Thursday 15th April 2021
(3 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberDomestic Abuse Bill 2019-21 View all Domestic Abuse Bill 2019-21 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Commons Consideration of Lords Amendments as at 15 April - (15 Apr 2021)
15:56 - The House divided: - Ayes: 360 / Noes: 221 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:08 - The House divided: - Ayes: 352 / Noes: 222 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:15 - The House divided: - Ayes: 361 / Noes: 218 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:22 - The House divided: - Ayes: 362 / Noes: 217 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:29 - The House divided: - Ayes: 362 / Noes: 217 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:37 - The House divided: - Ayes: 350 / Noes: 270 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:44 - The House divided: - Ayes: 352 / Noes: 270 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:51 - The House divided: - Ayes: 351 / Noes: 226 - Question accordingly agreed to.
16:58 - The House divided: - Ayes: 352 / Noes: 226 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)
I beg to move, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.
Mr Deputy Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Lords amendment 2, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendment 3, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendments 4 to 8.
Lords amendment 9, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendments 10 to 32.
Lords amendment 33, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendments 34 to 36.
Lords amendment 37, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendment 38, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendment 39.
Lords amendment 40, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendment 41, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendment 42, and Government motion to disagree, and Government amendments (a) to (c) in lieu.
Lords amendment 43, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendments 44 to 82.
Lords amendment 83, and Government motion to disagree.
Lords amendments 84 to 86.
Victoria Atkins
Before I start my speech, may I beg your indulgence, Mr Deputy Speaker, and place on the record not only my condolences to Her Majesty the Queen but my and my constituents’ heartfelt thanks to His Royal Highness Prince Philip? He was the personification of public service, dedicating his life to Her Majesty and to serving our country for more than 70 years, and he did so with great style and often a twinkle in his eye.
May I also pay tribute to my friend, the right hon. Dame Cheryl Gillan, who passed away very recently? She would have loved to take part in today’s debate. She was a huge advocate for the vulnerable, including those who live with autism. She was a wonderful, wonderful friend and colleague to us all, and she will be very, very sorely missed.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for all that she has done with regard to recognising the problems around threats to publish intimate images. Will she join me in saying that we need to make sure that the law is all-encompassing in this area? It is important to improve the law on revenge pornography as it stands now, introduced by this Government, but it is even more important that we have a wholesale review of this area, such as that which is part of the Law Commission’s review.
Victoria Atkins
I agree completely with my right hon. Friend. I thank her for the work she has done over many years to address this and other issues particularly affecting women and girls. We very much take that point. We have worked on the amendment with Baroness Morgan to have an immediate impact, but in addition we look forward to receiving the Law Commission’s report and recommendations later this year—it is looking at the whole of the law on the use of intimate images and other types of malicious communications on the internet. If the law needs to be changed to reflect recommendations, we can address those in subsequent legislation. These clauses apply to all relationships and all encounters of a sexual nature, from a Tinder hook-up to a marriage of many decades. Those protections will be enshrined in this Bill.
I turn to another amendment that I know has been welcomed warmly by survivors and campaigners: the extension of the coercive and controlling behaviour offence to include post-separation abuse. We listened very carefully to debates in this place, as well as to charities such as Surviving Economic Abuse and, of course, to survivors themselves. We reviewed the offence to see how it is working after five years of being in force and we published that review in March.
We acknowledge that coercive and controlling behaviour continues and indeed may escalate following separation, so amendment 34 will extend the offence to cover post-separation abuse between former intimate partners and interfamilial abuse, regardless of whether the family members are living together or not. The amendment will send a strong message to perpetrators that controlling or coercive behaviours, irrespective of the living arrangements, are forms of domestic abuse and that the criminal law is there to protect victims.
The Bill also revolutionises the help that is available to victims who need to flee relationships to refuge or other safe accommodation. It is revolutionary in that it helps to ensure that they are helped to recover from their experiences. Part 4 introduces a duty on tier 1 local authorities to provide specialist services to such victims and we have announced £125 million of funding to support that provision in the Bill.
