Domestic abuse support needs more than tick-box politics

One of the problems with the political news cycle, whether in normal times or now, is that politicians believe that making an announcement about a policy problem is all they need to do to tick it off their to-do list. The more complex the problem, the more tempting it is to make an announcement that sounds as though you are taking it seriously, but which doesn’t do anything to address even one aspect of what’s really going on.

One of the classic long-term examples of this is social care, which no political party in the past two decades has done enough to address, beyond making announcements about what they might do. Another is ‘skills’, which few politicians really understand, but which they know is in some vague sense important to those who haven’t been to university. In recent years, we have heard plenty of announcements on how seriously the government takes mental illness, which then amounts to little more than someone as powerful as the Prime Minister saying ‘it’s okay not to be okay’, without doing the sorts of things that powerful people like prime ministers can do, like increasing the amount of support available for those who aren’t okay rather than leaving them on a year-long waiting list.