Domestic Abuse Bill

Lord McNicol of West Kilbride Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 8th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

I rise to speak to Amendment 160 while offering my sympathy and support for the other two amendments in this group. I reflect on the words of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who said that this is a landmark Bill and needs to be as near perfection as we can possibly make it. I speak also as a member of the delegation from this Parliament to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. The Istanbul convention is one of the key cornerstones of the achievements of that council over the last several years. It grieves me that I regularly see on the material put out by the council that the United Kingdom is one of the countries that has not yet ratified the convention, although of course it added its signature in 2012.

The idea is that our legislation is not yet in line with all the requirements of the convention, and that we are working on that. Earlier today, I heard extraterritoriality mentioned in debates and that a parallel effort is being made in the Northern Ireland Assembly which, mercifully, will deal with a major part of what prevents us at this minute ratifying the convention. That leaves us with Article 4(3) and Article 59. The whole question of discrimination has been properly alluded to as a very important thing for us to accord. I believe that the Government wish to do that, but they have taken the extraordinary step, having seen the recommendation in what is the fourth report since we have had these annual reports, to refer the matter into a pilot that will sit from December last to the end of March. That pilot’s findings will help us to quantify and find sustainable responses to this particular need.

I say that it is ironic and it is because, in a sense, the two other amendments in this group, were they on the statute book, would provide exactly the guarantees being sought and would allow us to ratify the convention at once. Is the fact that we have the pilot, which goes on to the end of March, going to make it necessary or impossible for us to include any measures to deal with discrimination for migrant women within the timescale of the passage of this Bill? I cannot see that we can possibly do the Bill and include any outcome from this process, which means that we will have missed the opportunity in this landmark Bill to deal with the two outstanding obstacles to our signing the Istanbul convention.

I missed a lot of these riveting debates because I was in Strasbourg, virtually—but we were talking about the same things. It pains me that we have not ratified the convention. At this minute Turkey and Poland are on the point of withdrawing from the Istanbul convention, and our moral stance in urging them not to is greatly diminished by the fact that we ourselves have not ratified it. With all that in mind—and this point has not yet been made, although it has been alluded to many times—I wish that these amendments could be made. Some 58 people and organisations wrote to me, as I am sure they wrote to the Minister, to say that all the evidence we could possibly need has been gathered. What is to stop us going forward? Why cannot we find a way between now and Report to leapfrog any obstacle, if necessary? Is this really impossible?

At the end of the day, it will all come down to money—£1.5 million will not do what needs to be done in the next five months and certainly, it will take a lot of money to deal with this in a sustainable way in the fullness of time. The domestic abuse commissioner designate—what a welcome appointment and what a clear-sounding person she seems to be—says that, unless migrant women with no recourse to public funds are included,

“their options are brutal.”

So, there it is from the person who will be overseeing this whole area of our national life.

I do not know whether the Minister can assure us that, even though we are out of sync with the passage of the Bill, we can hope in the not too distant future to incorporate retrospectively all that we are seeking to do through these amendments.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

I call the next speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, who will be followed by the noble Baroness, Lady Verma.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, as I and many others said at Second Reading, the biggest hole in the Bill is its failure to make any provision for migrant women—a group of domestic abuse survivors who are let down badly by current provisions. I therefore strongly support these amendments, which, in different ways, would fill that hole and ensure that abused migrant women receive the same support as other domestic abuse survivors.

It is to the Government’s credit that they listened to the criticisms from domestic abuse organisations and, in particular, those working with abused migrant women such as Southall Black Sisters and the Latin American Women’s Rights Service—to which I pay tribute—and revised the prospectus for the Support for Migrants Victims pilot scheme. However, they refused to face up to the most fundamental criticism, as cited by the right reverend Prelate in her powerful speech, that a pilot scheme of this kind is simply not necessary in order to provide the evidence that Ministers claim they need before taking longer-term action to protect abused migrant women. Southall Black Sisters, for instance, has already provided the necessary evidence and the domestic abuse commissioner designate supports its belief that the Government do not need further evidence to act.

Although much improved from its original specification, the pilot is still inadequate to meet the needs of abused women. According to SBS, and as we have heard, the £1.4 million allocated is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of all the women requiring crisis support. It calculates that this will enable it to support only 50 women for three months each over a year, which would leave many women still excluded from protection and crisis support. At the same time, the £1.09 million grant it was awarded from the tampon tax fund to support women subject to the no recourse to public funds rule is due to end in March. As the right honourable Theresa May pointed out on Report in the Commons, we have to take account of the fact that the removal of financial support from a woman in a relationship might be

“part of the abuse they are suffering”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6 July 2020; col. 712.]

The Government must surely do all they can not to compound that abuse through public policy. At the very least, will the Minister consider suspending the application of the NRPF rule to domestic abuse survivors during the lifetime of the pilot to minimise the hardship that is likely to result?

Whatever the merits of the pilot project there is, as we have already heard, no guarantee that it will lead to lasting change. Such an important part of the domestic abuse strategy should not be dependent on the presence of sympathetic Ministers. Domestic abuse legislation does not come along that often; indeed, how many years have we had to wait for this Bill, welcome as it is? It is therefore vital that provision be made within it to ensure equal protection for migrant domestic abuse survivors. Indeed, the EHRC warns that failure to do so might put us in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and, as we have heard, it would almost certainly breach our obligations under the Istanbul convention. Given that the Minister said in her letter to Peers following Second Reading that the Government will ratify the convention only when they are satisfied that we meet all our obligations, it is surely imperative that equal protection for migrant women be enshrined in this Bill, as argued by the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, and my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port.

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Amendments 156 and 157 not moved.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 158. I remind noble Lords that anyone wishing to speak after the Minister should email the clerk during the debate. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in debate.

Amendment 158

Moved by

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 159. I remind noble Lords that anyone wishing to speak after the Minister should email the clerk during the debate. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate.

Amendment 159

Moved by

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Amendment 160 not moved.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

We now come to Amendment 161. I remind noble Lords that anyone wishing to speak after the Minister should email the clerk during the debate. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate.

Amendment 161

Moved by