The Attorney General, Ellie Reeves KC MP, has announced that every domestic abuse victim in England and Wales will now be given a domestic abuse victim liaison officer, as the Crown Prosecution Service makes its Universal and Enhanced Services permanent across all 14 CPS Areas. The announcement was marked by a visit to Liverpool, one of the actual pilot areas for this service. A report commissioned by Merseyside’s own Police and Crime Commissioner, produced with Women’s Aid and Liverpool John Moores University, found more than 117,000 people, predominantly women and children, experience domestic abuse there each year, and warned that local services are already overstretched and need more stable, long-term funding.
This is genuinely good news, and worth being clear about that before anything else. A dedicated point of contact, able to update a victim by phone, email or post from the point of charge through to trial, closes a real gap. The Enhanced Service already existed for victims of rape and serious sexual offences; extending the same model to domestic abuse is a sensible, overdue step.
But it is worth being precise about what this is, and what it is not, because the two are easy to blur together.
What the liaison officer role actually is
A victim liaison officer is a CPS employee. The role sits at Executive Officer grade, on the CPS’s own pay scale, and is advertised on the CPS’s own careers page alongside every other internal position. CPS staff describe the work plainly: writing letters explaining decisions in a case, proofing correspondence, triaging queries from victims who want to know what has happened and why. It is a communication role, facing the victim, delivered entirely inside the CPS, on the CPS’s own budget line.
Worth a brief aside here, since it is easy to assume every domestic abuse measure in government announcements works the same way. It does not. The same press release names a related but quite different initiative, Raneem’s Law, which embeds domestic abuse specialists in police 999 control rooms. Unlike the liaison officer, those specialists are not CPS or police staff. They come from women’s aid charities, commissioned through public tenders, funded in one-year cycles through Home Office grants that have to be won again each year. It is a useful reminder that not every service announced in the same breath sits on the same secure footing, but it is a different stage of the system entirely, the emergency call, not the courtroom, and a separate question from the one this piece is actually about.
Why this still is not what we proposed
Because whichever form it takes, salaried or commissioned, neither the liaison officer role nor Raneem’s Law touches the gap our own proposal, The Case for a Domestic Abuse Assessor in the Courts, was built to close. That proposal is on the public record from 30 June 2026, before this rollout. It argues for a domestic abuse assessor who sits with the judge in domestic abuse cases, giving case-specific, real-time input on how the person in front of the court is presenting, grounded in how survivors actually behave, modelled on how a medical specialist sits with a judge in the First-tier Tribunal (Mental Health). The judge keeps sole decision-making authority throughout. Any view the assessor gives that differs materially from the evidence has to be disclosed to both parties, so it can be heard and challenged, the same safeguard that makes the tribunal model fair.
A liaison officer faces the victim. Our assessor faces the judge. One helps a woman understand what is happening to her case. The other helps the court understand what is happening to her. Better communication about a decision does not change how that decision gets made, and judicial training, general and periodic as it is, still cannot tell a judge what is happening in the specific case in front of them right now. That is precisely the gap a case-specific assessor exists to fill, and nothing in this rollout reaches it.
What the announcement does not say
A few things are worth naming plainly, because their absence is itself informative. There is no funding figure attached to the liaison officer expansion itself, no stated start date for full national coverage, no complaints route, and no named professional standard beyond the job existing. There is nothing for a victim whose case is never charged in the first place, despite the announcement itself quoting survivors who describe being worn down by reporting and evidencing abuse repeatedly without seeing action, which is, by definition, a pre-charge problem a post-charge service cannot reach.
Better communication is not nothing. It is also not the same as a voice in the room where the decision is actually made.
Sources
GOV.UK, “CPS to give all domestic abuse victims a dedicated liaison officer nationwide”, Attorney General’s Office and Crown Prosecution Service
Crown Prosecution Service, “Delivering a better service through our Victims Programme: update September 2026”
Crown Prosecution Service careers page, “Apply to become a Victim Liaison Officer”, and CPS staff accounts, “Meet some of our victim liaison team”
Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner, “A review of the provision and commissioning of services for victims and survivors of domestic abuse across Merseyside”, produced with Women’s Aid and Liverpool John Moores University
Karma Nirvana, “First domestic abuse specialists embedded in 999 control rooms under Raneem’s Law”
Find a Grant (find-government-grants.service.gov.uk), West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner commissioning notice, “Raneem’s Law Domestic Abuse Specialists”
West Yorkshire Combined Authority, “Raneem’s Law: Domestic Abuse (DA) Specialists in West Yorkshire Police”, project supporting information
The Women’s Railroad, “The Case for a Domestic Abuse Assessor in the Courts”, Parts One and Two, thewomensrailroad.org.uk
