What is Clare’s Law? Your Right to Ask, Explained
What is Clare’s Law? Your Right to Ask, Explained
Most people have never heard of Clare's Law until they need it. The hope with this article is that you find it before you or anyone around you needs it.
There are all sorts of moments that could signal that you or someone you know might be able to find Clare’s Law useful. They can be anything from something that feels slightly off about a new partner, to a story about an ex that doesn't quite add up or a friend who goes quiet whenever their relationship comes up. If something like that has made you hesitate, you're not overthinking it and this might come in handy.
Two things first. This law applies in the UK. And if you feel the danger is immediate, don't wait to use Clare's Law. Call 999 now. For confidential support at any time, the free 24/7 National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247. It's always better to be overly cautious than to wish later that you'd acted.
For everything short of that, there is Clare's Law, which gives you the legal right to ask the police whether a partner has a history of abuse.
It's also worth being clear that Clare's Law is not just for women, and not just for heterosexual relationships. It applies to anyone aged 16 or over, regardless of gender or sexuality, and covers same-sex and any other relationship equally. Domestic abuse happens across every kind of partnership, and so does the right to ask about it.
What is Clare’s Law?
Clare's Law, officially called the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme, requires the police to share information about a person's abusive or violent past with someone who may be at risk from them, or with a person close to them. It was named after Clare Wood, who was murdered in 2009 by an ex-partner with a history of violence she knew nothing about.
The scheme was rolled out across England and Wales in 2014. At first it was just guidance that police forces were expected to follow. Then the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 gave it legal teeth, meaning forces now have a statutory duty to operate it consistently rather than treating disclosure as something left entirely to their own discretion.
A key point worth repeating: you don't have to be the person at direct risk to use it. It's enough to have genuine concerns about someone you know. And in some situations, the police have a duty to come to you. Those are the scheme's two routes.
Right to Ask: you ask the police
This lets any member of the public apply to the police to check whether a current or ex-partner has a record of abuse. You can apply about your own relationship, or on behalf of someone you're worried about. A parent, a friend, a neighbour, or a colleague can all make a request for someone they think is at risk. If you apply for someone else, the information goes to the person actually at risk, not automatically to you.
Right to Know: the police discloses information without any request for it
This works the other way around. If the police come across information suggesting someone is in danger, they have a duty to consider telling that person on their own initiative, even if no one has requested it.
How would they know? Usually it surfaces through ordinary police work. An officer attending a domestic incident, making an arrest, or reviewing intelligence might identify that one person has a history of abuse and that their current or ex-partner could be at risk. The disclosure is then made to the person at risk, normally in person, with a safety plan in place.
How to use Clare’s Law
How to request information under Clare’s Law
This is usually where people get lost, because "ask the police" sounds vaguer than it is. There are three ways to start.
Call 101, the non-emergency police number, and ask for a Clare's Law disclosure.
Walk into your local police station and ask in person.
Or, arguably the easiest, apply online through the police's national request form, which routes your application to the right local force.
Whichever route you choose, you'll be asked for some details about yourself and the person you're concerned about.
What happens after you ask
The process is fairly consistent across the UK. An officer from the force's Clare's Law team will contact you to confirm your request and ask what prompted it, along with when and where it's safe to reach you, or the person you are concerned about.
They then run checks across police and safeguarding databases, and in more complex cases a multi-agency panel reviews the information before deciding what can be shared.
What counts as complex? Cases where children are involved, where the information sits with another police force or agency, where the person you're asking about has a contested or partial record, or where disclosing could itself increase the risk to you. These take longer because more people have to weigh in.
If there is relevant information and disclosure is judged necessary and proportionate, the police will arrange to tell you in person, usually in a private meeting.
"Necessary and proportionate" refers to specific legal tests the police must satisfy before disclosing:
Sharing the information is necessary to protect you from crime
There is a pressing need
Interfering with the other person's privacy is justified given the risk
They have to balance your safety against that person's right to confidentiality, within data protection and human rights law. That balance is also why some things won't be shared. A single allegation that was investigated and found baseless, a spent conviction unrelated to abuse, or vague rumour with nothing behind it generally won't meet the threshold. The scheme discloses relevant, credible history of abuse, not someone's entire background.
The information is given verbally, so you won't be handed a written report. You'll be asked to sign an undertaking not to pass it on. This is partly for your own safety and partly because the information concerns someone else's record, and sharing it further can carry legal consequences. That requirement is a real part of how the scheme operates, not just a formality.
Applications are generally completed within 28 days unless the case is unusually complex.
It's worth being honest that not every request leads to a disclosure, and that forces vary. But use of the scheme has grown sharply. In the year ending March 2024 there were 58,612 Clare's Law applications in England and Wales, far more than in its early years, which suggests both more awareness and more confidence in asking.
Why Clare’s Law Matters
Clare's Law exists to interrupt a pattern that repeats far too often. People usually aren't overthinking when they sense warning signs before serious harm happens. The point of the scheme is simply to move information that would otherwise stay buried in a police record into the hands of the person who actually needs it, early enough to do something with it, whether that's leaving a relationship, seeking support, or making a safety plan.
The scale is hard to ignore. In the year ending March 2024, an estimated 2.3 million adults experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales. This is not an edge case.
And it doesn't stay neatly at home. Domestic abuse shows up at work in unexplained absences or in dips in performance. It shows up among friends when they flinch at a phone notification from their ex or their partner, or when their partner has a habit of turning up unannounced at the office or on a night out.
For someone you know, Clare's Law can be a way to help a person who doesn't yet see the pattern, or who sees it but feels too trapped to act.
For employers, awareness of schemes like Clare's Law is part of a wider duty of care, and increasingly part of how safeguarding and conduct responsibilities are understood across the UK.
Like a lot of safeguarding, the barrier usually isn’t the law. It's recognition. People hesitate because they're not sure the concern is "serious enough," or when they know it is, they don't know a route like this exists, or even sometimes they assume someone else will say something. It's the same hesitation that stops a colleague from speaking up when they sense something is wrong with someone at work.
The point of this article is simply this: being overly careful is okay, there are legal routes built for exactly that, and you're allowed to use them.
Closing the recognition gap
The prevalence of domestic abuse, and the lack of awareness about schemes like Clare’s Law, is exactly why Arti has teamed up with Impact-Inspire to deliver a training program specifically on domestic abuse.
Our personalised conversational AI training moves people past the obvious textbook examples and into the realistic, ambiguous situations they're far more likely to encounter, whether that's spotting the early signs of an abusive dynamic affecting someone they know or knowing what to do when something feels off but isn't yet clear-cut. Because in safeguarding, what counts isn't whether someone sat through the training. It's whether they knew what to do when it mattered.
If you want to see how that works in practice, jump in the platform and test out one of the free trainings or book a demo. And if you think your organisation’s training could benefit from Arti, let us know. We won't say it came from you unless you want us to, but they'll receive a note saying someone in their organisation believes they could be doing more to protect their people.
