Domestic Abuse Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Lords Chamber

We have 20 years of evidence to demonstrate that the current system is not working. It is too late for more guidance and more words; it is time to act. I therefore urge the Minister to accept my amendment, so that perpetrators are no longer able to act with impunity, so that fewer women and girls live in fear and fewer lives are tragically lost at the hands of serious and serial domestic abusers and stalkers. I look forward to the Minister’s response, specifically on the inclusion of perpetrators of stalking on the register and new database and on the perpetrator strategy. I beg to move.

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I strongly echo all the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, but am profoundly upset that Ministers seem to have gone backwards since we last debated this matter in the Lords on Report. The Minister referred to the 30 deaths that we reported at that time, but at least 16 further women have been murdered since Report on 15 March—a mere 36 days ago. This is deeply shocking evidence of the current failures.

As a new Member of your Lordships’ House, I was invited to join the independent parliamentary inquiry into stalking law reform chaired by Elfyn Llwyd MP. At the start of its report, there is a quotation that is important in the context of Amendment G1 today. Tracey Morgan, a victim and now a supporter of many other victims, said to us then,

“The victims I hear from are saying the same things I was 15 years ago—what’s changed? We need to do more. This is about murder prevention.”


Ten years on, nothing has changed. That is 25 years of Tracey’s experience and hundreds of murders. One key perpetrator recommendation from our stalking inquiry remains outstanding, which is having a register of serial stalking perpetrators. Why are they not mentioned in the Government’s amendment?

The Minister insists that Motion G1 is not needed because the problem is one of better management to make the various parts of the multiagency system work better everywhere. We all know that there are pockets of excellent practice, but the safety of victims and the de-escalation of the behaviour of these dangerous perpetrators should not be a postcode lottery. It should be consistent and should give confidence to victims and all those working with them. It should save lives.

I think we all agree that the current MAPPA arrangements need to improve. In 2017, HMICFRS inspected a number of MAPPA cases; this resulted in its report, Living in Fear. The headlines in that report are deeply shocking, with 100% failure in 112 cases inspected across six police force and CPS areas. Victims were left at risk and let down by under-recording and inconsistent services, with patterns missed and incidents being treated as isolated. Victims said that they wanted the police to understand the bigger picture and to receive specialist-led training. There was often no risk identification, assessment or management of stalkers.

In Committee, I talked about the need for a golden thread to run through all interactions with victims and perpetrators. This is particularly vital for perpetrators because we know that their behaviour escalates and becomes more obsessive and violent as time goes on. Only by getting them into the MAPPA process can we achieve that and ensure that this golden thread provides an oversight of behaviour.

Last week, Channel 4’s excellent documentary “24 Hours in Police Custody” had an episode called “Death Us Do Part”. It focused on the 2019 Bedfordshire Police investigation into a severe attack by a female perpetrator on her male partner. She gave him two bleeds on his brain and a fractured eye socket. We saw the frustration that the excellent police domestic violence team faced. The attack on Paul Jenner came just two days after his partner’s early release from prison after a previous serious attack on him. It was evident that there was no contact with HM Prison and Probation Service. The custody sergeant even commented that they knew her well and that it is as if a switch gets turned on and she cannot stop herself attacking him. The investigating officer was struck that after she was arrested, she was already texting her partner, who became frightened and unwilling to co-operate. The officer and her team finally persuaded him that they could help him, but their efforts were constantly undermined by the coercive control that the perpetrator had over him. Sadly, he died a few days later. Given the number of attacks she had made on him over many years and the increasing severity of those attacks, she was well known to everyone in the system. That is why serious and serial domestic violence perpetrators need to be on the register and why there needs to be a duty for all the multiagency partners to work together. If that had happened, this “never event”—a predictable event that should never have been able to happen but did—could have prevented because that golden thread would have prepared and supported Paul Jenner and his partner on her release from prison.

Stalking Awareness Week started on Monday. Robert Buckland QC—incidentally, he was a member of the stalking law reform inquiry with me a decade ago—made a moving video as Secretary of State for Justice, and I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, that he has been a champion for getting on top of stalking. He said of stalking: “We need to call it out. We need to stamp it out. We need to do all we can to deal with the menace of stalking in our society.” I agree. However, that will never happen until a duty for multiagency response is enshrined in legislation, with a database and register to provide that golden thread to identify and stop stalking and domestic abuse perpetrators and save lives. I beg the Government to reconsider.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am not a fan of acronyms at the best of times, but I feel that this evening does call for one, and it is DVAOA—which, as everybody will know, stands for “déjà vu all over again”. So here we are again.

Last Thursday, in another place, there was a lamentable performance by the Government, I must say. For those who have not watched it, I suggest you take a stiff gin and tonic and then sit back and enjoy it. Particularly if you are of the Government’s persuasion, it is not very nice to watch. To her credit, the noble Baroness the Minister, as one might have expected, has performed immeasurably better, and I am very grateful to her for the opening speech, which I thought contained some very positive elements. Because of that, I will rein in the rant that I was going to deliver and make it a rather smaller rant than I would have delivered otherwise.

Why am I and others on our feet again? Some of what the noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady Brinton, have said very comprehensively has already covered that, but I was going to wave three exhibits. The first was the report that Robert Buckland, our Justice Minister, undertook about stalking and the recommendations that he made. The second, exhibit B, would be one of a certain Alex Chalk, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Justice, who, in his own stalking review, which he did with a fellow Gloucestershire MP, strangely used exactly the same wording as Robert Buckland’s report, basically saying

“Consideration should be given to the production of a register of serial perpetrators”.


Last but not least, exhibit C is from our Home Secretary herself, Priti Patel, who in 2013 edited a report called Rebalancing the Scales for victims. One of the contributions, which she was responsible for editing, said very clearly that a database should be established comprehensively to cover all perpetrators and stalkers.

On Thursday in another place, the Government effectively admitted that the current system is not working as it should, that the current database is out of date and is not working as it should, and the Minister in the Commons, in a much more pared-down way, indicated some of what the Minister said earlier this evening. But what we are really talking about, and this goes back certainly as far as 2004, is a fundamental failure of management and leadership.

I do not have a background in government or public service; I have a background in business, and where I come from, over all those years, the sort of failure of management and leadership that has been consistent through changes in government, changes in Minister, changes in special adviser, would be regarded as a sacking offence, and certainly as a career-limiting offence. Given the awful, relentless toll of women dying, week in and week out, I think that, in the world I come from, it would also be regarded potentially as corporate manslaughter. Noble Lords know what the penalties are for corporate manslaughter: they are considerable. But because this is a Government, and because we are dealing with statutory agencies, that is not an option—but it really is not far off, and it is shameful. And the death toll relentlessly keeps going up, and will keep going up, whatever fine words we say.

As I said, the Minister has been very helpful. I was going to say that, until the point she spoke, I was much clearer about what the Government did not want to do than about what they do want to do, and I am very grateful that she has given some clear indications about the direction they want to go in. We have had, as I am sure the Minister has, some fairly intensive conversations with the domestic abuse commissioner’s office about how she sees things, going forward. She too knows and admits that the current system is not working, but, naturally, given her role and the nature of her relationship with government, she wants to be positive and to try to make it work. I am very keen to be positive, too, and to try to make this work.