A new national billboard campaign from the crisis support charity Hestia is casting a stark winter light on one of the UK’s most significant innovations in domestic abuse support: the high street ‘Safe Space’. As Chief Executive Patrick Ryan emphasised, the winter months can be particularly dangerous for those experiencing domestic abuse due to increased isolation and risk, making the promotion of these discreet havens more critical than ever. The initiative, run under Hestia’s UK Says No More campaign, transforms everyday locations like pharmacies and banks into accessible sanctuaries where survivors can discreetly ask for private access to a room, a telephone, and vital information. This represents a paradigm shift in public-private partnerships for social good—a potential blueprint for other sectors, born from a global crisis.

The Pandemic’s Legacy: Forging New Portals to Safety

For decades, the domestic abuse (DA) sector has navigated a fundamental tension: the need to ensure survivor safety, which often demanded secrecy and hidden locations, versus the need to make services visible and easily accessible to those in desperate need. This long-standing challenge meant that many specialist services lacked a public-facing community presence, making it difficult for survivors to find help.

The COVID-19 pandemic acted as an unexpected and powerful catalyst for innovation. As lockdown restrictions confined survivors at home with their abusers and severed access to traditional support networks, a new sense of urgency propelled the sector to forge novel partnerships. According to a 2022 academic study from the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Edinburgh, these unprecedented conditions accelerated the development of “community touchpoints”—a new model for delivering support that partners DA organisations with government bodies and commercial businesses.

This “community touchpoint” model is defined by its ability to provide access to specialist DA support within non-stigmatised, everyday spaces. By integrating safety portals into trusted public locations like pharmacies and banks, the approach effectively hides support “in plain sight.” This strategy aims to overcome the barriers of visibility and stigma that have long hampered the sector, creating accessible pathways to help. From this conceptual framework, one of the UK’s most prominent initiatives, Hestia’s Safe Spaces, emerged and began rapid expansion.

From Crisis Response to High Street Fixture: The Story of Safe Spaces

Hestia’s Safe Spaces scheme stands as a leading example of the community touchpoint model in action, translating an emergency response into a durable part of the UK’s support infrastructure. Launched in May 2020 as part of the charity’s UK Says No More campaign, the initiative was designed to be simple, discreet, and effective. A person experiencing domestic abuse can enter a participating business, ask a staff member for a ‘Safe Space,’ and be shown to a private consultation room. There, they can use a telephone and receive information on national helplines and local DA services.

The scheme’s growth has been remarkable. Following a successful pilot in a single London borough, Hestia expanded the initiative nationally, first by partnering with major pharmacy chains. Its reach broadened significantly when it extended into the banking sector, with an extensive list of high street names joining the network, including AIB (NI), Boots, Cooperative Bank, Medicare, Metro Bank, Morrisons, Nationwide, NatWest, Progressive Building Society, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander, TSB, and Ulster Bank. The scheme’s continued growth was demonstrated when HSBC joined in April 2022. Today, there are over 4,400 Safe Spaces established on UK high streets.

Alongside its physical network, Hestia developed a parallel digital innovation: ‘Online Safe Spaces.’ Created in partnership with the Royal Mail Group, this discreet portal can be installed on commercial and government websites. The widget allows a user to access untracked information and support resources without fear of their internet history being discovered by an abuser. This dual approach—physical and digital—has created a multi-layered support system, but its rapid rollout has also prompted a deeper analysis of its true impact and the operational challenges it faces.

Evaluating the Impact: Reach, Awareness, and Unanswered Questions

While the Safe Spaces model has achieved significant scale, its rapid implementation during a crisis has raised important questions among sector experts about its effectiveness, equity, and long-term sustainability. The initiative’s successes are clear, but so are the challenges that come with a nationally scaled, top-down approach.

A careful evaluation reveals several key successes.

• Public Awareness and De-stigmatisation: Partnerships with high-profile commercial organisations have been crucial in raising public awareness and reframing domestic abuse as a societal issue. This was powerfully demonstrated by HSBC’s experiential outdoor advertising campaign at London’s Spitalfields Market, which used a live actor to depict control. This was not merely a branding exercise; by focusing on financial abuse, the campaign directly addressed a specific, often hidden form of control, demonstrating how corporate partners can be leveraged to educate the public on the nuances of domestic abuse.
• Impressive Reach: The scheme’s rollout has been extensive. By March 2022, data showed participation from 5,720 pharmacies and 290 bank branches across the UK. The parallel ‘Online Safe Spaces’ initiative had been adopted by 64 organisations, logging over 934,000 individual visits.
• Flexible Support: Anecdotal evidence highlights the model’s adaptability. One success story documented in academic research tells of a survivor who used a local Safe Space six times to methodically plan her escape—contacting family, accessing legal support, and connecting with a local Independent Domestic Violence Advisor (IDVA). This demonstrates how a simple touchpoint can be transformed by a survivor into a sustained lifeline.

However, critical analysis from the same research has identified significant limitations and areas for improvement.

• Local Responsivity: Researchers noted that a national, centrally-driven scheme can feel “top-down” and lack sensitivity to local contexts. For example, some promotional posters in Scotland were found to display an English DA helpline number instead of the correct Scottish Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline. Furthermore, concerns were raised about ensuring confidentiality in rural communities where pharmacy or bank staff are more likely to know customers personally, potentially deterring disclosure.
• Staff Training: While staff at participating businesses receive training, such as a 60-minute e-learning course for bank employees, some experts question whether this is sufficient preparation for handling complex and highly sensitive disclosures. This highlights the model’s central trade-off: achieving massive national scale through commercial partners necessitates a ‘light touch’ training approach, which stands in contrast to deeper, but less scalable, community-based volunteer initiatives that can offer more sustained support.
• Accessibility for All: The model’s accessibility for marginalised groups has been questioned. Researchers highlighted potential barriers for Black and Minoritised women, survivors experiencing digital poverty, and those whose movements are heavily scrutinised by an abuser. Crucially, with the exception of a specific scheme in Scotland targeting victims of sexual assault, the community touchpoint initiatives are designed almost exclusively for adults, largely excluding children and young people.

These complex findings—balancing significant successes against critical questions of equity and local responsivity—frame the central challenge for the future of community-based support.

The Future of Community-Based Support

The ‘Safe Spaces’ initiative is a landmark innovation born from the crucible of the pandemic. It has fundamentally broadened the range of organisations involved in the UK’s response to domestic abuse, shifting vital support out of specialist silos and into the mainstream commercial sphere. This paradigm shift has not only created new avenues to safety but also helped erode the public silence that has long surrounded this issue.

Looking ahead, the model’s future rests on its ability to resolve the central tension between achieving national scale and ensuring that its services are locally relevant, culturally competent, and truly accessible to the most vulnerable survivors. The key question for the charity sector is whether these public-private partnerships, fuelled by the pandemic-driven empathy, will continue to thrive and evolve in a post-pandemic context. The potential is clear: with refinement and further investment, the community touchpoint model could be extended into other settings and, critically, adapted to finally reach the children and young people who remain so often invisible.