home.Here’s more details of the energy price cap just announced, from Ofgem.If you are on a standard variable tariff (default tariff) and pay for your electricity by Direct Debit, you will pay on average 26.35p pence per kilowatt hour (kWh). The daily standing charge is 53
Thames Water agrees payment plan for £123m sewage and dividend fines
Thames Water has agreed a payment plan with the water regulator for fines it owes worth £123m, as it races to secure funding to avoid temporary nationalisation.The water company, which serves 16 million customers across London and the south-east, is currently trying to pull together a deal to avoid collapse.Earlier this month the government approved the appointment of insolvency advisers FTI Consulting to consult on plans for Thames Water to be placed into a special administration regime.The debt-laden utility company was hit with a record £104m fine by Ofwat in May over environmental breaches involving sewage spills, after failing to operate and manage its treatment works and wastewater networks effectively.At the same time, a further £18
Half of UK adults worry that AI will take or alter their job, poll finds
Half of adults in the UK are concerned about the impact of artificial intelligence on their job, according to a poll, as union leaders call for a “step change” in the country’s approach to new technologies.Job losses or changes to terms and conditions were the biggest worries for the 51% of 2,600 adults surveyed for the Trades Union Congress who said they were concerned about the technology.AI is a particular concern for workers aged between 25 and 34, with nearly two-thirds (62%) of those surveyed reporting such worries.The TUC poll was released as a string of large employers – including BT, Amazon , and Microsoft – have said in recent months that advances in AI could lead them to cut jobs.Britain’s job market is slowing amid a cooling economy, with the UK’s official jobless rate at a four-year high of 4
Bob Owston obituary
My friend and colleague, Bob Owston, who has died aged 88, was an engineer; he was also employed as a project architect, in particular on works at York University.He was the structural engineer, working with the architect Jack Speight, on the brutalist York Central Hall, built in the mid-1960s and now listed Grade II. Also at York, Bob contributed an elegant Corten steel footbridge, several halls of residence, language and psychology blocks and the Sally Baldwin building. Elsewhere, he was responsible for the pier approach building in Bournemouth, evocative of seaside culture.Born in Great Ayton near Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, Bob was the son of Henry, a steelworks manager, and Dorothy (nee Prosser)
Mitch Brown’s coming out shows the AFL what courage and grace look like | Jonathan Horn
As a footy writer, I keep a rather shambolic database of current and former footballers. It’s kind of a buoy I can grab on to when I’m up against a nasty deadline. Sometimes it’s four of five paragraphs; sometimes it’s a sentence on so-and-so’s inability to kick on his left, or his poor record against a certain player, or something vaguely interesting he said on a podcast. When Mitch Brown became the first man in VFL/AFL history to come out as gay or bisexual, I was curious to see what I had written on him. Here’s my Pulitzer worthy offering: “Nathan’s twin
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