There is a cross-party desire to see those measures matched by equivalent provision in respect of community-based support. This Government are alive to such calls. Police and crime commissioners, and others, already provide significant community-based support to victims of crime, but we need better evidence of the gaps in current provision and how they might best be addressed. That is why the Government have now committed to consult on the provision of community-based support as part of this summer’s consultation on the new victims’ law. That commitment to consult is backed up by Lords amendments 5, 8 and 10 to 16. Lords amendment 5 will place a duty on the domestic abuse commissioner to publish a report, under her new powers in the Bill, on the provision of and need for community-based services. Lords amendments 8 and 10 to 16 will place a duty on tier 1 local authorities, with the support of their domestic abuse local partnership boards, to monitor and report on the impact of the safe accommodation duty on the provision of community-based support in their area. Taken together with the responses to our victims’ law consultation, those amendments will ensure that the Government have all the information they need to build on the strong foundations of existing community-based services.
Some of the most upsetting and torturous experiences that victims can experience happen after a relationship has ended, in the family and civil courts. Lords amendments 17 and 24 to 31 relate to special measures and the ban on cross-examination in person in civil proceedings. In short, those amendments more closely align the position in the civil courts to that in the family courts, so that victims of domestic abuse have the benefit of automatic eligibility for special measures to enable them to give their best evidence and to ensure that they are protected from being cross-examined in person by their abuser. Our justice system should not be used as another form of abuse. This Bill will help to protect victims and secure justice.
In the case of the family courts, perpetrators can continue abuse through repeated unmeritorious proceedings. Lords amendment 33 amends the Children Act 1989 to prevent such vexatious claims. The amendment makes it clear that a court may make a barring order in circumstances where it is satisfied that a further application made by the named person would put the child or another, for example the parent victim, at risk of harm. For all the victims and survivors I have met, and whose stories we have heard in the Chamber: these measures are to help you all to secure justice, as you deserve.
Lords amendment 39 would ensure that a health professional working in a general practice that holds an NHS contract cannot charge for evidence to show that a patient has been the victim of domestic abuse for the purpose of obtaining legal aid. We recognise that it is already the case that most GPs do not charge for such evidence, but the amendment will ensure that no victim faces that barrier to obtaining legal aid.
The Bill also reaches beyond these shores. Lords amendments 70 to 82 amend the extraterritorial jurisdiction provisions in the Bill to remove the dual criminality requirement for relevant sexual offences, including rape, committed outside the UK by UK nationals. That will enable UK nationals who commit marital rape in countries where such behaviour is not criminal to be prosecuted in UK courts. This is also a significant step forward towards ratifying the Istanbul convention, as it addresses one of the three outstanding matters set out in the statement to the House in October last year.
I turn to the 12 sets of Lords amendments to which we have tabled motions to disagree. I emphasise that, in line with our approach throughout the Bill, where we do not agree with the amendments, and where possible, we have sought to address the concerns raised through practical measures instead. The first set of amendments relates to the definition of domestic abuse. Lords amendments 1 to 3 would bring abuse by all carers of disabled persons, paid and unpaid, within the definition of domestic abuse in the Bill. I hope it is clear—it perhaps does not need saying—that the Government abhor all abuse, and we have every sympathy for the spirit of these amendments. Abuse of disabled people by their carers must be called out and acted upon. The issue before us today is whether this is the right Bill to strengthen the protection for disabled people.
The focus of this Bill is on domestic abuse as it is commonly understood—that is, abuse by a current or former intimate partner, or by a family member. That is the approach taken in the Istanbul convention, which I know many hon. Members are keen for the UK to ratify. Where a disabled person is abused by a partner or family member, the abuse will be covered by the definition as already agreed by this House. However, Lords amendments 1 to 3 would bring in a much wider range of relationships, outside a domestic abuse setting. We should steer away from diluting the purpose of the Bill.
As I have said, however, in inviting the House to disagree with these Lords amendments, we do not wish to downplay or deny for one moment the experience of disabled people who are abused by their paid or volunteer carers. There are protections in place, including the offences in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 relating to ill treatment and wilful neglect. However, we have listened carefully to the experiences and concerns raised in this House and the other place. We want to find practical ways in which to address those concerns. That is why the Government intend to carry out a review of the protections for people at risk of carer abuse. We will engage with the noble Baroness Campbell of Surbiton and the disabled sector on the scope of the review, but it would broadly seek to examine the protections offered against carer abuse and the support available to victims. We have listened and we will act.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
Like the Minister, I wish to place on record my own and my party’s sadness on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen. I suppose all your life you get used to the existence of the royal family as if they are always going to be there. In the passing of Prince Philip, we realised how lucky we are as a nation to have a sort of backbone that is always there—a family who are not always perfect, like anyone’s family, but who we can look to. I and we all feel very keenly in light of the pandemic the loss to the royal family specifically and to us as a nation.
