Non-disclosure Agreements in the Workplace

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Jess Phillips

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips]

I did not say that the law said that, although incidentally Zelda Perkins’s NDA did say that. I do not know what is written in all the NDAs in the country, although I have quite a lot in my inbox, so I have an idea of some of the things that people get asked for.

Of course what the Minister describes is illegal, but it is not illegal to say, “You can’t speak about this. You can’t tell the woman in the next cubicle along that the man you work for has been groping you, because you’ve been silenced.” That is what we are apparently saying is okay; we are fine with that.

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

I apologise for not having been here at the start of the debate; I was chairing somewhere else. The hon. Lady used words that I had not yet heard today in this Chamber: “he”, “his”, “him”, and “the woman next to you.” That is really important. There are many women in this Chamber speaking about non-disclosure agreements. Apologies to my colleagues, who are a bunch of male Front Benchers, but does the hon. Lady agree that it is really important to reiterate how often NDAs are gendered? Apologies, Jim.

[Jess Phillips]

Hear, hear. The data laid out by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke made it very clear not just the gender imbalance in those affected by NDAs, but that black women are much more greatly affected.

Ethnic Minority and Migrant Victims of Violence Against Women and Girls

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Jess Phillips

Wednesday 5th July 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

I believe this is the first time I have had the pleasure of serving under your chairship, Ms Nokes. I want to say a massive congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) for bringing forward this important debate, and to all the agencies that compiled the report. I am hopeful that the Minister will want to arrange a meeting with them to look at the findings, which, from my experience, are clear and accurate.

The nub of the issue, as my hon. Friend identified, comes from Refuge data, which found that black women are 14% less likely to be referred to its services for support by the police than white survivors. I have worked in the field for a long time, and people often say these are—I hate this language—“hard to reach” groups. In actual fact, black women are 3% more likely to report abuse to the police and 14% less likely to be referred by police services to specialist services. This is not a hard-to-reach cohort of people; this is a group of people asking for help and not being provided with it. There is something fundamental in that statistic about where we are going wrong, before we even get to the idea of people being criminalised.

To my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum): maybe I just have not slept very well this week, but the statistic about Calpol being the thing that was most stolen in her constituency, based on police data, made me want to cry. That is unbelievable, yet so believable. That was before she went on to speak about her experience, where criminalisation was undoubtedly used as a weapon by her abusers. That is not uncommon. I first read about the charges against my hon. Friend in The Sun, when she had only just been elected. It was not a very detailed piece but as a professional in this area, on reading it, I did not see a woman being criminalised; despite having never spoken to her, I instantly knew that she was a victim of domestic abuse. I contacted her immediately to say as much. Why on earth could the first criminal justice agency to interact with her in that case not see that from the evidence in front of it? It is a disgrace.

What I am seeing at the moment, specifically in domestic abuse cases where children are involved, is that the new game in town for those accused of domestic abuse who want to attack their accuser is claim and counterclaim, and I have recently encountered counterclaims against known victims of domestic abuse that have led to their arrest. In one case I am handling, the health visitor of a woman who had been to the multi-agency risk assessment conference eight times, such was the high-risk nature of the threat to her life—two attempts had been made on her life, and on the lives of her child and parents—turned up at my office in a desperate panic because the woman had been put in a prison cell owing to counterclaims by her ex-husband.

Every single claim and counterclaim case I have been involved with in which the police have made an arrest has involved an Asian woman—and that is not just because of the demographics of the area that I represent. I am watching black and minoritised women being criminalised literally for being victims of domestic abuse. As I say, that interacts very badly with our failing family court system, where the game in town for a long time was parent alienation. Now that has been widely rebuked, there is a new game: every single domestic abuse claim a woman makes in family court—bar rape, one notices—gets turned around and put back on her. In every case where I have seen claim and counterclaim lead to either criminalisation or poor decisions in family court—this is totally anecdotal, based on my personal experience; I would love to show some data, but neither the Home Office nor the family courts collect any, so everyone gathered here will have to take my word for it—it has involved a black or Asian woman. There is definitely a problem in the system; I am seeing it live with my own eyes. My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse is incredibly brave to talk about her experiences again, and I am proud to know her.

To the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), again, missing data is part of the problem, but the brutal exploitation of girls in gangs, both criminally and through sexual exploitation, only for them to go on and be criminalised, is absolutely woeful. Some 63% of girls and young women serving sentences in the community have experienced rape or domestic abuse in intimate partner relationships. I have absolutely no doubt that a large number of those will be linked to the gang and sexual exploitation activity that is going on.

We in the Labour party are seeking to amend the Victims and Prisoners Bill so that child criminal exploitation is defined in law. So far, the Government have pushed back against that, but hope springs eternal that by the time the Bill comes back in its next iteration they will have decided that defining child criminal exploitation in law is important. I know my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall has lent her voice to that. Moreover, on the push for data, I cannot express enough how we need better data on all of these things. The situation is woeful.

