News & Campaigns

All the latest from HER-itage and our affiliates

2026 Birthday Honours for Women Working for Women

OBE

Eileen Murphy
Chief Executive, Women’s Aid Armagh-Down.
For services to Charity

MBE

Joy Madeiros
Group Chief Executive Officer, Oasis Charitable Trust and Founding Member, Women’s Faith Forum.
For services to Education and Faith Relations

Mina Smallman
Lately Archdeacon of Southend and Campaigner.
For services to Social Justice and to Women’s Safety
Birchington

BEM

Eleanor Guedalla
For services to Football for Women and Marginalised Communities
London

For New Year and Birthday Honours previously awarded see http://www.womensgrid.org.uk/?s=Honours+for+Women+Working+for+Women

Nominating someone for an honour

 

June 29, 2026

Draft Conversion Practices Bill – Office for Equality and Opportunity

The draft Conversion Practices Bill contains 3 proposed offences to ban criminal conversion practices.

The draft bill has been shared with Parliament to undergo pre-legislative scrutiny.

A conversion practice is an act that is carried out with the intention of changing a person’s sexual orientation or transgender identity.

The draft bill sets out measures which:

  • prohibit the carrying out of criminal conversion practices on individuals
  • creates an offence of encouraging or assisting conversion practices against a UK national/resident abroad
  • makes provision for conversion practice protection orders – civil orders which can be used to pre-emptively protect individuals from these practices

Applies to England and Wales

Go to https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-conversion-practices-bill for copies of the Draft in different formats, eg HTML, pdf, etc..

June 29, 2026

Martha’s Rule extended to all maternity services – Department of Health & Social Care

Landmark patient safety initiative, Martha’s Rule, rolled out to all maternity settings after review found serious and sustained failures.

Mothers and newborns across the country will be better protected, as landmark patient safety measure Martha’s Rule will be rolled out to all maternity settings in England, following a string of serious and sustained failures at maternity wards in the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH).

Donna Ockenden’s review – the largest into maternity and neonatal services in NHS history – considered the experiences of maternity care for 2,500 families and found women ignored or complaints dismissed, missed opportunities to identify deteriorating patients and a culture of silencing both junior staff and parents.

The government will today (Wednesday 24 June) commit to rolling out Martha’s Rule across maternity and neonatal wards in England to ensure every parent can request a rapid review from an independent medical team if a baby or mother’s condition is deteriorating and they are concerned this is not being responded to.

The scheme – which is helping transform the NHS’s culture and has been rolled out for inpatients in every acute hospital in England – has already been piloted in 15 maternity and neonatal settings, with rollout to more expected this year.

NHS data shows that there have already been over 2,100 calls to Martha’s Rule requiring changes in a patient’s treatment, with over 600 calls leading to potentially life-saving interventions to transfer them to enhanced levels of care.

The safety initiative is named after Martha Mills, who died in 2021 aged 13 after developing sepsis in hospital, where she had been admitted with a pancreatic injury after falling off her bike.

Martha’s family’s concerns about her deteriorating condition were not responded to, and in 2022 a coroner ruled that Martha would probably have survived had she been moved to intensive care earlier.

Those responsible for failures will be compelled to give evidence to investigations into failing maternity care to end a culture of secrecy and prevent further harm.

This action will help ensure the reviews in Leeds and Sussex are fair and comprehensive, so that uncovering the truth does not rely solely on those who choose to come forward voluntarily. Those who refuse to do so or deliberately withhold information about failures could face up to 2 years in prison.

The measures are designed to tackle the culture of silence exposed by the Nottingham review, where over 800 staff gave evidence but many described a culture of being silenced by senior clinicians and hospital bosses when raising concerns around patient safety. This will ensure that for both reviews of Sussex and Leeds, staff are heard and families are closer to getting the answers they deserve.

Reports of incidents in mortuaries across the country will also be more tightly reviewed, following the deeply concerning findings about the lack of respect given to deceased babies, and the complete disregard to their dignity. The Human Tissue Authority will require all mortuaries to review internal records dating from 2015 to 2026 to ensure all incidents have been logged and reported. This will strengthen accountability, ensuring concerns cannot be hidden or overlooked.

NUH is also taking immediate action, introducing a new helpline for concerned members of the public available from today. The helpline will provide support for families who use or have used NUH maternity and neonatal services and may have concerns or questions following the publication of the report and media coverage. Details on how to access this service will be available via the NUH website.

