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The head of one of the country’s biggest domestic abuse charities has compared the actions of Cheshire East Council with that of a “domestic abuse perpetrator”.
The council told the charity in mid-January that it plans to stop funding MyCWA — Cheshire Without Abuse — after nine years.
“The council has been very bullying,” Saskia Lightburn-Ritchie claimed to Byline Times, adding: “It’s the same approach as a domestic abuse perpetrator: monopolising people’s perspective of us by sharing misinformation, removing our access to data, refusing to speak to us, and going behind our back.”
At the forefront of Lightburn-Ritchie’s concerns are the 14 adults and seven children in the charity’s refuge accommodation receiving intensive support, who she fears will be forced into hostels.
“I’m terrified what will happen if we’re not there. The people with us at the moment are settled. It’ll be a terrible disruption to families that don’t need extra trauma,” she says.
Lightburn-Ritchie, who lived in a refuge when she was a young parent, says it can be “really devastating” to live in a hostel — but this is often the only option for women fleeing abusive partners. An estimated 2.3 million adults (1.6 million women and 712,000 men) suffered domestic abuse in the UK last year, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Along with its emergency refuge — one of the 5% across the country that allows pets — many of the charity’s other services were instantly put at risk, including crisis support, adult and child survivor recovery programmes, behaviour change interventions, and practical support, by the council’s funding move. The charity is the primary provider of non-statutory domestic abuse support in Cheshire East, and supported 4,00 adults and children last year.
MyCWA was already supplementing its funding from the council and, over the past year, spent £300,000 delivering services. For every £1 invested, MyCWA saves the public purse £8.37, a Women’s Aid report previously found.
Two years ago, Cheshire East Council said that ending its contract with MyCWA — the only commissioned domestic abuse refuge in the area —would put women and girls at greater risk of domestic abuse, and potentially cause more women to be murdered and die by suicide.
It recommended working with MyCWA for another five years — and gave the charity two successive six-month extensions while it figured out its domestic abuse strategy, Lightburn-Ritchie says.
The council’s decision to stop funding MyCWA is part of a national pattern of refuges closing or turning women away due to chronic underfunding.
Many hostels around the country are at breaking point after years of underfunding, says Abigail Ampofo, interim chief executive of Refuge. And many councils, she adds, are reducing or freezing budgets for VAWG services, which, she says, are essential in supporting the Government’s mission to halve VAWG within the next decade.
Refuge is concerned that without ringfenced provisions for specialist services, these will continue to be at risk of decommissioning in favour of generic services, which cannot meet the needs of survivors in the same way
Abigail Ampofo, interim chief executive of Refuge
In response to findings that cases of domestic violence are rising, the National Police Chief’s Council, in July 2024, emphasised the importance of services supporting women and girls.
However, after there was no mention of VAWG in the Labour Government’s first budget, charities called for £516 million per year in England, to ensure that survivors can access early interventions with specialist domestic abuse services. The autumn budget fell short of the sector’s expectations, making funding domestic abuse services even more difficult for councils across the country. More recently, the Crime and Policing Bill, introduced to parliament on February 25, made no explicit mention of domestic abuse.
There have been warnings that, because councils aren’t obliged to fund most domestic abuse services, the mounting financial pressure they’re facing means that domestic abuse services will likely be reduced or cut altogether.
For seven months before Cheshire East Council ended its funding via email, Lightburn-Richie said it ghosted the charity. She was then given nine weeks’ notice — but says the council had previously assured her it would provide at least six months’ warning.
Then, one week after the council’s email, and with one hour’s notice, the charity claims it was cut off from an online database it shared with the council, holding the data of 300 vulnerable MyCWA clients. That weekend, Lightbutn-Ritche says a client was stabbed by their partner, and CWA was unable to contact them because it didn’t have their details.
Lightburn-Ritchie says that when she contacted the landlords of the buildings where the charity’s refuges were located, she was told they’d all been instructed by the council to end their leases with MyCWA.