We also share in the Minister’s sadness at the loss of Dame Cheryl Gillan. Regardless of political party, she was a friend especially to every woman in this House. To every woman from every party who came, she offered words of advice and words of exasperation in the lady Members’ rooms. She was one of a kind, and she will be missed genuinely and keenly across the House. She would definitely have been here today, without question. She spoke in almost every single one of these debates. We will miss her further, and no doubt we will all seek to take on her work.
Following the death of Sarah Everard, heartbreak, fear and anger ripped through the country—a response to the endemic violence that women and girls suffer. People felt it in their bones. Responding to such an outpouring of grief is our job. It is our duty and a privilege as parliamentarians to take that emotion, that fear, that rage, that passion and that injustice and to turn it into policy and law. It is our job to do something meaningful.
The question for the House today, as we consider the amendments inserted into the Bill by the other place in the heat of those moments, is: who do we decide to save? I will briefly talk through which amendments we are supporting and why, as the Minister has done.
I welcome very much, as I have throughout its passage, the immense changes to the Bill. It is unrecognisable from the day it started, which I do not know if anyone can remember; it seems so long ago. The spirit in which the Bill has been forged—that is how it feels—has always been to seek amendments and to work to improve it, and my comments will continue in that exact same spirit as we seek to continue to amend it.
Amendments 40, 41 and 43—I am sure nobody will be surprised to hear my views on migrant victims of domestic abuse—would allow migrant victims to access support and protection just like everybody else and just like I could. Without the amendments, victims will be left trapped in abusive households. It is as simple as that. The Government will seek to tell us that they have proposed a pilot project, which we have heard about today. I am pleased to hear that the pilot has gone to Southall Black Sisters, I believe in partnership with Birmingham and Solihull Women’s Aid—a place very close to my heart—but the specialist organisations and independent commissioners have all been very clear that the pilot is inadequate, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) alluded to.
Analysis by the domestic abuse sector suggests that thousands of victims could be left unprotected and unsupported under the pilot scheme. Students here studying, for example, might be raped, battered and abused by their partners. Thousands of students have this week talked on the Everyone’s Invited site about sexual assaults on campus. Foreign students would not be able to seek refuge in the same way that I can under the current rules in this country if they needed to escape.
This pilot is not good enough. It will only provide minimal, short-term support for 300 to 500 women. There is no money, for instance, for counselling, therapeutic intervention, interpretation costs, children’s costs and medical or travel costs. What happens, then, when the 501st victim visits? I can tell you what happens to the 501st victim, because it is what happens now. It is happening to Farah, who was routinely tormented and assaulted with a belt by her father and trapped in that abuse without access to public funds or support and protection. She said:
“I made many calls to the council and even the national domestic violence helpline and many other organisations for people who suffer domestic violence. They all said the same thing: I had no recourse to public funds, so they couldn’t and wouldn’t help me. Some of them even said it was the law not to help me. I guess that no recourse to public funds means that it’s okay for me to be violated physically and mentally abused by my father. I guess the Government approves of that.”
Lords amendment 40 establishes safe reporting mechanisms which ensure that all victims of domestic abuse feel able to come forward to the police. Perpetrators know at the moment that they can use immigration status as a weapon against vulnerable, frightened victims—“If you tell the police, you’ll get deported and you’ll never see the kids again. If you go to the police, they’ll lock you up in a detention centre.” I have seen this thousands of times.
At the end of last year, three police oversight bodies said that the data sharing with immigration enforcement was causing “significant harm” to the public interest. If victims cannot report, those perpetrators remain out there. We are leaving violent rapists and dangerous, violent men in our community, able to hurt people again and again. I listened to the Minister’s comments on this, and obviously I welcome the idea of a review. In terms of the idea that it is premature to ask for the law to be amended to protect these victims, I have stood in the House asking for this for at least four years. It does not feel premature for my constituents who had threats to kill and ended up in detention. It does not feel premature when I had to go to Yarl’s Wood to collect them.
