Domestic Abuse Bill

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Ind)]

It is always a privilege to follow the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). She and I do not always agree on things, but I absolutely concur with her final comments to the Minister about this being a gendered crime. Of course it happens to men as well as women, but we have to look at the reality of the statistics.

I welcome the opportunity this afternoon to get this Bill out of the blocks and use this unexpected week wisely. I must also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for her moving contribution. I wish, in a limited period of time, to concentrate on one element alone. Some may look at me with some surprise when I do this, and fear I find myself in the role of gamekeeper turned poacher, rather than the other way round. I am sure the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), does not need reminding of the meeting that she and I attended in May, alongside the Minister for countering extremism and my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), then an Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Justice. I was pleased to see him on the Treasury Bench for the opening of this debate. He made the point during that meeting that when considering domestic abuse it is imperative that we consider people as victims first, rather than alongside any other considerations that the Government might have. That meeting was attended by Southall Black Sisters, Imkaan and the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who has not yet spoken in this debate but who has such a wealth of experience and expertise on these issues.

I was pleased to hear my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor talk about the need for a cross-Government approach. The meeting that I chaired and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle, attended was a cross-Government one, but, as I said to those agencies represented, it was not sufficiently cross-Government. There was no representation from the Department for Work and Pensions or the Department of Health and Social Care. If we are going to address domestic abuse in all its forms, we must have all bodies around the table.

[Chris Bryant]

I just wonder whether we should be looking at one other Department, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, because in my constituency and in the south Wales valleys the worst spikes, when there are so many instances of domestic violence that the police are simply not able to cope, occur when there is a big rugby or football match. I simply do not understand why all the sporting bodies cannot come together to run a major publicity campaign to try to tackle this.

[Caroline Nokes]

I welcome the comments that the hon. Gentleman makes and those that my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), a former Culture Secretary, made when she said that she was trying to do what he suggests. Of course the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government must also be involved. We have heard much about health, relationships and sexual education in schools, so the Department for Education also of course has a role to play.

I urge the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend Member for Louth and Horncastle to do what she can to make sure that we are doing more for migrant women, bearing in mind that the destitute domestic violence concession is currently available only to those who come here on a family visa. We must consider those who are here as partners of refugees, those who are here en route to settlement but who have not yet got their protected status, and those who are here on tier 4 visas. We have heard much about older victims, but younger people, those who might be here as students, can also suffer from domestic abuse.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a valid point about the breadth of this issue and the need for Departments to co-operate. One of the most disturbing cases ever brought to my surgery—we all know how disturbing surgery cases can be—was that of a disabled man whom I had known in a different context as a cheerful, light-hearted person but who had been abused for years by his wife, who was of course much stronger and more powerful than him. Disabled people and other vulnerable people need to be taken into account here, which is one reason why we need to work across Government.

[Caroline Nokes]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right; we must work across Government and we must consider all vulnerabilities.

We have heard this afternoon about the varied forms that domestic abuse takes. It might be physical, financial, emotional. We have heard about coercive control. However, there is also the controlling behaviour that relates to immigration status. A victim is a victim first, and the law and agencies must recognise that.

The role of the Minister is not simply to speak—it is to listen; it is to understand. Earlier, I mentioned the cross-Government meeting held back in May. As I said, it was not cross-Government enough, but I certainly listened very carefully that afternoon to the voices of Southall Black Sisters, the End Violence Against Women coalition, and Imkaan, and their message was that we had to extend the domestic violence concession and must not allow immigration status to be weaponised—as we know that, by perpetrators, it very much is weaponised. That can be physical, in the sense of a passport being withdrawn, but it can also take the form of the simple threat that a victim is in this country only because of the status of the perpetrator, and that if they were to approach an agency they would do so at their peril, and might then be excluded from this country.

The hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who is no longer in her place—I venture into this space with some trepidation—spoke of the EU settled status scheme and EU citizens. I urge hon. Members to make contact with Home Office officials and talk to them about the amazing amount of work that has gone into the resolution centre in Liverpool. When I was a Minister, I visited the centre and spoke to a wide range of brilliant caseworkers there. I hesitate to name her, but the awesome Gabi, who was passionate about helping those in the most vulnerable situations, spoke about recognising that there will be people who apply to that scheme who no longer have their passport, and who have no paperwork evidencing their stay in the United Kingdom, because their controlling partner has seized that from them and prevented them from having access to it.

We heard this afternoon about Government data sharing. Again I hesitate to go there, but there are occasions when data sharing can actually be a force for good. I would highlight the EU settled status scheme, which can combine evidence from the Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC in order to draw a picture of someone’s life in the UK that enables those who are vulnerable, who have been victims, to pull together sufficient information. There is a call centre. I sat in on some of the calls, which were handled in the most compassionate and understanding way so that victims were not put through a gruelling process but were helped to obtain their status. When I left office, there were in the region of 1,500 people working on the scheme. I hope to goodness that there remain 1,500 people working on it today, because it is absolutely imperative that we get that right for all EU citizens who are in this country.

