The Drive Project model and expansion

Following a four-year investment from the Home Office announced in July 2025, the Drive Project – the Drive Partnership’s flagship intervention for high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators of domestic abuse – will expand across all areas in England and Wales, with the vast majority of funding flowing directly to local perpetrator services and victim-survivor services by nature of the Drive Project’s model.

This investment into a consistent and evidence-informed response to high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators across all areas aligns with one of four key recommendations within the Drive Partnership’s 2024 Call for Further Action, supported by over 100 signatories across the sector. The Drive Partnership welcomes this investment as an important step within a wider, collective mission, and will continue to work to pursue the sector’s urgent needs and all recommendations within the Call for Further Action.

Ahead of the expansion, please find further information below on the Drive Partnership and the Drive Project; how the Drive Project model works to reduce risk and increase the safety of victim-survivors; and how its expansion across all areas in England and Wales is set to be implemented.

The Drive Partnership

The Drive Partnership, established by Respect, SafeLives, and Social Finance in 2015, is working to end domestic abuse and protect victim-survivors by disrupting, challenging, and changing the behaviour of those who are causing harm. The Drive Partnership does this through the development of innovative perpetrator responses and advocating for systems and policy change to develop sustainable, national systems that respond more effectively to all perpetrators to increase the safety and freedom of all adult and child victim-survivors.  

The Drive Project

The Drive Project is the Drive Partnership’s flagship intervention for high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators of domestic abuse. The key features of the Drive Project model can include a combination of intensive one-to-one case management to challenge and change perpetrator behaviour, and a coordinated multi-agency response that can include police-led disruption approaches. The Drive Project model will always include dedicated Independent Domestic Violence Advisors (IDVA) and parallel work with victim-survivors and services to prioritise their safety and needs, in line with the Respect Standard.

To deliver the Drive Project, the Drive Partnership works with local specialist domestic abuse organisations to design and deliver a programme tailored for the locality, alongside strong working relationships with statutory partners such as the police, health and children’s social care.

The Drive Project can include those who have never been in contact with the criminal justice system and individuals do not need to be convicted of a crime. Referrals are via statutory and non-statutory services, and there is no direct referral route for individuals to self-refer.

The Drive Project impact

The Drive Project works with high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators of domestic abuse – those who are at risk of causing serious harm or murder within their intimate or family relationships. A quarter of high-harm perpetrators are repeat offenders and some have at least six different victims.

From 2016 to 2025, the Drive Project has worked with over 6,949 high-harm, high-risk and serial perpetrators, helping to reduce the risk that they pose to keep 7,755 adult victim-survivors and 14,196 child victim-survivors safer. This impact has been achieved in just a number of PCC areas, and the expansion across all PCC areas in England and Wales will significantly increase this impact – reaching a larger number of high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators, and an even larger number of associated adult and child victim-survivors.

This new investment will ensure a consistent response to high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators across all areas to stop them slipping through the net and causing further harm, and is an important step towards our ongoing call for a full range of effective perpetrator responses available across all areas and designed for all communities.

Victim-survivor centred

The core mission of the Drive Project is to stop the cycle of domestic abuse and increase the immediate and long-term safety of adult and child victim-survivors. The Drive Project does this by partnering with agencies and local perpetrator services to disrupt, challenge and change the behaviour of high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators, and working closely with IDVAs and victim-survivor services to always centre the safety and needs of victim-survivors, in line with the Respect Standard. Victim-survivors tell us that, alongside more support needed for themselves, they want and need better responses to the people causing harm in their lives – interventions that hold perpetrators to account, support them to change behaviour, and break the cycle of domestic abuse for good. However, when surveyed, just 7% of victim-survivors who wanted their perpetrator to receive support to change their behaviour were able to get it. The investment into the expansion of the Drive Project is an important step towards addressing this gap.

Support for victim-survivor services

By nature of the Drive Project’s model, the vast majority of the expansion funding will flow directly to perpetrator services and victim-survivor services. As part of the expansion, the Drive Partnership has taken steps to further increase the amount of funding for victim-survivor support to strengthen provision and mitigate against increased demand on an already stretched sector. Within the first-year expansion, with further modelling underway for following years, each new PCC area in the national expansion of the Drive Project will also have:

Funding for two dedicated full-time IDVAs focused on victim-survivors’ safety and needs working alongside Drive Project Case Managers.

Dedicated grant funding for frontline specialist services, similar to SafeLives’ Circle Fund, to support victims of economic and domestic abuse. These grants can be used for (1) crisis intervention, (2) to increase safety and (3) to help support recovery and resilience.

We recognise and share concerns for the urgent need for wider funding for victim-survivor services and will continue to pursue significant and sustained investment in specialist victim-survivor support for a holistic response to domestic abuse that addresses the root cause of abuse while ensuring all adult and child victim-survivors can access the support that they need.

Cultural competency and support for by-and-for organisations

The Drive Project is guided by cultural competency learning from the Drive Partnership’s National Systems Change work to respond effectively and safely to all communities. As part of the first-year expansion, with further modelling underway for following years, each new PCC area in the national expansion of the Drive Project will also have:

Ringfenced budget for specialist or by-and-for organisations that may work with and identify gaps in service provision within local areas.