I have to disagree with what the Minister said. These amendments do not ensure indefinite leave to remain for all victims of domestic abuse or allow some mythical path to dodge immigration processes. They are about getting victims out of an abusive and dangerous situation, on an equal footing to what any one of us in this House would expect for ourselves and our daughters. I also expect it for all my constituents.
Moving on to other serial offenders whom we currently leave on the streets and those victims who are at the highest risk of harm, Lords amendment 42 requires serial domestic abuse or stalking perpetrators to be registered on a database and accompanied by a comprehensive perpetrator strategy. The Labour party supports this amendment. Zoe Dronfield almost died when her ex-partner attacked her with a meat cleaver. Zoe spent weeks in hospital recovering from bleeding to the brain, a stab wound to her neck and a broken right arm inflicted during an eight-hour ordeal at the hands of Jason Smith. Zoe discovered after reporting her case to the police that Smith had abused 13 previous victims. There is a desperate need in this country to do something to identify, manage and monitor these high-harm perpetrators of stalking and domestic abuse. They would not have been met by current MAPPA. [Interruption.] The Minister claims that that is not true, but they were not in these instances.
Victoria Atkins
I just want to clarify this, because it is an important detail. Category 3 of MAPPA is defined as “other dangerous offenders”. It does not matter whether that offender has committed section 18 grievous bodily harm or criminal damage, which, as the hon. Lady will know, is a much lower offence. It is the risk assessment of that defendant in the circumstances of the offence that matters and puts them in category 3. That is the point—it already exists.
Jess Phillips
If it already exists, why was Jason Smith allowed to go on and abuse 13 other people? It is not just Jason Smith, of course—it is the person who killed Hollie Gazzard, the person who killed Jane Clough and the person who killed Helen. The reality is that this is not working, and the victims in these instances, like Zoe Dronfield, have spoken very clearly, and the agencies have spoken clearly. They have asked us to look again and help to protect them.
Victoria Atkins
Just to assist the House, as I hope I made clear in my speech, we know there have been horrific instances where, in the system itself, those risk assessments and the management have not been done properly. I think we are having a disagreement about whether putting in a new category will change that. We want to look, and we are doing so through the statutory guidance, at how these assessments are made on the ground. That is what will make a difference, not a statutory framework.
Jess Phillips
I can sympathise with what the Minister is saying, but I would ask the House and the Minister to sympathise with somebody on the frontline who has been watched again and again, through one multi-agency risk assessment conference after another, or a serious case review or a domestic homicide review. Again and again, the same thing is said—agencies do not speak to each other. The idea of amending the statutory guidance but not putting in place some legislative framework so that this has to occur is just more, “Oh, let’s see if we can get agencies speaking to each other again.” It just is not enough. It is not just me who thinks it is not enough. When I spoke to Zoe Dronfield herself this morning, she told me that she was devastated. In the heat of the Sarah Everard killing, she felt that the Government were listening, and today victims like her feel as though they have been let down.
The Government amendment in lieu is not enough. It is perfectly fine in its own right and the Labour party called for a perpetrator strategy in Committee, but it is not the same as what is proposed in Lords amendment 42. It is not even nearly answering the same question. Dangerous criminals are on our streets and in our homes, and repeating the same acts of violence and abuse over and over again, moving from victim to victim. Nothing in what the Government have proposed, I am afraid, has anywhere near enough teeth or will account for, identify and offer safety to the victims now dead at the hands of the most serial perpetrators. The amendments from the other place are strong, and I very much imagine that it will successfully push back. The Labour party stands ready to support it as it does so, and stands to support the victims.
Disabled victims are currently left out of the Bill. Lords amendments 1 to 3 change the definition of “personally connected” to reflect the lived experience of disabled victims of domestic abuse. Disabled people can be victims of domestic abuse by paid and unpaid carers, with whom they have close, intimate relationships. For victims, this abuse of trust and power is experienced in exactly the same way as that perpetrated by a mother, a father or a partner, so it should be recognised as such in the Bill. The expansion of the definition of “personally connected” will not dilute it, as has been suggested by the Government, but fortify it to protect those who right now are being domestically abused because they are dependent on another person in their lives. This is what disabled people have asked for, and I am sure we will see after today if the review proposed by the Government is satisfactory to those voices, who are the ones we must listen to in this.
