Member

In particular, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner is keen to suggest to the Minister and his team that although the training in how to identify and upskill what is required to assess domestic abuse perpetrators is done in-house, her suggestion is that there are a variety of external bodies which are highly specialised in this area and which are on the front line and have day in, day out experience. She would encourage the Minister to think about using their expertise and knowledge in co-operation with what is being done in-house to extend and re-engineer so that it is even more explicit and targeted. That would give greater resource in being able to have a bigger bandwidth to upskill the Probation Service and would also bring in knowledge from the people who are on the front line. That would be organisations such as Advance, Respect, the Hibiscus initiative, Galop, and the End Violence Against Women coalition—there are many others, of course. She would be very happy to discuss that in detail and to try to work out how that might be possible.