Domestic Violence and Abuse

Baroness Williams of Trafford Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Manzoor for tabling today’s debate. Its timing sits well with the lead-up to the domestic abuse Bill. I also commend my noble friend Lord Goschen for being the only man to have spoken in this debate. We have heard some very good contributions from all sides of the House, bringing different aspects to the subject. I pay tribute to those who have campaigned tirelessly on this issue over the years.

As we have heard today, domestic abuse covers a range of harmful and deeply unacceptable behaviours which can devastate the lives of victims, survivors and those closest to them. Victims deserve our best support and they deserve justice. This Government are committed to doing everything they can to transform our approach to domestic abuse to ensure that victims have the confidence to come forward and report their experiences, safe in the knowledge not only that they will be supported but that their abuser will be pursued.

Last year, we launched the violence against women and girls strategy, setting out our ambition that no victim of abuse is turned away from the support they need—that echoes the final words of the noble Baroness, Lady Gale. It signalled a move towards early intervention, a drive to stem offending and, as is all too often the case, reoffending by perpetrators.

The strategy is supported by a new National Statement of Expectations, which is a clear blueprint for good local commissioning and service provision. It is backed up by new tools and guidance to help raise all areas of the country up to the level of the best.

As has been said, it is important to be clear that men and women can experience domestic abuse and that all victims must be supported, but it is also important to recognise the gendered nature of domestic abuse, which is why the Government have a violence against women and girls strategy.

Data show that women are much more likely than men to be the victims of high-risk or severe domestic abuse. This is clearly demonstrated by a greater number of cases going to multiagency risk assessment conference, or MARAC, and accessing an independent domestic violence adviser service—as referred to by many noble Lords. Those deal with the most severe cases of domestic abuse. More than 95% of victims are female and 4% are male.

The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, talked about the funding mechanism for IDVAs versus the lack of funding for ISACs. We have moved from national matched funding of individual roles such as IDVAs to supporting integrated programmes through the VAWG Service Transformation Fund. The £17 million from that fund announced yesterday—to answer the question asked by my noble friend Lady Newlove—will help 41 local areas to improve support to victims, and 10 of those bids include support for victims of stalking. The Government have also funded via the tampon tax fund other programmes to support victims of stalking. Those include the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and Black Country Women’s Aid. The Suzy Lamplugh Trust has received £200,000 to enable it to reach an additional 290 women and improve front-line professionals’ first response to stalking.

My noble friend Lady Newlove asked about the role of IDVAs in the courts, and I think the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, talked about the courts seeing cases on the same day and worried about the more scattered nature of those cases being heard now. I acknowledge the role of the IDVAs in supporting victims; in the magistrates’ court, domestic abuse cases are often listed together to enable the IDVAs to be able to support victims during the court hearings, which makes absolute sense. The listing of cases is the responsibility of the judiciary, although I note the noble Baroness’s point.

A lot of questions were asked about funding. To support the Government’s commitment to tackling these crimes, the strategy was accompanied by increased funding of £80 million until 2020. A question was asked about sustainable funding going forward. Clearly we cannot make funding commitments beyond the spending review, but to further support our efforts to tackle domestic abuse, we pledged a further £20 million in the spring budget, bringing the total dedicated funding to £100 million. This will help to deliver our goal to ensure a secure future for vital services like refuges and rape support centres while driving a major change so that victims get the help they need, when they need it.

In the last year we have provided £3 million for the Disrespect NoBody teenage relationship abuse campaign. It is a very important campaign indeed, which is designed to raise awareness of different types of abusive behaviour and recognise them while girls— and boys—are younger.

Beyond the £80 million, tackling these crimes will benefit from a range of government sources. Funding through the tampon tax, again, for example, has supported innovative programmes like the joint Women’s Aid and Safelives’ Sooner the Better early intervention project, and Standing Together Against Domestic Violence, which supports women with complex needs.

