Historical Institutional Abuse (Northern Ireland) Bill [HL]

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 28th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, like all other speakers, I am entirely supportive of this Bill, and believe that we need to get on with it.

I have some questions, which I hope that the Minister can answer at the end of the debate. All the evidence about child abuse, whether physical, sexual or emotional, is that it is much more prevalent than people imagine. Revelations about past cases often lead to more people coming forward. The new abuse redress board and commissioner will likely shine a light on the tips of many new icebergs. Exposing the whole edifice of historical institutional abuse is a process which will take years, not months. Collecting the evidence will be a long and complex task, requiring detailed research and investigation. Yet the Bill is rather vague on how the board and the commissioner will be funded in the long term. I entirely agree with the points made by my noble friend earlier, but what is the Government’s estimate of the funding required to ensure that the board and the commissioner can function properly? Can he confirm that they will be given resources equal to the task of meeting the needs of the victims?

Clause 23 enables the commissioner to appoint an advisory board of victims of historical abuse. This strikes me as essential, but it is equally critical that the advisory board is diverse and properly representative of the different groups of victims. The House should consider whether such a requirement should be hardwired into the Bill. Clause 21 sets out the process of appointment of the commissioner, which is left in the hands of the Northern Ireland Executive Office, which will also have to approve the annual budget. Can the Minister reflect on how we ensure that these two provisions do not undermine the independence of the commissioner in carrying out their work? We have to ensure that the commissioner is well resourced, well advised and able to operate without fear or favour.

Meanwhile, a successful commissioner and a successful compensation scheme will be judged by the breadth of victims who seek to secure remedies and by the perceived fairness of the decisions taken in these cases. Can the Minister therefore look at the Bill’s provisions on who can make claims, and when they can be made? This is about two things. First, the Bill says that the claim must be made within five years of the scheme being advertised. It strikes me that because of the likelihood of one set of victims coming forward leading to another set being revealed, and because many of the victims are now in Australia, this might be too tight a timescale. How was the five-year position arrived at, and will the Minister look favourably at allowing claims for a longer period, perhaps at the commissioner’s discretion?

Secondly, the Bill accepts in principle that where a victim is deceased, a partner with whom they have cohabited should be able to claim on behalf of the estate; but it stipulates that the cohabiting partner must have lived with them immediately before their death. It is always difficult to legislate around family life, but has the Minister considered the possibility that some cohabiting partners may have lived with somebody for the majority of their lives—decades, perhaps—but for one reason or another had not in the days immediately before their partner’s death? Should the cumulative time together not be a factor in these difficult cases?

Finally, I want us to consider the role of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and the impact its recommendations should have on the Government and on the commissioner’s work. Can we have some reassurance that the commissioner will draw on the huge body of evidence collected by this inquiry and, in turn, that the Government will look again at the strong case for mandatory reporting?

Getting the Bill done and getting it right could scarcely be of greater importance. Out there await, tragically, thousands of people whose lives have been wrecked by abuse in their childhoods: people who told the Truth Project that they felt safer in police cells than at home; people who said they tried to tell social workers about what had happened to them but had never been believed; and people who have said that the lasting damage inflicted on them by rapists and abusers leads them to a daily dilemma between living with what happens in their heads and killing themselves. We owe those thousands of people whatever measure of justice we can now attain for them after decades of being ignored.