Tesco Gives Abuse Survivors Three Paid Days

Britain’s biggest private employer now offers paid “safe leave” to staff experiencing domestic abuse. It is a first for UK supermarkets, and a modest one next to what the law already guarantees workers in Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines.

By Teona Abuladze · 6 min read

Twenty-one hours. That is what Tesco now guarantees, on full pay, to any UK employee who tells a manager they are experiencing domestic abuse. For a full-time worker it comes to three days.

The hours can be split up. A morning in family court. An afternoon waiting at home for a locksmith. A day spent viewing an emergency flat across town.

The policy went public on 5 October. Tesco employs around 300,000 people in the UK, more than any other private company, and it is the first British supermarket to put paid leave of this kind in writing.

What the policy says

The leave is extra. It doesn’t eat into holiday or sick pay. Staff can use it to attend court hearings, arrange emergency accommodation, change locks, organise childcare or separate their finances from an abuser.

Nobody has to bring proof. No police report, no letter from a caseworker. The employee discloses, and the time is hers. (Or his. The policy covers everyone.)

Nobody has to bring proof. The employee discloses, and the time is hers.

Managers across the company have been trained to recognise warning signs, respond when someone discloses, and point people toward specialist services. The policy was negotiated with Usdaw, the shopworkers’ union, and developed with guidance from the Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse, a network of more than 2,000 UK employers.

It sits alongside support Tesco already offered: confidential counselling, legal and financial advice, mental health support, and a personal safety app called Peoplesafe.

Emma Taylor, Tesco’s chief people officer, summed up the reasoning: “No one should have to choose between their job and their safety.”

Why a supermarket matters

Paid safe leave already exists in parts of corporate Britain. Vodafone has offered up to ten extra paid days since 2019. BP and a handful of local councils have their own versions. Those are largely office jobs.

A checkout shift works differently. You can’t log in from a solicitor’s waiting room or quietly shuffle your hours. If a shelf-stacker needs Tuesday morning for a hearing, someone else has to cover her aisle, and until now that morning usually came out of her wages. Unpaid leave is the quiet tax on leaving. For people paid by the hour, three funded days are concrete.

The commitment first surfaced in March, folded into a pay deal with Usdaw that raised hourly rates by 5.1% to £13.28. Tesco said then that a domestic abuse policy with up to three paid days would follow before the end of the year. It arrived in October. Daniel Adams, Usdaw’s national officer, has since urged other employers to follow.

The numbers behind it

The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates that 3.8 million people aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse in the year to March 2025. About 2.2 million were women, which is 9.1% of all women in that age group.

Over a lifetime the figure climbs. Using new, more detailed survey questions, the Office for National Statistics found that 29.6% of women in England and Wales have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16. That is close to three in ten.

Close to three in ten women in England and Wales have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16.

Reporting stays low. Fewer than one in five victims of partner abuse go to the police, according to the ONS.

The deaths are the hardest numbers. The charity SafeLives, working from 2023 data, says eight women a month are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales. Official counts shift from year to year: in the year to March 2025, the ONS recorded 111 domestic homicides, with 75 women among the victims, and 67 people killed by a partner or ex-partner. That is more than one a week.

Where British law stands

This is where the story gets less flattering, and mostly for the government.

In England, Scotland and Wales there is no legal right to paid safe leave. Alex McIntyre, the Labour MP for Gloucester, introduced a Domestic Abuse (Safe Leave) Bill in June 2025 that would have created one. It never reached a second reading and fell when the parliamentary session ended.

Northern Ireland went further on paper. The Assembly passed the Domestic Abuse (Safe Leave) Act in March 2022, and it received Royal Assent that May, creating a right to at least ten paid days a year. Four years on, workers still can’t use it, because the regulations needed to switch it on haven’t been made. A public consultation closed in September 2024. Unions have rallied at Stormont asking where the leave is. In July 2026, Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald repeated her pledge to deliver it before the current Assembly mandate ends.

Other countries wrote it into law years ago:

• The Philippines, 2004. Its Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act gives victims up to ten days of paid leave. It applies only to women.
• New Zealand, April 2019. Ten paid days a year, on top of holidays and sick leave.
• Australia, 2023. Ten paid days a year for full-time, part-time and casual workers, available upfront from the first day of a job. Large employers had to offer it from February, small businesses from August.

Set beside those, three days is a start.

There is also an awkward comparison inside Tesco itself. In March 2023, Tesco Ireland gave its 13,000 staff five days of paid domestic abuse leave, also with no proof required, moving ahead of Irish legislation that was on its way. The UK workforce, more than twenty times larger, gets three.

In 2023, Tesco Ireland gave its staff five paid days. The UK workforce now gets three.

What three days can’t do

Leaving an abusive partner rarely fits inside a week of appointments. Custody cases drag on for months. Finding somewhere safe to live can take longer than any leave policy allows.

The leave also depends on telling someone at work, and disclosure is exactly the step many people put off for years. The no-evidence rule helps. So does the training, if it holds up in practice: a manager who understands coercive control is easier to talk to than one who thinks abuse means bruises.

The harder question is why a worker’s access to paid time off to get safe depends on which company she happens to work for. Tesco has done voluntarily what Westminster hasn’t made anyone do. When an employer of 300,000 people manages it, the familiar argument that a legal right would be unworkable for business gets thinner.

Northern Ireland’s regulations are now promised for before the 2027 Assembly election. In Westminster, the bill would have to start again from the beginning.

If you or someone you know is affected by domestic abuse: in the UK, the free 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.

Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.

Sources: Retail Gazette (5 Oct 2026); Personnel Today (5 Oct 2026); Employee Benefits (6 Oct 2026); Drapers (Oct 2026); RetailSector and The Industry Fashion on the March 2026 Usdaw pay deal; ONS, Domestic abuse in England and Wales overview: November 2025; ONS blog, The value of ONS domestic abuse statistics (Nov 2025); ONS, Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2025; SafeLives, Facts and figures; UK Parliament, Domestic Abuse (Safe Leave) Bill 2024–26; NI Department for the Economy (consultation 2024; ministerial statement 8 July 2026); Legal-Island (Dec 2025); ICTU NI; Fair Work Ombudsman (Australia); NI Assembly Research and Information Service briefing on safe leave in other jurisdictions; Philippine Senate (RA 9262); Checkout.ie and IOE on Tesco Ireland (March 2023).