What has actually changed?
The Justice Secretary, David Lammy, has announced that offenders who murder a current or former intimate partner in England and Wales will face a new minimum starting point of 25 years in prison — a substantial increase of ten years over the existing baseline. The change, which is subject to consultation with the Sentencing Council, targets a long-standing asymmetry in how English law treats homicides committed in the domestic setting. Under the current framework, murders carried out with a weapon brought deliberately to the scene already attract a 25-year starting point, on the reasonable premise that premeditation compounds culpability. Most domestic murders, however, take place in the home, where a kitchen knife or similar implement is simply present rather than carried there with intent, and so have historically attracted only a 15-year starting point — a distinction that many have argued systematically undervalued the lives of female victims.
The reform forms part of the government’s broader commitment to halve violence against women and girls and to deliver what it describes as swifter justice for victims and their families. More than a fifth of all murders in England and Wales are domestic in character, and women constitute the overwhelming majority of those killed. The existing 15-year starting point will, however, continue to apply in cases where a victim of domestic abuse kills their abuser — a carve-out that preserves the legal recognition of coercive and violent circumstances that can drive such acts.
Why did this anomaly persist for so long?
The gap in sentencing thresholds was not the product of deliberate policy so much as an inherited feature of a sentencing framework that distinguished between killings on the basis of apparent premeditation, using the presence or absence of a brought weapon as a proxy. That logic is coherent in the abstract, but it failed to account for the particular geography of intimate-partner violence, which by its nature tends to occur in the shared domestic space. Since around 70 per cent of homicide victims killed in the home are women, the practical effect was that the courts routinely imposed lighter starting-point sentences on a category of murder whose victims were disproportionately female. The anomaly persisted in part because domestic homicide, as a subject of sustained legislative attention, was for decades treated as a matter of social policy rather than criminal justice reform.
The campaign that ultimately produced this change was driven by the mothers of three murdered young women: Carole Gould, whose daughter Ellie — a sixth-form student aged seventeen — was killed by her ex-boyfriend Thomas Griffiths on 3 May 2019; Julie Devey, whose daughter Poppy Devey-Waterhouse, a twenty-four-year-old quantitative trading analyst, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend Joe Atkinson on 14 December 2018; and Elaine Newborough, whose daughter Megan was killed by her boyfriend Ross McCullam on 6 August 2021. Over seven years, these three women pursued a case for reform through the charity Killed Women, arguing with considerable force that the sentencing disparity was not merely technical but represented a structural failure to treat the lives of women killed at home as equally worthy of the law’s protection.
How has the reform been received?
Refuge and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Dame Nicole Jacobs, both welcomed the increase in sentencing, though neither regarded it as the final word on the matter. Refuge called on the government to conduct a parallel review of the partial defences — most notably loss of control and diminished responsibility — that perpetrators sometimes deploy to secure a lesser conviction of manslaughter rather than murder, thereby circumventing the very sentencing thresholds that this reform seeks to strengthen. Dame Nicole Jacobs, while broadly supportive, expressed disappointment that the new minimum would not extend to victims killed by other family members, noting that honour-based abuse and filicide are no less grave merely because the perpetrator falls outside the definition of an intimate partner.
The most pointed institutional reservation came from Mark Day, Deputy Director of the Prison Reform Trust, who cautioned that the announcement had pre-empted the findings of a detailed review of homicide offences currently being conducted by the Law Commission. Day warned that the measure would add further pressure to a prison system already struggling to absorb the consequences of steadily rising sentence lengths for serious offences — a concern that is not without empirical foundation, given the well-documented capacity constraints facing the custodial estate. The tension between the legitimate retributive and deterrent case for longer sentences and the practical realities of a constrained prison system is one that policymakers will need to address with greater structural seriousness than a single sentencing reform can provide.
What questions remain unresolved?
The reform raises at least two questions that the consultation process with the Sentencing Council will need to address carefully. The first concerns the boundary of the new category: intimate-partner homicide is a legally defined concept, but the line between a current or former partner and a family member is not always as clear in practice as it appears in statute, and the exclusion of family-member victims from the enhanced starting point may produce anomalies of its own. The second concerns the interaction between the new minimum and the partial defences that Refuge has flagged — if perpetrators can more readily obtain manslaughter convictions by pleading diminished responsibility or loss of control, the higher starting point for murder may have less practical effect than its proponents intend.
What is not in doubt is that the underlying principle — that the domestic setting of a killing should not systematically reduce its legal gravity — is sound, and that the seven-year campaign by the victims’ mothers has produced a concrete and overdue correction to an inherited inconsistency. Whether the reform delivers its intended effect will depend as much on how prosecutors charge cases and how juries convict as on the sentencing framework itself. The announcement is a necessary step; it is not, by itself, a sufficient one.