This government has already taken urgent action on maternity. Since 2025, the government has invested £145 million to improve the safety of maternity and neonatal care facilities. Other measures include:

  • implementing a new programme to reduce the 2 leading causes of avoidable brain injury during labour
  • delivering a package of initiatives and interventions to reduce stillbirths, neonatal brain injury, neonatal death and preterm birth
  • introducing a Perinatal Culture and Leadership Programme to develop a culture of safety, learning and support for leads from all maternity and neonatal units
  • expanding maternal mental health services to help women and extended the baby loss certificate scheme to include all historic losses
  • rolling out guidance across the NHS to tackle the leading causes of maternal death including thrombosis, mental health, epilepsy and haemorrhage

A national action plan will be developed through the National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, chaired by the Secretary of State, bringing together the findings of this review and Baroness Amos’ report to drive real and lasting change for women and families across the country.

Extracts from a longer press release at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/marthas-rule-extended-to-all-maternity-services

June 29, 2026

Lack of funding to learn from domestic abuse related deaths “deeply concerning” – Domestic Abuse Commissioner

On 27 May 2026, the UK Government has issued its formal response to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s report into how learnings from Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) – an independent review conducted when someone over 16 loses their life because of violence, abuse or neglect – are acted on both nationally and locally.

The report made several proposals to government on how it could improve the independent oversight of recommendations stemming from DHRs to better implement learnings, so these tragic deaths do not happen again. The Commissioner also called for dedicated funding to be made available to councils to deliver the growing number of DHRs they are needing to conduct.

The Commissioner was pleased to see the government reiterate its intention to develop a digital oversight tool to ensure recommendations are captured – an intervention announced in early March by the then Safeguarding Minister, Jess Phillips.

However, she has expressed frustration that the official response does not provide any further update on what funding will be made available to deliver the tool, a timeline for its rollout, or how it will improve accountability for government departments and wider agencies on implementing recommendations made to them.

She also said she is “deeply concerned” that the government has outright rejected her call to provide dedicated funding to councils to help them deliver DHRs.

Since 2011, local councils have been mandated to conduct domestic homicide reviews – which the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and the Local Government Association estimate cost an average of £10,000 –  yet no funding has ever been allocated for Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) – a group of agencies responsible for assessing and addressing local safety issues – to do so.

In 2016, DHRs were then broadened in scope to include domestic-abuse-related suicides and again no additional funding arrangements were made. This change, welcomed by the Commissioner, has led to an increase in the number of deaths meeting the criteria for a review.

The growing rate of DHRs councils must oversee has also come against the backdrop of local authorities’ budgets being cut or frozen. This is leaving local councils with ever dwindling resources which they must also use to fund public services.

Without dedicated funding, local areas have told the Domestic Abuse Commissioner that they will struggle to deliver these potentially life-saving reviews in the future. This risks creating a postcode lottery, with review decisions being made on financial grounds and opportunities missed to take learnings forward.

While the response acknowledges the pressures faced by councils and indicates that updated statutory guidance will help improve the effectiveness of delivery, there is no timeline for when this will be published, despite the public consultation to improve the statutory guidance being launched more than two years ago.

The government has an ambitious target to halve violence against women and girls within a decade and centres reducing female domestic homicide as key to achieving this.  The Commissioner is urging the government to be “bolder and braver” in its decisions to speed up delivery for people subject to domestic abuse, and ensure vital lessons are not lost.

Dame Nicole Jacobs, Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, said:

“When someone loses their life to domestic abuse, we should be doing all we can to learn from this tragedy and ensure it never happens again.

“While I’m pleased to see the government reaffirm its commitment to deliver a digital oversight tool, the lack of dedicated funding to ensure councils can conduct these potentially life-saving reviews is deeply concerning – particularly when councils are telling me they will struggle to commission them if further resource isn’t found.

“In the last few weeks, this government has been accused of delivering incremental change for victims and survivors of abuse. If it wants to achieve its mission and be a world leader in tackling VAWG it must be braver and bolder in its decisions.

“Ministers must reconsider this response and make dedicated funding available to ensure DHRs can be effectively conducted. This will not just deliver genuine improvements for people subject to domestic abuse, it will ultimately save lives.

