The UK government is expanding a scheme designed to put specialist help at the heart of emergency response to domestic abuse. Under Raneem's Law, domestic abuse specialists are placed in 999 call centres, working alongside officers and call handlers to improve the way reports of abuse are dealt with from the very first phone call.
The initiative is not starting from scratch. Victims Minister Catherine Atkinson said the scheme began with a pilot last year, testing how embedding specialists in control rooms could change the response that victims receive when they reach out to the police in a moment of crisis.
Now the programme is being significantly scaled up. The government says it is more than trebling the scheme so that it covers 17 areas, a substantial increase on the original pilot and a sign that ministers intend to make the specialist support far more widely available across the country.
The longer-term ambition stretches further still. According to the minister, the goal is for the scheme to be rolled out across all police forces in England and Wales by the end of this government, which would make the presence of domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms a standard feature of emergency response rather than a limited trial.
The scale of the problem helps explain the urgency. Atkinson pointed out that the police receive a call related to domestic violence every 30 seconds, a figure that underlines how often officers are confronted with such cases and why the government argues that dedicated expertise is needed at the point of first contact.
The expansion is being presented as part of a broader push. The minister described it as a key element of the government's strategy on violence against women and girls, a commitment the administration has set out to pursue over the coming years through measures aimed at better protecting victims and holding perpetrators to account.