The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Sharpe of Epsom) (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have participated for their valuable, thoughtful and insightful contributions. I particularly thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for opening this debate on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Drake—I am sure that the whole House will join me in wishing the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, well. I will do my very best to address all the points that have been raised, but there are a number, so I hope noble Lords will indulge me if I go a little over time. I join the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in thanking Girlguiding UK and Refuge, which supplied me with some very thoughtful briefings on this subject.
I am confident in saying that tackling violence against women and girls is a priority for all Members of the House, as we have heard, so I am glad that we have had the opportunity to discuss it today. Some Members of this House may have experienced it for themselves—such as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, on Sunday morning—or they may have loved ones who have experienced the horrific nature of these crimes. They have absolutely no place in our society and, again as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, said, why should anyone live like that? We have to change attitudes and improve how the criminal justice system supports victims and pursues perpetrators. That is why the Government are taking a whole-of-society approach to tackling this issue.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, outlined in her introduction, violence against women and girls—or VAWG—includes crimes such as rape and other sexual offences, stalking, domestic abuse, so-called honour-based abuse, including female genital mutilation, forced marriage and honour killings, as well as revenge porn and upskirting. These crimes can occur online as well as offline, and they are deeply harmful, not only because of the profound effect that they have on the victims, survivors and their loved ones but because of the harm they inflict on wider society. It is important to say that men and boys also experience abusive and violent crimes that fall under some of the umbrella here.
Domestic abuse alone is a high-volume crime, affecting 2.4 million adults every year. It is high harm. One in five homicides is a domestic homicide, and I note the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, about stalking and homicide statistics.
To answer the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, I am not aware of the work that has been done in Wales to which she has referred but I commit to looking into it. I can say that the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice are investing £3 million specifically in “by and for” organisations over 2023-24 and 2024-25, which will include organisations that support victims of abuse with different protected characteristics—for example, older victims or victims living with disability. I am happy to agree to a debate, for which she asked. I am also pleased to be able to inform the House that since 2018 the Government have provided £300,000 to Hourglass, to which the noble Baroness referred, to enhance its helpline, provide casework support and so on.
This crime is also very high cost. For the year ending March 2017, the cost of domestic abuse was estimated to be £66 billion.
I turn to a couple of more general points. My noble friend Lady Helic and the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, talked about judicial training. I am also happy to join them in their comments about Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood. The Government do not provide input into judicial training or have responsibility for it, for reasons of judicial independence. The Lord Chief Justice has statutory responsibility for the training of judges and magistrates, with the responsibility exercised through the Judicial College.
The noble Lord, Lord Winston, may not be surprised to know that I am not particularly up on the subject of egg freezing, but I will come back to him when I have done a bit more investigating.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Patten that tackling violence against women and girls is a long slog, but it is one to which the Government are committed. He is right that it requires ongoing diligence; it is not something we can just fix and then walk away from.
Noble Lords will be aware that in July 2021, the Government published the tackling VAWG strategy to ensure that women and girls are safe everywhere—at home, online, at work and on the streets. This was followed by the tackling abuse plan, which we published in March 2022. Through the commitments set out in these documents, the Government aim to transform society’s response to these crimes with actions to prevent abuse, support victims and pursue perpetrators, as well as to strengthen the systems to respond to VAWG.
The documents build on the Government’s work to date, including the landmark Domestic Abuse Act 2021. That Act bolsters our response to domestic abuse at every level, strengthening protections for victims while ensuring that perpetrators feel the full force of the law. The measures in the Act include the creation of a statutory definition of domestic abuse, emphasising that domestic abuse is not just physical violence but can be emotional, controlling or coercive, and can include economic abuse.
The Government have made good progress in implementing the tackling violence against women and girls strategy and the tackling domestic abuse plan. As my noble friend Lady Helic noted, we ratified the Istanbul convention on 21 July 2022, which demonstrates to women in the UK and partners overseas our commitment to tackling VAWG.
This provides a suitable opportunity to talk about migrant victims of domestic abuse. Support is provided to migrant victims in the UK through our destitute domestic violence concession, which gives victims who have entered the UK on certain partner or spousal visas access to public funds for three months, which can be used to fund safe accommodation. Migrant victims can also apply for settlement—indefinite leave to remain—under the domestic violence indefinite leave to remain rules. The intention is to safeguard victims of domestic abuse by offering them an immigration status and financial support independent of the abusive partner.
Following the Government’s review of support for migrant victims in 2020, in April 2021 we launched the support for migrant victims scheme pilot to provide a support net for migrant victims of abuse with no recourse to public funds. We are providing a further £1.4 million in 2023-24 to continue to fund the support for migrant victims scheme, ensuring that we maintain support for migrant victims of domestic abuse.
