Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Fiona Mactaggart and Andrew Bingham

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

I do not intend to detain the House for long, because I am aware that plenty of other hon. Members wish to speak. I just wish to add my voice to those thanking the Government and the Ministers for their concession on this matter. My constituency is very rural but, like the constituency of the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk), it contains a large asbestos-related industry. That industry was born and based in High Peak, so my constituency has a higher level of mesothelioma than the national average. The Government’s movement on this issue is to be commended. Last week, I, along with one or two of my hon. Friends, voted in the Opposition Lobby on this matter. I subsequently received an e-mail from a constituent telling me that he was actually proud of his MP—he said that this does not happen very often.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), because she has driven this through, along with the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) and those in the other place. I welcome the amendment in lieu and am particularly pleased to see that a report will be published on the conclusions of the review. That gives me great confidence that the review will be meaningful and searching, and will come forward with something that all of us across the House can support when the day comes. I look forward to that report.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

When the Lord Chancellor introduced the statement to the House which preceded this Bill, I asked him about the provisions in relation to domestic violence. He thought that I would be pleased with the answer, because the Government had recognised that domestic violence was, to some degree, a special case. I was not pleased with the answer, because at that point the definition of “domestic violence” was unique to this Bill, it did not cover all cases and it was, in my view, fundamentally flawed. So the first thing I wish to say is how glad I am that the Government have now decided to use the Association of Chief Police Officers definition of “domestic violence”.

I need to push one point further, however. The failure of the Government to understand the reality of the lives of victims of domestic violence is reflected in how they have constructed this Bill. I will never forget the moment when I talked to two local police officers in my constituency who dealt regularly with victims of domestic violence and who told me about a case that they had just dealt with of a woman who had been beaten up by her husband 12 years earlier but did not report it until he started biting pieces out of her body. That case, although it made me tremble with horror, is shockingly not that exceptional. We should not forget that, in this country, two women are murdered every week following a history of domestic violence. We should not forget how few women ever report it. Why do they not report it? Overwhelmingly, the victims of domestic violence think, “It was my fault.” That is how they feel, so they do not go to the police or to social workers. They conceal it, as they think it is caused by something that they did.

Such women often report because of someone else. When women are pregnant, they will report their victimisation by their partner because they want to protect the child in their womb. The problem with the distance travelled by the Government is that they have not yet gone far enough. I hope to be able to persuade the Minister to take that last step and to accept wider forms of evidence. We know that women do not necessarily go to a refuge; they go to a place of refuge. They might go to their sister, to their school friend or to their mum, and they are the people who women will tell first about their experience of victimisation.

Some very perturbing evidence from Welsh Women’s Aid suggests that the average time—the average, not the extreme—that a victim might take before reporting a domestic violence incident and getting to the stage of resolving the private family law issues is five and a half years. That average time would be excluded by the route that the Minister is pursuing. I beg him to recognise that the House of Lords got this one right and to say that he will take the last step and ensure that the other victims are properly protected. That is important because by allowing these women to use private family law to protect themselves and their families, we will prevent future domestic violence homicides. The Minister could do that by changing his position on the amendments.