“I want to once again thank the areas that, in spite of funding challenges, gave their time, expertise and commitment to piloting the oversight mechanism.”

Notes:

  1. Read the Commissioner’s full Learning from Loss report. You can also see a full appendix of national DHR recommendations by government department.
  2. Average DHR costs calculated from the Commissioner’s 2024 survey, conducted in partnership with the Local Government Association.
  3. The government’s VAWG Strategy has sent the number of female homicides as a sub-headline metric of its success in achieving its aims. The first pillar of the Strategy focuses on the prevention of VAWG and early intervention for victims and survivors. DHRs provide a wealth of knowledge in achieving both.

https://www.domesticabusecommissioner.uk/lack-of-funding-domestic-abuse-related-death-review/

 

June 5, 2026

Domestic abusers to be evicted under new landmark housing law – Ministry of Housing

Landlords get new powers to evict domestic abuse perpetrators from social homes

Abusers will be evicted from social homes and victims will be able to stay safely in their communities, under a new landmark Social Housing Bill returning to Parliament for its Second Reading today (Monday 1 June).

Under new protections, landlords and courts will be able to evict perpetrators of domestic abuse from social housing – without the victim having to leave first.

Currently, landlords can only evict a perpetrator after the victim has already left the home, and in joint tenancies, the only option for the victim is to end the tenancy entirely – potentially leaving them homeless.

The Bill also closes a loophole that let abusers serve a Notice to Quit to make victims homeless. Under the proposed new law, a Notice to Quit served by a perpetrator will not end the social housing joint tenancy while court proceedings are ongoing.

In addition, for joint tenancies, courts will be able to transfer the tenancy into the victim’s sole name, or where staying is not appropriate, require the landlord to provide suitable alternative accommodation where available.

Last year, around 15,000 households in England were forced to find a new social home because of domestic abuse. This Bill means victims can stay safely in their homes and communities, close to support networks, schools, and work.

The news follows the swift introduction of the Bill earlier this month, which also includes the biggest overhaul of Right to Buy in a generation to reverse the decline of social housing.

Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Dame Nicole Jacobs said:

“Sharing a social home with a perpetrator presents victims and survivors of domestic abuse with an impossible choice. Remaining in their home means facing further abuse but leaving could put them at risk of homelessness and struggling financially.

“Alongside survivors and campaigners, I have been calling for action to be taken to stop perpetrators from weaponising joint tenancies – and I’m pleased to see that the government has listened.

“People experiencing domestic abuse need safety and stability in order to recover and rebuild free from harm. This will be an important step towards that for many.”

Head of Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance, Nicki Clarke said:

“The Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance (DAHA) welcomes the Government’s tenancy reforms proposed within the Social Housing Bill. These changes represent an important and long overdue step forward, with the potential to transform the lives of many domestic abuse victims.

“Domestic abuse typically takes place in the home and it is where most women are killed. By enabling landlords to safeguard victims and hold the perpetrators of abuse to account, these reforms will enable domestic abuse victims, including children, to achieve safety, stability and long-term housing security. This is essential for all individuals impacted by domestic abuse to rebuild their independence and move forward with lives free from harm.

“We look forward to working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to support the development and implementation of these measures, and to ensure that the detail of the reforms delivers meaningful, practical outcomes for those affected.”

Head of External Affairs at Women’s Aid, Veronica Oakeshott said:

“Today, the Social Housing Bill has received its second reading, and we are pleased to see that it contains measures to protect some survivors of domestic abuse in joint tenancies, which Women’s Aid, along with sector colleagues, have long campaigned on.

“For too long, survivors have been faced with impossible choices – either staying with their abusers or risking homelessness – all because of outdated practices. The measures introduced in this Bill begin to change that picture by enabling social landlords to transfer a tenancy to a survivor in certain circumstances or, where needed, evict perpetrators and prevent them from unilaterally ending a tenancy. While ultimately we hope the measures will go further to enable more survivors to qualify, this is an important start.”

Further information

Under the Bill, a Notice to Quit served by a perpetrator in a social housing joint tenancy will not take effect where a notice under the domestic abuse grounds is in force, or during ongoing court or eviction proceedings, preventing the misuse of such notices to force tenants out of their homes.

Extracts from a longer press release at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/domestic-abusers-to-be-evicted-under-new-landmark-housing-law

June 5, 2026