The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, asked me about the firewall between the police and immigration enforcement. When a crime is committed, our immediate priority is always the welfare of the victim, irrespective of their immigration status. All victims should be free to report crimes without fear, and it is in the interests of the general public for all crimes to be fully investigated. The protocol will provide assurance to individuals that no immigration enforcement action will be taken while criminal justice proceedings are ongoing and while support to make applications to regularise their stay is being sought.
Returning to the Istanbul convention, my noble friend Lady Helic asked why the UK made reservations on certain aspects of it. Many members that have ratified the convention have also made reservations on specific articles. We placed one on Article 59, which relates to migrant victims of domestic abuse, to avoid further delays to ratification. However, we are carefully considering the findings of the support for migrant victims scheme pilot evaluation to ensure that migrant victims are supported effectively. We will reflect on our position following that, and in the interim, as I have just said, we are providing up to £1.4 million in each year up to 2025 to continue to fund support for migrant victims of domestic abuse.
We have published the revised domestic violence disclosure scheme, allowing the police to disclose information to a victim or potential victim about their partner or ex-partner’s previous abusive or violent offending. We have doubled funding for the national domestic abuse helpline so that victims of domestic abuse are better supported, and we have launched our national communications campaign, ENOUGH. The ENOUGH campaign challenges harmful behaviours that exist within wider society, educates young people about healthy relationships and consent and ensures that victims can recognise abuse and receive support. Campaign advertising has reached millions of individuals across England and Wales, resulting in tens of thousands of visits to the campaign website and thousands of clicks through to organisations offering support for victims of VAWG.
This is the right time to talk about a subject that has been raised by many noble Lords: online pornography. As my noble friend Lady Jenkin has noted, it is deeply alarming. The noble Baronesses, Lady Warwick, Lady Burt, Lady Jones and Lady Thornton, also referred to the subject so I will go into it in some detail. Offences relating to sexual images—for example, revenge pornography and extreme pornography—have been included in the Online Safety Bill as priority offences. Priority offences reflect the most serious and prevalent illegal content and activity, against which companies must take proactive measures. As such, platforms in scope of the Online Safety Bill will be required to implement systems and processes to minimise the uploading and sharing of such content. Beyond the priority offences, all services will need to ensure that they have effective systems and processes in place quickly to take down other illegal content that targets individuals, once it has been reported or they become aware of its presence.
In addition, the Bill will address children’s access to all forms of published pornography, whether extreme or otherwise. However, it should be noted that publishers of extreme or illegal pornography are already liable for publishing any illegal content on their service.
The Online Safety Bill will cover all online sites that offer pornography, including commercial pornography sites, social media, video-sharing platforms, forums and search engines. These companies will also have to prevent children accessing pornography or face enforcement action. In addition, the Bill will require all in-scope providers to take preventive action to protect all users, including children and young people, from illegal content such as extreme pornography and revenge pornography. This new duty will be enforced by Ofcom, with providers being subject to the same enforcement measures as other services, including substantial fines up to the greater of £18 million or 10% of global qualifying annual revenue or, in the most serious cases, business disruption measures, including blocking.
My noble friend Lady Bertin brought up the image-abuse offences. The Government are reforming the law on the abuse of intimate images, based on the recommendations made in the Law Commission report Taking, Making and Sharing Intimate Images without Consent, which was published in July 2022. That includes offences of sending, sharing and threatening to share deepfake pornography as part of the new base that criminalises someone for sharing an intimate image without consent. That is in combination with the measures already in the Bill to make cyberflashing a criminal offence, which will significantly strengthen protections for women, who are, as has been powerfully stated, disproportionately affected by these activities.
On 27 June the Government announced amendments to the Online Safety Bill relating to intimate image abuse that will protect victims of revenge pornography by changing current laws that require the prosecution to prove that perpetrators shared sexual images or films in order to cause distress. Through this package of amendments, for the first time the sharing of deepfake intimate images, explicit images or videos that have been digitally manipulated to look like someone else will be criminalised.
I want to speak about children accessing pornography in a little more detail, as it was powerfully raised again by the noble Baronesses, Lady Bertin and Lady Jenkin, and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke. On 8 February 2022, the Digital Minister Chris Philp MP announced world-leading measures to protect children from accessing pornography online. As I have just stated, that is a key principle for this Government. They include the new legal duty requiring all sites that publish pornography to put robust checks in place to ensure that their users are 18 or over. I think it is worth reiterating that, if a site fails to act, Ofcom will be able to fine them substantially.