Moving on to training of the judiciary and the accreditation of child contact centres, I want Members in this House to know that today they will be voting against making it mandatory for family court judges to be trained on domestic abuse. The Government are claiming that Lords amendment 33 threatens the independence of the judiciary. They have yet to elaborate, and the Minister did not elaborate on this point earlier. However, I shall assume—she can of course correct me if I am wrong—that she and those who sit behind her, both metaphorically and actually, are using the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which gave the Lord Chief Justice responsibility for training. I am assured that those who tabled this amendment in the other place took legal advice on this exact thing, and they do not agree that it is unconstitutional, but think it fits very well with that Act.
The amendment was drafted by a peer who is a QC, and was accepted by the parliamentary Clerks. On Report, a number of significant legal minds voted in favour of the amendment, including QCs and the former Deputy President of the Supreme Court. I would very much welcome a copy of the Government’s legal advice. There is absolutely no desire on our parts to do anything that is unconstitutional. We are not even saying what the frame of the training has to be, just that it has to happen. The idea that the Lord Chief Justice would push back, saying it did not have to happen and was against the independence of the judiciary, is something, frankly, that we would want to push against.
The Government’s own harm review found that comments made by judges in the family court included, for example, that a woman could not be a victim of domestic abuse because she wore make-up to court. Judges also found that women were emotional and temperamental when they cried about their abuse in the court room. Who knew that we did not need the police, the courts or welfare for victims of domestic abuse? We should have just told women to pop on a bit of make-up, and that would have protected them from domestic abuse. That is essentially what is being said in our family courts: if a woman wears make-up, how can she be a victim of domestic abuse? That was not said by me but by a judge in our family courts, and that kind of attitude is not just insulting but dangerous, because terrible practice in our family courts leaves children alone with violent perpetrators. I am not offended by the sexism; I am frightened for people’s lives.
Victoria Atkins
Home should be a place of love and safety, but for 2.3 million adult victims of domestic abuse, and for their children, it is not. We all want this abuse to stop, and we want victims to live peaceful, safe and happy lives, and as I have said many times at this Dispatch Box, that is why this Government are bringing forward the Domestic Abuse Bill. The continued passage of the Bill marks an important milestone in our shared endeavour across the House to provide better support and protection for the victims of domestic abuse and their children. It is the culmination of over three years of work, although I rather liked the slip of the tongue by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) when she said it felt like two generations. I pay tribute in particular to my right hon. Friend, who as chair of the Joint Committee, set in train much of the work that has happened in this place and the other place when the Bill was in draft form. I thank her sincerely.
I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) for championing the Bill, both as Home Secretary and as Prime Minister, and now—eminently, if I may say so—from the Back Benches. I also thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed today. The Bill has been improved during the course of debate in both Houses. It was scrutinised properly and thoroughly by their lordships, whom I thank for their vital contributions. I do not know whether many other Bills have had a mere 86 amendments to them when they came back to this place. This is a sign of their lordships’ commitment. The Bill includes real measures to help victims of domestic abuse and, as we have heard, even beyond those relationships. It expressly recognises the harm and distress caused to victims by so-called revenge porn and threats to disclose such images.
The Bill also creates a new offence of non-fatal strangulation. My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) did much in this place when the Bill was before us for scrutiny, along with the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), to campaign on the issues of rough sex and non-fatal strangulation. My hon. Friend asked me about consent in the amendment, and I want to try to clarify that in order to reassure people who may be watching. A valid defence of consent is available under the new offence only where the offence does not involve causing serious harm or where the perpetrator can show that they had not intended to cause serious harm or had not been reckless as to the serious harm caused. This provision reflects the current law as set out in R v. Brown and, indeed, in the rough sex clause that was passed earlier in the Bill’s progress. We have had to be, and tried to be, consistent with both of those provisions, and I hope that that reassures my hon. Friend.