This is not new news. At the moment, I sometimes feel like I am in a meeting that I was in 20 years ago. We must be 20 years on from Baroness Corston’s report, which roundly proved that criminalising women was costly to society, dangerous for our criminal justice agencies and bore no results. I used to run a female offenders’ centre in the west midlands that came about because of what was in the Corston report and we had a 97% non-reoffending rate. Sadly, I think the state has the opposite: a 97% reoffending rate. We know that women’s centres and services that divert people from prison work. It is not soft touch; it stops criminal activity. Do I think for a second that somebody who has stolen some Calpol should go to prison? That is phenomenal, yet it happens up and down our country. We know the data.

Unfortunately, the Government have a policy of building new women’s prisons, which they will fill overnight at great cost to the taxpayer. The reoffending rate achieved will be nowhere near as good as investing that money in women’s centre services. I set up a women’s centre because I watched victims of domestic abuse from my refuge being criminalised as part of the pattern of the abuse they had suffered, for things such as their children not going to school—that is the point of a women’s centre. Women move miles away from their home, where they have been living in horrendous situations in which they have basically been enslaved, and their children are frightened to leave them to go to a new school. Then they are criminalised because their children will not go to school. That is just unbelievable bad practice, all over the country.

I am not entirely sure why the Government, in the small bit of data they bother to collect, would look at the reoffending rates from prisons and women’s centres and think, “Prisons: that is the one for us.” It is absolute madness and does not make any sense. The failed and now returned to the state privatisation of probation—a dreadful and failed experiment over the past 10 years—has largely decimated our women’s criminal justice centres, which were doing brilliant and amazing work. I cannot stress enough the need for better data and understanding in this space.

On statutory defences, as alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton, I tabled amendments to that effect in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. I continue to believe that statutory defences in cases of domestic abuse and sexual violence and exploitation should have a role in our law. Just as my hon. Friend pointed, it seems ridiculous that the same provisions for cases of force used in break-ins do not exist for victims of domestic abuse. It is as if the state is basically saying “We are not expecting zero violence. You should be able to take a bit of violence before you kick back.” That is pretty grim, and I urge the Government once again to look at statutory defences. Under the stewardship of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), statutory defences were put into law in cases of modern slavery and human trafficking.

I am afraid to say that, although the law is written well, the practice is not so good, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall pointed out, so much more work needs to be done in that space. But there is nothing for victims of domestic and sexual violence. The right hon. Member for Maidenhead, the ex-Prime Minister and Home Secretary—back in the time when Home Secretaries stayed for a long time—acted with a spirit of fairness and had an understanding of what will work and what is right. I encourage the Government to take on that grit.

As for the firewall, I will briefly say that a woman in my constituency came to me because her husband was threatening to kill her. He continued to threaten to kill her after she called the police, as I told her to do, and she had a “sig” marker put on her house because her life was at risk. The police turned up, and the next thing I know she called me. Because she did not speak particularly good English, she said that she was in Bradford, but she was actually in Bedford, in Yarl’s Wood, because when she called the police to say that her husband was threatening to kill her and was coming round, she ended up in immigration detention. She has since, of course, been given indefinite leave to remain; I think she is actually a British citizen now. She should never have been detained, and she certainly should not have been detained when there was a threat to her life, because the next time her husband threatens to kill her, she will not call the police, and then I will read out her name on the next International Women’s Day.

We have case after case like that, and the Government’s response to our amendments on the firewall—the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has made clear that he supports that, and anybody who knows anything about anything thinks it is a good idea—is to act as if they are doing a kindness. What a kindness they did to my constituent when they put her in detention when her life was at risk. They act as if they are doing a kindness when they say, “Well, sometimes there is a need for the police to speak to immigration.” Of course there is. I speak to immigration all the time, but I do not do it as an enforcer; I do it to try to ensure that a victim’s immigration status can be sorted out and she can access the right services, and I do it at her request.

There is absolutely no reason why the police could not act in exactly the same way. No one is saying that we can never speak to immigration, but we should speak not to immigration enforcement, but to the Home Office at the point at which the victim needs her immigration sorted out. Caseworkers in violence against women and girls services do that all over the country, all the time, and nobody ends up in detention, so why do they when the police do it? It is a disgrace—it is part of the hostile environment—that the Government do not want to end the practice of detaining women who come forward to say that they have been raped or abused, that their lives are at risk, and that something should be done about it.

The Government agreed to the Istanbul convention, apart from the bit about migrant women. They literally carved out their rights, creating a two-tier system.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind the shadow Minister to leave time for the Minister.

[Jess Phillips]

I will sit down shortly.

There is literally no excuse. I really hope the Government look at the report I mentioned, take its recommendations incredibly seriously, and use facts and evidence, not ideology, to make decisions about what they do with my constituents’ tax money.