My noble friend Lady Newlove asked specifically about the VAWG Service Transformation Fund. I have just gone through that, but it is excellent that these projects will make sure that the victims get the right support at the right time and prevent these terrible crimes.

We know that abused women use healthcare services more than non-abused women and are more likely to trust health professionals when disclosing abuse. That is why we are funding a number of health-based projects, including the health-led ASSIST program in Birmingham, which will provide specialist support to victims of domestic abuse who also have complex additional problems—which is not unusual—such as drug, alcohol or mental health issues, which mainstream services are often unable to address, and will focus specifically on supporting women who are at risk of having their children taken away.

We are also funding proposals that will work with schools and young people to help build resilience and develop positive and healthy behaviours to prevent abuse before it happens. For example, we are funding a family intervention project with Portsmouth to upskill children’s social workers to identify harmful behaviours early, as well as to support children who have witnessed domestic abuse. We are also providing funding to 17 programmes, which include working with perpetrators to change their behaviour. Perpetrators have been mentioned a lot. This includes working with teenage boys to provide targeted interventions at an early stage to prevent worrying behaviours escalating later into abuse.

To support victims who need a crisis response, we recently announced that the current round of the £20 million domestic abuse accommodation fund will support 76 projects, creating 2,200 new bed spaces in refuges and other specialist accommodation. This will provide more than 19,000 victims with somewhere safe to live and rebuild their lives, and will offer further access to education, employment and life skills training. I am incredibly pleased to announce that we have committed to legislate to deliver the Government’s manifesto commitment to ensure that the victims of domestic abuse who have lifetime tenancies and flee violence are able automatically to secure a new lifetime tenancy. This is something we also touched on in the then housing Bill, which is why I am doubly pleased about it. We will take this forward at the earliest possible opportunity.

However, we all know that funding alone will not solve this problem. The Government are committed to ensuring that front-line agencies have the tools they need to provide effective protection to vulnerable victims. We have introduced a specific offence of domestic abuse which outlaws patterns of controlling and coercive behaviour to recognise the fact that domestic abuse reaches far wider than physical abuse alone. We rolled out the domestic abuse disclosure scheme, known as Clare’s law, so that the police may disclose information about previous violent offences committed by a current or former partner. The police are no longer left guessing whether people might be at risk.

The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, asked about listing on the ViSOR scheme. From memory, I know that if someone is both violent and a sex offender, they will be on that register. Clearly there are differences in the types of cases, but I know exactly the point that she is driving at. I will look into it and come back to her, but my current understanding is that the register is for violent sex offenders. We will talk about that some more. We have also brought in domestic violence protection orders, which can prevent the perpetrator from returning to a residence and from having contact with the victim for up to 28 days, giving the victim a vital breathing space. We have extended the troubled families programme to 2020 to work with an additional 400,000 families, including those affected by domestic abuse. It was obvious that it was quite prevalent in some of these difficult family situations. We have worked with the police to improve training and guidance, and I will say more on police training and so on shortly.

On the subject of stalking, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, for her work with Paladin. As noble Lords have mentioned, a report by the Inspector of Constabulary and the Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate on the response to stalking and harassment which was published yesterday has found that the police and the CPS response is just not good enough. These are quite devastating crimes which cause great distress to victims. Noble Lords have described some of that distress and it is absolutely unacceptable that these victims are being left to live in fear. We have strengthened the law in this area and are taking steps to include a new civil stalking protection order to protect victims at the earliest possible stage, but clearly there is more to do. The Home Secretary will be speaking to national police leads about what action needs to be taken. To that end, the noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady Brinton, both gave us several examples of where the systems can dreadfully fail women, so action needs to be taken.

The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, also asked whether HMRC and the CPSI stalking harassment report shows that the police and the CPS are failing to tackle these crimes effectively and failing victims. We know that these crimes are devastating, and that is why back in 2012 we strengthened the law to create specific stalking offences and to raise the maximum sentence for stalking and harassment to 10 years—thanks to the noble Baroness—through the Police and Crime Act 2017. To make sure that victims get the support they need, the Home Office has provided £50,000 a year to support the national stalking helpline.

The noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady Hamwee, talked about the specific issue of training. I am quite horrified to hear the story of spending 25 minutes in front of a desktop computer being considered to be sufficient training for anyone, let alone the police. Since 2012, the College of Policing’s training package on investigating stalking effectively has been completed by more than 68,000 police officers. I hope that was not 25 minutes on a desktop. Again, I hope the e-learning module on stalking is not of just 25 minutes—

[Baroness Brinton]

It is.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

It does not say that in my notes. If that is the case, I will go back to the department for more detail on that. When the noble Baronesses were getting agitated, I thought I might be hitting on exactly the thing they had criticised. The Home Secretary will be meeting the national police lead, Garry Shewan, who used to work for Greater Manchester Police. I will make sure that this issue gets to the Home Secretary’s desk and, I hope, to his.

I have a note on the register for perpetrators of stalking. They will already be captured on the PNC. We need to make better use of existing databases and improve connectivity and information-sharing, rather than create new databases. The noble Baroness does not agree with me so I think we will have further discussions on that as well.

On sentencing, in response to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, we should be clear that release under licensing does not mean that prisoners are let off lightly. All prisoners are released on licence and if they breach their licence conditions they may be returned to custody. The period served on licence is an integral part of the sentence and necessary for the purposes of safely reintegrating prisoners back into the community in a controlled and supervised way, reducing the risk of further offending. Requiring a proportion of the overall sentence to be served in custody followed by a period on licence in the community is not new, since the legislation was introduced in 1967. Successive Governments have maintained this approach.

We are seeing some progress in the reporting of these often hidden crimes. That is on the rise and prosecutions and convictions are at record levels. However, there are still 2 million victims of domestic abuse every year in England and Wales. That is 2 million too many living in fear, and too many families and children devastated by this awful crime.

I quickly move to the measures in the domestic abuse Bill, which I think noble Lords will agree is a landmark Bill. I am also aware that I am at 17 minutes and not even half way through my notes so I will have to get some letter-writing done. In response to the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, I confirm that there will be a legal definition of domestic abuse. What will be in that definition? The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, referred to that. We are consulting widely on the Bill, including opportunities for noble Lords and others, so that the legal definition will not only be supported but is robust and has the correct teeth that it needs.

The recognised harm caused to a child is a really important area. The children of victims of domestic abuse not only witness that abuse but can be damaged by it for the rest of their lives. If abusive behaviour involves a child, we will make sure that the court can hand down a sentence that reflects the devastating, lifelong impact that the abuse will have on that child.

We will establish a domestic abuse commissioner to stand up for victims and survivors, to raise public awareness and to hold those agencies to account. I assure both my noble friend Lady Manzoor and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, that we will be consulting widely on the scope of the role and the powers available to the commissioner.

It will be music to the ears of the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, that we intend to demonstrate our commitment to the Istanbul Convention by including in the Bill the changes needed to enable us to ratify it. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, asked whether disabled women were included in the convention. The convention consists of 81 articles related to tackling VAWG—violence against women and girls—including articles to ensure appropriate support for victims, including those with complex needs, and it recognises the need to support all victims, including those with disabilities. This is reflected in the Violence against Women and Girls—National Statement of Expectations, published last year, which set out a blueprint for local areas.

Some very good points were made about older people. If we think domestic abuse is a hidden harm, it is most certainly hidden in our population of older people, some of whom may not even know that they are suffering domestic violence.

I apologise; I have got only half way through my notes and my 20 minutes are up. I will write to noble Lords. I have probably missed out aspects of what they asked. Again, I thank noble Lords for taking part in a debate where I think we are all coming from the same place and want the same ends. I thank my noble friend for bringing this debate to the House.