Rachael and Auden Slack

Heather Wheeler Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s kind words. I agree entirely that there seems to have been a long failure to provide Andrew with the care he needed. We cannot be wise after the event. None of us can say that people must have known the incident would happen. However, perhaps they ought to have seen a pattern of escalation of his condition—perhaps it gave off more warning signs than were seen.

On 28 May, in that tragic week, two days after Andrew was arrested and assessed, he phoned Rachael more than 20 times. He went round to see her and forced her to take him and the child out. While they were out at a park, he threatened to kill her and made various threats saying that she did not realise how dangerous he could be. That was reported to the police. Sadly, he was released on police bail with conditions not to approach Rachael, but no further action was taken.

A neighbour reported further threats Andrew had made to take away Auden. There was some concern that the police did not take action following that report. At that point, the police concluded that Rachael was at high risk. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that they told Rachael how high their assessment of the risk was. That is what led to the coroner’s findings.

On the day of the tragic incident, Mr Cairns visited his GP, who reported that Mr Cairns was anxious and agitated. Mr Cairns remarked to the GP that, “The next few days will be the most important of your career.” By the time Mr Cairns left the GP, he had apparently calmed down and was rational, but, clearly, even on the day, he had made a cry for help that sadly was not heeded. I am sure that, if any of the police, the mental health team, the GP or anybody else had thought that the tragedy would happen later that day, they would have taken action to prevent it. The question we need to ask is: what more could have been done to assess the risk properly and see whether there was a realistic risk of such a tragic event? No hon. Member wants anything like this tragedy to happen again.

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that it is important that our Derbyshire police, whom we love and trust, have a specialist domestic violence unit that can look into incidents and give professional advice to people who do not necessarily deal with domestic violence day-to-day?

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention and I entirely agree. One of the issues is ensuring that the police have the specialist knowledge and training to be able to handle domestic violence cases. The right answer has to be more specialist police officers, but because there are so many reports of domestic abuse, which police all over the county have to handle urgently, I am not sure that it is possible always to send out a specialist domestic violence officer to each of those incidents. It is perhaps a question of ensuring better training in general for police officers and then making sure that cases that look to be serious receive specialist follow-up as soon as possible to ensure that signs of escalating behaviour or real risk have not been missed by a perhaps less trained person. In general, I agree with my hon. Friend’s suggestion.

The coroner last week suggested that he would make some recommendations to the Home Office, and I am not sure whether the Minister has received those yet. One of those suggestions was for some kind of electronic document that would summarise the important details in the investigation that would be available to all the police officers involved in the case. Outside agencies might also have some input, such as the mental health teams, social services, the local health teams or anyone else deemed relevant. It is key to ensure the full and complete sharing of information between the various teams involved. If everyone who had ever dealt with this case had known the full history of the complaints by Rachael and Mr Cairns’s mental health issues, it might have shown the pattern of escalating behaviour. He might have been viewed as a much higher risk than was initially thought by most of the people involved.

Another suggestion is that perhaps we could strengthen police bail conditions or introduce greater sanctions if they are breached. There is a question about what can be done by court bail and what can be done by the police, but it cannot inspire public confidence if someone is released on police bail with a condition that he cannot approach someone, but very little action appears to be taken if he approaches her soon after being given that bail condition.

A public campaign, supported by 38 Degrees—not an organisation Conservative Members are always fans of—suggests a full public inquiry into how the whole system deals with domestic violence issues. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is carrying out a review, but as various police forces around the country have received strong criticism from the IPCC on how they have handled domestic violence cases in recent years, perhaps we need to go a step further than an IPCC review. A full public inquiry could look at all the agencies involved rather than just focusing on the police, which is not where all the issues lie. Perhaps the Minister could tell me whether the Government are inclined to have a public inquiry on an issue as important as this. The statistics suggest that two or three women a week are killed in domestic violence incidents, and that is an awful situation for a country such as ours still to be in.

It is not for us to reinvestigate this case. Reports are still required from the police and various other agencies, but my purpose today is to raise with the Home Office both the tragedy of this case and the points at which greater action could have been taken to protect Rachael—perhaps to give her greater security, or regrettably to advise her to flee her home to ensure that she was not at immediate risk—or to address Mr Cairns’s health needs, perhaps including sectioning him or giving him more intensive treatment than he was able to get. Is it fair that Rachael was never recorded as Mr Cairns’s carer so she never really got any information or support for the help that she was trying to give her ex-partner for his mental health condition?

Having discussed this with Derbyshire police over the past three years, I am aware that they have reviewed their processes and have tried to make improvements. There are outstanding reports that may require further consideration, but they now have initiatives to work more closely with social services from the same base and to try to improve links with the mental health team. Perhaps the Minister can talk about initiatives he may have seen elsewhere that could be rolled out as best practice around the country. The closer the working relationships, the more immediate the contact and the sharing of information, all of which might make a positive outcome more likely. We all talk about greater partnership working and sharing, but people work in silos and if there are not robust processes and good personal working relationships, trying to bridge three trusts or public bodies with different demands on their time is not always very effective. The question is: how can we improve and create best practice?

It is tempting to think that Parliament could wave a magic wand, pass a new Bill or give new powers to stop this type of incident happening. I am not convinced that we have missed anything. The police have never said to me, “If only we had had this power we could have stopped it.” However, if the Minister has any suggestions about extra powers that the police need or could have used in this case that they were not aware of—I am not saying that that is the case—that would be helpful to the family. There is a feeling among the family, friends and the community that something went horribly wrong—that this was preventable and that somehow the system failed. If there is anything that can come out of an incident as tragic as this, it is that it never happens again.

I again stress my condolences to the family and friends of Rachael and Auden for their tragic loss. I wish that the inquest had reported several months or years earlier. It is a pity that we have had to wait three and a half years before being able to have a public assessment to start to learn the lessons in the public domain. I urge the Minister to do whatever he can to make the inquest system much faster. I struggle to see why we have to put people through three and a half years of waiting before they can get the closure they need. I hope the Minister can provide some assurance that the Government take this issue very seriously—I know they do—and that we can expect further progress to ensure that this kind of thing can never happen again.