That deals with the supply side. On the demand side—I think this goes to the points the noble Baronesses, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lady Fox, made about education—relationship, sex and health education, or RSHE, is now a statutory part of the curriculum. Children will be taught about the importance of respectful relationships, as well as issues such as domestic abuse and sexual consent. The Department for Education is currently working to update the RSHE statutory guidance. In the tackling VAWG strategy, we committed £3 million in funding for what works to tackle violence against women and girls and invest in high-quality evidence-based prevention projects, including in schools.
In 2022, the Home Office and wider government committed over £230 million over the next three years as part of the domestic abuse plan. This includes over £140 million for supporting victims and survivors. One example of funding to tackle VAWG is the 2023-25 domestic abuse perpetrator intervention fund. This awards up to £39 million to local areas in support of the delivery of interventions for domestic abuse perpetrators, including behaviour change and stalking intervention programmes.
I noted the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, on alcohol and substance abuse. It is important, obviously, to break cycles of disengagement and reoffending, but there are no excuses for domestic abuse. There is a frequent coexistence of domestic abuse, mental health issues and drug and alcohol abuse, with complex interrelationships between all of them. The NHS plays a key role in providing care and support to victims through a wide range of services. It is also important that any alcohol or drugs treatment plan for perpetrators, as well as addressing the causes of the substance abuse, addresses the complex dynamics of power and control which underpin domestic abuse. I agree with the noble Lord’s comments.
I think this also goes towards answering some of the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Patten about interventions regarding perpetrators. Perpetrator interventions are designed to help change or disrupt offenders’ behaviour and stop crimes being committed. That supports our aim to place the onus on the perpetrator to change and stop victims from experiencing further harm. There is promising evidence suggesting that interventions can be effective at reducing levels of abuse. For example, a perpetrator’s participation in the Drive Project can result in substantial reductions in abuse and risk, with physical abuse reduced by 82% and controlling behaviours by 73%. The Drive Project works with high-harm, high-risk and serial perpetrators of domestic abuse to prevent their abusive behaviour and protect victims. Alongside this funding, the Home Office has appointed an independent evaluation partner to conduct evaluations of perpetrator interventions to help us further enhance our evidence base and better understand what works.
Clearly the police have a vital role to play. Following the 2021 HMICFRS inspection into the policing response to VAWG, we supported the introduction of a new full-time national policing lead for VAWG: DCC Maggie Blyth. She has been working closely with government to drive national co-ordination of the policing response to VAWG. DCC Blyth and her team published a strategic threat and risk assessment for VAWG last month, outlining the areas where police should prioritise their resources to tackle VAWG crimes in the coming year. In February this year, the Home Secretary added VAWG to the revised strategic police requirement. This means that VAWG is now set as a national threat for forces to respond to, alongside other threats such as terrorism, serious organised crime and sexual abuse.
In the tackling VAWG strategy we can confirm that we are looking at the case for a new law on public sexual harassment, which has been referred to by a number of noble Lords. We ran a targeted consultation on this last summer. We are grateful to those who responded to the consultation and recognise that a specific offence could deter perpetrators, encourage victims to report and make the law clearer for everyone. We think there is a case for legislative change; the Government are therefore supporting the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill, sponsored by the right honourable Greg Clark MP and my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar. The Bill completed its passage through the House of Commons in March and received its Second Reading in the Lords on 16 June.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Russell, that the changes to crime reporting will free up hundreds of thousands of police hours. On the subject of stalking, in January 2020, we introduced stalking protection orders, which are a new civil order to protect victims of stalking at the earliest possible opportunity and address the perpetrator’s behaviours before they become entrenched or escalate in severity in the way that the noble Lord described. SPOs support existing tools to ensure robust protections are available to victims, including victims of stranger stalking, where the perpetrator is not a current or former intimate partner of the victim. The courts issued almost 1,000 SPOs between February 2020 and December 2021. I will write to the noble Lord in answer to his other questions, because I do not have much time left and I still need to talk more about the police. I hope noble Lords will indulge me if I go over my allotted span a little.
It is obvious, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, and my noble friend Lady Bertin both identified, that trust issues with the police have been a problem, and it is paramount that public trust in the Met, in particular, is restored. The Government will continue to hold the commissioner and the Mayor of London to account to deliver wholesale change in the force’s culture. There is much more to do, and the task of this mission is rooting out unfit officers. That will mean that further unacceptable cases will inevitably come to light.
The Government are also driving forward work to improve culture, standards and behaviour across policing, including strengthening vetting and reviewing the dismissals process. In January, we launched a review into the process of dismissals to ensure that the system is fair and effective. Among other areas, the review is considering the consistency of decision-making in cases of sexual misconduct and other forms of VAWG. We are currently considering the findings, and the next steps will be published in due course.
