Tesco Offers Paid Safe Leave for Domestic Abuse Victims
The Silence That Filled the Rota
It did not appear in policy, because home life was treated as separate from the job, and the payroll was not expected to know about it. The union that represents shopworkers compresses that stretch of time into a single sentence: violence against women, and domestic violence in particular, was hidden, excused and ignored. That sentence belongs to Daniel Adams, a national officer at Usdaw, who still delivers it in the past tense: “Historically violence against women, and domestic violence in particular, has been hidden, excused and ignored. That needs to change.” [1] Something has now been written into the contract at the country’s largest private-sector employer. Tesco employs 300,000 people in the UK, and it is the first supermarket to introduce paid “safe leave” for victims of domestic abuse. The entitlement runs to up to three days, which can be taken flexibly. Flexibility is the part that makes the allocation usable, because the tasks involved do not arrive when a rota says they should. What the days are for is itemised: attending court hearings, arranging emergency accommodation, changing locks, securing childcare, separating finances. Those are tasks that require being somewhere other than work, at hours that work does not choose.
Managers across the business have also been trained to spot the signs of domestic abuse, to support those affected, and to flag them to specialist services. The policy was developed with Usdaw, the shopworkers’ union that negotiated it. Tesco will not ask those suffering abuse to provide formal evidence in order to gain access to the special leave. What the policy does answer is who pays for the time: the company, not the person who needs it. That is the difference between paid leave and the unpaid kind a colleague would otherwise have to take. Whether three days is enough is a question the policy does not answer.
Emma Taylor, Tesco’s chief people officer, says the company believes it has a responsibility to support colleagues during what may be among the hardest moments of their lives. Guaranteed safe leave, in her account, means colleagues can get practical assistance and the time required without fear of losing pay or having to disclose private details. She ends on the choice the policy is meant to remove: “We’re proud to be taking this step and want it to help drive wider action from employers across the UK. No one should have to choose between their job and their safety.” [1]
When the Employer Moves First
Tesco is thought to be the first big British retailer to introduce safe leave. It is not the first British employer to act on the same problem. BP and Vodafone, along with some local councils, have enacted related measures: protected paid leave, emergency accommodation, and training for staff to recognise the signs of domestic abuse.
The legal track keeps its own timetable. In 2020, Northern Ireland passed legislation guaranteeing domestic abuse victims 10 days’ paid leave. A private member’s bill currently before parliament proposes the same 10 days for England and Wales, to give victims time to deal with the practical and emotional steps. The Domestic Abuse Act, which became law in April 2021, already includes workplace protection for domestic abuse victims.
Those ten days are not law yet. Until they are, the number of days a victim can count on depends on who employs them. The bill would reach workers whose employers have agreed to nothing.
Tesco’s three days sit in company policy; Northern Ireland’s ten sit in statute, passed in 2020. Tesco says it wants this step to drive wider action from employers across the UK, which is the voluntary route stated openly. The gap between the two tracks is now measurable: three days by agreement at the country’s biggest private-sector employer, ten days by law in Northern Ireland, ten days asked for in England and Wales.
The Numbers the Policy Is Written Against
The count covers a single year and two nations. More than 3 million people suffered some form of domestic abuse in England and Wales last year, most of whom were women, according to the campaign group SafeLives. SafeLives also says eight women a month are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales, based on 2023 data.
Daniel Adams, the Usdaw national officer, puts the reach of domestic violence and abuse at at least one in five women, and he urges other employers to introduce similar support. [1] Usdaw has long campaigned for support at work for survivors of domestic abuse, and the policy at Tesco is the product of a negotiation the union counts as successful. Abuse at home often follows a survivor into work, and the union’s argument is that employers need to understand both that fact and what they can do about it. That request to other employers is not the union’s alone: the company’s own statement asks employers across the UK to act.
Incidents rose sharply during the pandemic lockdowns, when victims were trapped at home with perpetrators. The permanent shift to working from home since then is seen to have made some people more vulnerable, though that effect is a judgement rather than a count. The lockdown spike, by contrast, was measured as it happened. The mechanism is spatial: for many workers the workplace used to be a building a perpetrator could not walk into, and remote work removes that separation.
Three million people, one woman in five, eight deaths a month — these are the figures SafeLives and Usdaw publish, and they are the ones against which the policy will be judged. For an employer reading them, the practical fact is that a workforce of any size contains people living with this. What the policy adds is a procedure: a route to ask for the time without first proving the harm. The figures measure the harm; the policy measures the response. Leave, in this policy, is not time away from the job but the interval in which someone can change the locks and still keep it.