Dedicated grant funding for frontline specialist services, similar to SafeLives’ Circle Fund, to support victims of economic and domestic abuse. These grants can be used for (1) crisis intervention, (2) to increase safety and (3) to help support recovery and resilience.

We share and support urgent calls for sufficient funding for specialist by-and-for organisations and specialist responses across all areas that meet the needs of all communities, as prioritised in one of four key recommendations within our 2024 Call for Further Action, and will continue to pursue its recommendations and the urgent needs of vital by-and-for organisations and the wider sector.

Evidence

The University of Bristol undertook an independent, three-year evaluation of the Drive Project during its first phase of delivery (2016-2019). The evaluation concluded that the Drive Project reduces abuse and the risk that domestic abuse perpetrators pose. Key findings include:

Reduction in abuse: The number of Drive Project service users using each type of DVA behaviour reduced substantially: physical abuse reduced by 82%; sexual abuse reduced by 88%; harassment and stalking behaviours reduced by 75%; and jealous and controlling behaviours reduced by 73%.

Reduction of risk: For the duration of the intervention, IDVAs reported the risk to the victim reduced either moderately or significantly in 82% of cases.

Reduction in repeat and serial perpetrator cases heard at MARAC: MARAC data showed that the Drive Project helped to reduce high-risk perpetration including by serial and repeat perpetrators. Drive Project repeat and serial cases appeared less often at MARAC than the control group, the difference was statistically significant and was sustained for a year after the case was closed.

Reduction in police involvement: Police data shows a 30% reduction in number of criminal DVA incidents for Drive Project service users in 6 months after the intervention compared to 6 months before. By comparison, there was no change for control group perpetrators for the same period.

Cost-effectiveness

Domestic abuse has been estimated to cost the state approximately £78 billion a year. Financial analysis set out in Appendix 8 of the Evaluation of the Drive Project by the University of Bristol (UoB) is one of the most sophisticated attempts to estimate the cost to the state associated with high risk, high harm perpetrators identified via the MARAC referral pathway; which is estimated to be approximately £63,000 per case. Investing in responses to those causing harm is essential to breaking the costly cycle of domestic abuse by tackling the root cause – both the incalculable cost to victim-survivors’ lives, and the wider costs of domestic abuse across national systems, services, and agencies. Based on impact data from the Drive Project demonstrating reductions in serial perpetration of abuse, the Drive Partnership estimates that for every £1 invested in the Drive Project, approximately £3 could be avoided annually through the reduction of serial perpetration.

Expansion

The Drive Project is only ever implemented in partnership with both perpetrator services and victim-survivor services, in line with the Respect Standard. By nature of the Drive Project’s model, the vast majority of funding for the expansion will flow directly to local perpetrator services and victim-survivor services across England and Wales. The Drive Project central team will set-up, mobilise, train, data manage and provide ongoing quality assurance to Drive Project sites across existing and new PCC areas. Our aim is that in 12 months’ time, more than half of PCC areas will have a high-harm, high-risk Drive Project perpetrator service, with every step taken to ensure this process is safely and steadily implemented. We are working to roll out into 15 new PCC areas in Year 1 and an additional 15 new PCC areas in Year 2. Roll-out will happen in phases, and we will be working closely with partners and stakeholders to determine what this will look like for both existing and new sites to implement next steps.

Investment

The Drive Partnership has long called for a consistent and evidence-based response to high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators of domestic abuse across all areas to stop them slipping through the net and continuing the cycle of harm, as outlined in our sector-supported 2020 Call to Action and 2024 Call for Further Action. The Drive Project is an evidence-based, cost-effective response to high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators that has been working to reduce risk and increase victim-survivor safety for a decade. This investment, which will largely be directed to local perpetrator services and victim-survivor services, will ensure a consistent and sustainable response to high-risk, high-harm and serial perpetrators across all areas, and is an important step within our ongoing calls for a range of effective responses to those causing harm in all areas that meets the needs of all communities, and specialist support for all adult and child victim-survivors.

A Call for Further Action

In April 2020, the Drive Partnership published a Call to Action, supported by over 100 organisations and individuals, for the Government to formulate a perpetrator strategy to effectively tackle endemic levels of domestic abuse. Through the passage of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, the Government accepted our Call to Action’s key ask and set itself a legal requirement to publish a strategic approach to perpetrators within a year; which it fulfilled within the publication of the Pursuing Perpetrators Pillar of the Tackling Domestic Abuse Plan 2022. Following the 2024 General Election, the Drive Partnership published a Call for Further Action, supported by over 100 sector signatories, calling on the Government to take further action to address systemic gaps and strengthen the response to perpetrators of domestic abuse through:

Long-term, strategic investment in perpetrator responses and ongoing evaluation.

A full range of specialist service provision available across all areas – to match the scale of the problem and meet the needs of all communities.

Consistent and evidence-informed multi-agency responses to high-risk, high-harm perpetrators.

A cross-government, whole-system response to perpetrators that centres adult and child victim-survivors.

The Drive Partnership welcomes the investment in the expansion of the Drive Project, in line with its call for a consistent and evidence-informed multi-agency response to high-risk, high-harm perpetrators across all areas, and will continue to work to pursue the sector’s urgent needs and achieve all recommendations within the Call for Further Action.