I have spoken a lot from the Dispatch Box about other things that the Government have done, so I move on to the subject of rape. It has been mentioned on a number of occasions: the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Warwick, Lady Chakrabarti and Lady Thornton, discussed the decline in prosecutions for rape. The Government’s end-to-end rape review found that there had been a steep decline in the number of cases reaching court since 2016. One key reason for this was the number of victims who were withdrawing from the criminal justice process. In the rape review action plan, we took a hard and honest look at how the entire criminal justice system deals with rape, and recognised that in too many instances, it had simply not been good enough. We apologised at the time for this and will not rest until we have delivered real improvements, transforming support for victims and ensuring cases are investigated fully and pursued rigorously through the courts. We are committed to more than doubling the volume of rape cases reaching court by the end of the Parliament. The most recent rape review progress report, which was published in December 2022, showed increases in police referrals, charges and receipts at the Crown Court.
While we have made important progress, much of the work remains ahead of us and it will take time for the effects of these systemic transformations to be seen in the data, particularly due to the inherent complexity of rape investigations and prosecutions, because we are aiming to achieve genuine cultural change. To the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, we recognise that having police officers with the right skills is critical in ensuring cases are progressed and managed effectively. Chief Constable Sarah Crew is the national policing lead for adult sexual offences, and when she gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee she highlighted that she is engaging with chief constables to help ensure that this specialism is recognised across forces. Operation Soteria, which I have spoken about from the Dispatch Box before, is helping to establish an effective, evidence-based way of driving improvements across policing.
I shall talk a little more about Operation Soteria, because it is an ambitious joint policing and CPS programme to develop new national operating models for the investigation and prosecution of rape which will support officers and prosecutors to conduct suspect-focused, rather than victim-focused, investigations. The Home Office is investing £6.65 million in the policing aspects of Operation Soteria between 2021 and 2023. That builds on work in Avon and Somerset Police by bringing together academics and front-line police officers to develop a new national operating model for the investigation of rape.
Operation Soteria is working. We have seen improvements in a number of pathfinder forces: charge volumes in Avon and Somerset more than tripled between October and December 2022, and the Met has seen an 18% reduction in victims withdrawing, falling from 743 cases before Soteria to 611 between October and December 2022. All pathfinder forces have seen an increase in the number of cases being referred to the CPS; Durham has seen a 113% increase, more than doubling the number of cases referred. All pathfinder forces have experienced a reduction in the average number of days taken for a charge outcome to be assigned, with South Wales Police seeing a reduction of almost 300 days in the latest quarter. I am reluctant to disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, but I do not think that rape has been decriminalised—serious work is being done to fix this problem.
We will have more to say on the national operating model in due course.
On the subject raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, about children affected by domestic abuse, she is quite right. The Home Office has increased funding for the children affected by domestic abuse fund. We have allocated up to £10.3 million across three years to eight organisations across England and Wales that provide specialist support in the community to children who have been impacted by domestic abuse. That builds on the more than £12 million provided through the children affected by domestic abuse fund since 2018. This scheme has provided support to thousands of children, young people and families who have experienced abuse.
The noble Lord, Lord Patten, asked about refuges. In the Domestic Abuse Act a new duty was introduced on local authorities to provide support for victims of domestic abuse and their children in safe accommodation, including refuges.
I appreciate that I am over time, so I will try to conclude. My noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott, supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and my noble friend Lady Meyer, brought up the subject of single-sex spaces. We are committed to maintaining the safeguards that allow organisations to provide single-sex services. It is important that the principle of being able to operate spaces reserved for women and girls is maintained. The Equality Act 2010 sets out that providers have the right to restrict the use of spaces on the basis of sex and gender reassignment, where that is justified. The EHRC has published guidance on the existing legislation, which provides much-needed clarity to those who are operating single-sex spaces.
I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that we have robust legislative measures in place that require registered sex offenders to inform the police of any name change and enable courts to put restrictions on a registered sex offender’s ability to change their name if they pose a specific risk in relation to name changes.
I have gone over time, so I finish by again offering my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, for initiating the debate and the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, for introducing it and giving us all the opportunity to talk about this critical issue. I hope I have outlined some of the vital work that is being done to tackle violence against women and girls; we are doing a great deal, but we know that there is always more to do. This is a societal concern and requires a whole-of-society response. Driving that response is a key priority for the Government and for me, because no one should have to feel unsafe or suffer abuse. We must be and we will be relentless in our efforts to help victims pursue perpetrators, and we will strengthen our systems so that all victims of these crimes have the support and protection they deserve. I hope I have answered all the questions.