Domestic Abuse Bill

Baroness Bertin Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard
Monday 8th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the very inspirational speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove. I am in awe of her championing of these matters.

As a professional social worker for some years—although I am long in the tooth now—I cannot imagine dealing with child protection of any nature without having the confidence of knowing that I am well trained. I therefore welcome Amendment 15, and will also make some comments about Amendment 44. I am deeply indebted to my noble friend Lady Armstrong for her thoughtful contributions from Second Reading onward. Having heard the profoundly persuasive and detailed arguments of the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, I speak in support of mandatory judicial training. I believe it to be essential to treat survivors’ experience with the required level of due care.

My noble friend Lady Armstrong highlighted the impact of a well-trained workforce, including police and children’s services, as well as the potential positive effect of well-trained jobcentre managers. We cannot hope to change societal attitudes to poor institutional practices unless government is committed to adequately funding and mandating training at all levels of service, including the highest level in the judiciary. If the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, moves her amendment I will definitely support her.

The amendment also asks that front-line public service staff are properly trained and competent and fully equipped to ensure that thorough assessments can be made of survivors’ needs. Although it is correct that individual public services may be best placed to understand the most effective ways to develop training for their staff, as is argued by the Government, it cannot be overstated that our public institutions may not be the first port of call for help for many women of minority heritage. Therefore, specialist organisations would also require support and training to effectively realise those ambitions. I was so moved by the way that the noble Lord, Lord Marks, argued on behalf of the needs of diverse communities that I need not say another word.

Does the Minister agree that we also need to influence our educational curriculum and provide age-appropriate information? We already do this with regard to sexual orientation and Prevent et cetera; we make sure that our children have information on a whole range of issues. Unless and until we take the matter of violence in the home seriously—violence experienced by parents, relatives or whoever—and we give some details of acknowledgement and equip children, they may not know where to go when they witness this.

I do not have the statistics to hand but is the Minister aware of the evidence which indicates that significant numbers of teenage children, as young as 11, 12 and 13, are accepting violence as a norm within their relationships? This is as well as the tragedy of sexual exploitation and abuse of children which continues to grow exponentially and has overwhelmed the NSPCC, Barnardo’s and other leading children’s organisations.

Training resulting in greater awareness may not be the panacea for stopping violence and preventing the murder of women and children in the immediate future, but combined with the force of law and a well-trained front-line workforce, including the judiciary, the financial support and measures proposed in the Bill will certainly go a long way to build in additional safeguards and improve the chances of survivors to survive violence and abuse.

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 44. I thank my noble friend Lady Helic and Claire Waxman, the Victims’ Commissioner for London, and her team for bringing the issue of training to the forefront of this legislation. The evidence provided by my noble friend Lady Helic and others was harrowing, but hearing it is essential. As they said, too often it seems that our family courts are not the tools of justice they ought to be; instead, they can be used to continue that abuse.

Too often we fail to equip judges and magistrates with the knowledge they need to spot and prevent this reality. In doing so, we are denying many victims justice. We in this House can legislate all we like but if those on the front line are not adequately trained, as we have heard, it risks remaining just words, and, as my noble friend Lady Newlove said, not worth the paper they are written on. I believe we can and must do better than this. We should strive to ensure that our courts are at the cutting edge, and not repeatedly behind the curve.

The Bill introduces a number of excellent progressive measures that have the potential to help the family courts to deliver justice safely. They include recognising post-separation abuse and extending the grounds on which barring orders can be used. For those the Government certainly deserve credit, but the success of such measures and the guarantee that they will be translated into better practice on the ground hinges on this training amendment.

The amendment renders the need for training into clear language, creating an imperative to act. We need accountability and oversight in this area, as many others have said. If the Government resist putting the amendment into the Bill—and I do not really understand why they should—then at least we need to get to a place where the judiciary are being open and transparent about the level and quantity of training that they are receiving. Who is giving the training? Is it quality assured and rigorous enough? These are questions that need to be properly addressed.

We have heard a lot in previous debates about the need for data collection. In many areas across business and public life, it is transparency and good reporting that often create best practice, and it does not seem unreasonable for the public but also for the Government to be privy to such data. That would drive change from the bottom up.

We also need to be sure that training reflects the new provisions in the Bill immediately rather than them filtering into the system over a period of months or, worse still, years. Of course it cannot simply be a tick-box exercise that does not drill into the complexity of the reality on the ground with some of these cases. Post-separation coercive control, for example, is a multifaceted and insidious crime committed by devious and practised individuals. They need to meet their match in the courtroom, from magistrates upwards.

As my noble friend Lady Helic has rightly said, this is not an attack on the wisdom of our lawgivers. It is the opposite: providing them with training would deepen that wisdom and arm them with the means to deal with these complex cases. Doing so would give victims faith and confidence in our justice system and let them know that our courts were with them, not against them. It would also send a strong message to perpetrators that the courts were tools of justice, not another weapon to use against their victim.

I know that my noble friend the Minister is sensitive to these issues, and I am sure her answer will reflect that. As I have said before, I do not understand the resistance to putting this into the Bill, but I will listen carefully to her response. I hope she will come forward with some answers that move towards real progress and an understanding of what needs to be done.

[Baroness Crawley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I will be brief. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, on the important Amendment 44. I wish to speak in particular to Amendment 15 in this group, which would transform and regularise the very disparate current systems by which front-line staff of public authorities inquire into domestic violence and take action.

Since Committee, when we last debated this amendment, my noble friend Lady Armstrong has removed the statutory duty wording in order to see this important provision in the Bill. She and I have also had a helpful meeting with the Minister, whom we thank for her time. The new amendment makes clear that there should still be a transparency mechanism to hold public services to account. It is important to note that the domestic abuse commissioner remains supportive of this new adapted amendment and that, as my noble friends Lady Armstrong and Lord Hunt have said, adequate resources are needed to monitor and annually report on statistics on training in such inquiries.

In Committee, the Minister said she did not want sensitive and complex conversations turned into some sort of tick-box exercise. That is understandable, but our response is that the amendment would actually give public services and staff the space and independence to use their professional judgment as long as the context was transparent for monitoring purposes.

In her letter to my noble friend Lady Armstrong following our meeting, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, makes the helpful observation that relevant public authorities, as listed in Clause 15, are subject to the duty to co-operate with the commissioner, and that this would include the provision of statistics and other information specified in subsection (1) of the new clause, as my noble friend said. She also makes it clear that it is open to the commissioner to address matters relating to training and reporting in her duty to produce an annual report. But, while I hear and to some extent understand the Government’s reluctance to give specific direction in primary legislation to the domestic abuse commissioner regarding the need for public authorities to undertake front-line training, the present situation, based as it is on guidance, cannot continue to let down victims as it does. I look forward to the Minister’s response, in which I hope we will hear clearly her agreement with the principle of the amendment and how it can be taken forward.