Beyond the Tracker

01

Measured by the agency, not the person affected

VJA's founding argument is that government in Northern Ireland is too often evaluated by the agency responsible for delivery, rather than by the person who depends on it. The Policing Plan 2025–30 Annual Performance Assessment illustrates the point. Fourteen of its sixteen indicators were rated “Adequate”—but the assessment relied heavily on PSNI-supplied information, and several of the victim-focused measures that would test whether confidence is genuinely improving were unavailable or declining.

This is the Policing Board's assessment, and the Board has itself invited a review of whether the measures remain fit for purpose. That invitation is the opening VJA wants to take up: measurement built around the person affected, with independent instruments where the current ones are silent, rather than around the agency doing the reporting.

02

A review system that reaches only a fraction of the deaths

Domestic Homicide Reviews have operated in Northern Ireland since December 2020, under section 9 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004. They are conducted by independent chairs supported by multi-agency panels, and a number of executive summary reports have been published. The machinery exists. The difficulty is that it is discretionary: section 9 provides a power to direct a review and a duty only to have regard to guidance. There is no duty to review every domestic-abuse-linked death, no recorded and reviewable decision where a review is not held, and no enforceable duty to act on a review's recommendations.

The scale of what that discretion leaves unexamined is the argument. On the Department of Justice's own estimate, around six people a year are killed in Northern Ireland as a result of domestic abuse; specialist commentators have placed Northern Ireland level with Romania for the highest rate of domestic death in Europe. Since December 2020, only a handful of reviews have been completed and published. Most domestic-abuse-linked deaths in that period have never been the subject of a published review. A system that examines a fraction of the deaths it exists to learn from is not, in any meaningful sense, a system of accountability.

The Katie Simpson case illustrates the coverage gap precisely. That review was not a Domestic Homicide Review; it was separately commissioned by the Department because the case did not fall within the DHR (or PPANI) criteria. The family received a review, and rightly so. But the mechanism had to be built around them, case by case, because the standing system did not reach their circumstances—and every death that does not attract a ministerial commission depends on that same discretion.

This is why a published implementation tracker for review recommendations, though welcome, is not sufficient on its own. VJA's proposal for statutory Domestic Abuse-Linked Death Reviews would place the duty to review on a statutory footing, require a recorded and reviewable decision where a review is not held, and give an independent body oversight able to require reconsideration and to escalate non-compliance. That is the difference between a system that learns when it chooses to and one that is obliged to. The Justice Minister's stated intention to reform DHRs—including extending them to domestic-abuse-related suicides—is the moment to build in that accountability, rather than to copy a model that lacks it.

03

Visibility is not remedy: the Commissioner and the advocate

VJA supports placing the Victims and Witnesses Commissioner on a statutory footing, with the power to access delivery data, identify institutional delay and report publicly where agencies fail.

But systemic visibility and individual remedy are different jobs. The Bill allows the Commissioner to consider an individual case where it illuminates a wider issue, but bars the Commissioner from acting for a person in their own case (Clause 8). Even at its fullest, then, the role is systemic—it can learn from a victim's experience but cannot carry it. That leaves the individual with no one owning their journey from first disclosure through investigation, prosecution and court. It is the gap VJA's Break the Silence—One Advocate from Day One proposal is designed to fill: a statutory, independent advocate offered from the first moment of disclosure. Visibility at the level of the system; ownership at the level of the person.

04

Do not bank the Bills as progress before reading them

Pivotal lists the Criminal Justice (Sentencing etc.) Bill among its areas of progress. VJA supports much of the Bill—but has identified and submitted a number of concerns that a headline of “progress” can obscure. These include the absence of a consistent victim and family notification duty across the Bill, the omission of gender and sex as protected characteristics, and an unduly-lenient-sentence review that does not reach domestic-abuse offences at Magistrates' level. These are VJA's submitted positions rather than settled points; but they are the difference between a Bill that reads as delivered and one that actually closes the gaps it touches.

There is a further reason to be careful. VJA has live submissions or engagement across the Victims and Witnesses of Crime, Sentencing, Housing (Amendment) and Charities (Amendment) Bills. Pivotal is right that running out of parliamentary time must not licence rushed legislation or curtailed scrutiny—because it is precisely that scrutiny, informed by lived experience, that catches concerns like these before they become law.