I have listened carefully to colleagues who have raised the issue of the management of perpetrators. This is absolutely critical. I have talked in the past about the evolution of our understanding of domestic abuse. We look back on the days of the 1970s when brave campaigners for Refuge and other organisations started setting up refuges and talking about domestic violence. Our understanding and our efforts to deal with this have obviously moved absolute milestones in the decades since then, but one of the challenges that we will certainly be looking to address in the domestic abuse strategy is the management of perpetrators. I am delighted that we are now investing unprecedented amounts in perpetrator programmes, as announced in the Budget, because we have to prevent perpetrators from committing harm in the first place. Again, let me emphasise that the reason we find ourselves unable to accept that Lords amendment is that creating a separate category as envisaged in the Lords amendment does not get away from the need for the MAPPA authorities to make a judgment in individual cases as to whether a particular offender should be managed under the framework. I want to be clear that three categories exist in MAPPA. Category 1 covers registered sexual offenders. Category 2 covers any violent offender or other sexual offenders convicted of offences under schedule 15 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and sentenced to more than 12 months’ imprisonment. Category 3 covers any other dangerous offender. So on the sorts of horrific examples we have been hearing about, if there are convictions in the background of those offenders, these categories would cover some of the convictions that have been described. I say that, but I hope again that colleagues have appreciated that I have been very clear that there must be improvements in how the system works on the ground. That is why we have announced—we went into a little more detail in the “Dear colleague” letter—that we are going to revisit and refresh all relevant chapters of the MAPPA statutory guidance so as to include sections on domestic abuse, to ensure that agencies are taking steps to identify perpetrators whose risk requires active multi-agency management. We are ensuring that cases of domestic abuse perpetrators captured under categories 1 and 2 are included in the threshold guidance that is being developed. We will issue an HM Prison and Probation Service policy framework setting out clear expectations of the management of all cases at MAPPA level 1. This work on this new system, the multi-agency public protection system, will have a much greater functionality than existing systems, including ViSOR, enabling criminal justice agencies to share information efficiently and to improve risk assessment and management of MAPPA nominals. That is what will address the very understandable concerns that colleagues have raised in this debate.
I come to the final point I wish to touch upon, and I hope colleagues will understand why I am going to be quick. Hon. Members have raised questions and concerns about the issue of judicial training. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead and my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) set out the problems with the way in which Lords amendment 33 seeks to achieve that laudable aim, which we all agree with, of ensuring that the judiciary and magistrates must be trained well and, importantly, trained regularly. Referring back to the comments I was making earlier about the progress that has been made in the past few decades, let me say that, by definition, our understanding has grown, even, as some have said, during the passage of this Bill. Of course, that knowledge must continue to be deployed and trained. Domestic abuse is covered in all family law courses run by the Judicial College, and the debates held in the other place and in this place will I know—I have faith—have been watched and listened to very carefully by the President of the family court and others.
Jess Phillips
I admire the hon. Lady’s faith, but I would like something more than faith. The triumph of hope over experience will, I fear, leave us in the exact same position with the exact same problems. Faith is well and good—I have it in spades—but I would like to know about a monitoring process that will be done to review how well people are trained and how well this is working.
Victoria Atkins
I am happy to help the hon. Lady. As I said in my opening remarks, the President of the Family Division has indicated that he will consider making recommendations regarding training, taking into account this Bill, the harm panel report, which, as she knows, is critical to the Ministry of Justice’s concerns in this area and the four recent Court of Appeal judgments in domestic abuse cases. I would argue that there is a real understanding among our independent judiciary of the need to make sure that they are equipped to ensure that justice is delivered—and delivered well—in the courtrooms over which they preside.
In summing up, let me reflect on the course of the Bill. Progress on the Bill has been characterised by a determination on both sides of the House to work constructively and collegiately. At every stage, we have endeavoured to focus on what can be done to help victims of domestic abuse and to ensure that the abuse can stop. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke put it, these are not our issues—these are not party political issues—but the issues of our constituents who are victims and of their children, and I know that each and every one of us has had that very much in mind in all our deliberations on the Bill.
I therefore commend the Bill and the amendments that the Government support to the House. I very much hope that we will be able to make real and meaningful progress and pass the Bill, so that we can get on with the job of helping the victims we all feel so strongly about.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Before I put the Question, just a reminder that, should there be more than one Division, the doors will be locked after eight minutes in the first Division and, after that, after five minutes.
Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.