Six in 10 women are being turned away from refuges

Leading domestic abuse charity Refuge is making more homelessness referrals than ever Getty)

- MAYA OPPENHEIM

More than half of domestic abuse survivors face homelessness after being turned away from refuges due to a chronic national shortage of spaces. The latest figures show around six in 10 women fleeing domestic violence who sought a space in a refuge in England over a year were denied a place.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows 27,754 women were referred to a refuge between April 2022 and March 2023 but only 10,824 were accepted, with 16,930 women left with nowhere to go. This is the equivalent of one woman being turned away every two hours.

Exclusive data from Refuge shows increasing numbers of calls to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline which it runs are seeking referrals to refuges to escape their abusers, rising from 5,450 to 6,086 between 2020 and 2024.

Just this year so far, the helpline has supported 49,787 calls for help, with 75 per cent of those being from survivors of domestic abuse. The charity revealed that it is referring a record number of victims to local councils across England and Wales for homelessness – a tripling from 120 to 407 over the same four years.

Abigail Ampofo, interim chief executive of Refuge, said many of those being denied a safe place were desperate: “For some, there may be the opportunity of getting emergency temporary accommodation from the local authority. Others can stay with friends and family. There will be people who need to sofa surf with them. A lot of female rough sleepers’ homelessness was triggered by domestic abuse.”

The latest recorded number of refuge bed spaces in England from 2023 was 4,385, which is 22 per cent below the minimum total recommended by the Council of Europe.