I know that the Minister takes this matter very seriously and I am delighted that she has seized the opportunity provided by a day that we were not expecting to be in Parliament to give the Bill a Second Reading and allow us to make progress. I urge her to continue listening to the words of current and former Ministers. I know that the current Chancellor of the Exchequer was very passionate about ensuring that the review on migrant women enabled the Bill to cover more ground and enabled us to consider the domestic violence concession and do more.

I hope that the Minister heeds that, and that when the Bill moves into Committee we can all play an active part to ensure that we make it every bit as good as it can be, embracing as many individuals in this country who have been subjected to domestic abuse as possible, to give them the help that they need.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), chair of the all-party group on perpetrators of domestic abuse. I am sure that her work is extraordinary and really important.

I also follow the speech a little earlier of the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who talked about my constituent Natalie Connolly. Natalie Connolly, as she so rightly said, would be 28 years old now. She has a young daughter and she comes from a family of loving parents, loving grandparents, a loving sister and, of course, a loving daughter.

Natalie Connolly fell into a relationship with John Broadhurst in 2016. She was, I guess, impressed with him. He was a millionaire and she came from a relatively normal background. One Saturday afternoon, they went off to a rather extensive party. That evening, they were driven home by his driver. They went back to their house, which they were renting while their main one was being renovated, and indulged in intimate activities of an aggressive nature, which were allegedly consensual—I believe were consensual.

When John Broadhurst went to bed that night, he stepped over the bleeding, unconscious body of Natalie Connolly on the steps of their house and went upstairs, leaving her there. He came down the next morning, stepped across her now lifeless body, went and had breakfast, washed the car and called the emergency services, telling the police and paramedics that she was “dead as a doughnut”—which seems extraordinary.

Broadhurst was obviously charged with murder—the Crown Prosecution Service was going to maintain a murder case. The trial happened at the end of last year and was quite high profile at the time. The injuries that Natalie suffered were unbelievably extensive, extraordinarily intimate and, frankly, utterly, utterly brutal. She had lost a lot of blood from her injuries. But the problem was—this is where the law comes in—she bled into a carpet, so it was impossible to measure the extent of her blood loss. As a result, whether she died as a direct result of the injuries, or as a result of overuse of alcohol and possibly narcotics, could not be absolutely confirmed. The charges were therefore dropped from murder to manslaughter by neglect, owing to the fact that Broadhurst had left her behind to bleed to death overnight.

The problem was that to get this change of charge, someone had to sit down and talk to the family. I have met the family—an immensely kind and loving group of people. I sat down with them and we had a conversation about their daughter, who had been besmirched by this vile man. Their last memories of her will be of the court case—people discussing what he alleged about her and her hideous, unbelievable injuries. As I sat with this family, I looked at a group of people whose memories of Natalie should be of buying her first Snow White costume or Barbie doll when she was a child—all the stuff we want to do as parents who love our families. Being asked to understand the risk-balances of complicated legal issues put this family in an intolerable position, as they had to work out the right way forward to get a prosecution.

One of the unbelievably brilliant things about this House is that we are actually not divided when it comes to this sort of thing. The Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham, reached out to me before Christmas and said, “Are you aware of this case?”, so the two of us worked together. I am not a lawyer, so I do not particularly understand these legal issues, but she does; this illustrates how good we can be as a House. We visited the Attorney General to see whether there could be a retrial, but he said, “Actually, no. In this particular case, the sentence was right because of the reduction of the charge.” So together—actually, me being led by her and learning from her—we want to table a couple of amendments.

[Caroline Nokes]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly important point, and I think it is imperative that he is allowed the time in which to achieve that.

[Mark Garnier]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend.

There are two points. The first is that “she was asking for it” cannot possibly be a defence when somebody dies. Apart from anything else, the individual does not have the ability to defend themselves, and their reputation is being destroyed in front of the people they loved, the people who care for them and their friends. That is absolutely wrong. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” defence cannot be allowed.

The second point is that victims’ families are not qualified to make the decision about changing the charge so that there can be a better chance of a conviction. We need people who are brilliantly clever at this—brilliant barristers who are brave enough to fight these cases on behalf of the victims. But what we can do is ensure that the decision is made by somebody who really understands the process, so that the Director of Public Prosecutions is the one who is consulted if a change is going to be made in a case pertaining to this type of injury and homicide in a domestic abuse setting. In that way, these families will get the support they need.

Natalie Connolly would have been 28 now, with a young daughter growing up in a warm family, but she is no longer with us. If there is any way in which we can remember her, we have to do something to make sure that this can never happen to anybody ever again.