Domestic Violence Refuges: Funding

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) on securing this debate, and I commend her on her long commitment and experience. I am pleased to speak in the debate as co-chair of the joint inquiry of the Communities and Local Government Committee and Work and Pensions Committee on the future of supported housing. I am pleased that the Government accepted some of the recommendations in our report, but sadly that is not the case concerning refuges.

The inquiry heard evidence from across the supported housing sector, including from Women’s Aid, and I am glad that we heard oral evidence from a survivor of domestic abuse, Merida Taylor, who had spent time in a refuge when she fled from her abuser. She spoke extremely eloquently and powerfully about how desperate she was at the time she entered the refuge and how the refuge helped her to rebuild her life.

We heard evidence about the life-saving necessity of refuges, in a context where two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner in England and Wales, and the particular and specialist role that refuges play in supporting traumatised women and children. We also received evidence on the intense funding pressures that refuges have come under since 2010 and the extent of closures: 17% fewer refuge services were run by specialist refuge providers in 2014 than in 2010, and there are parts of the country where there is now no refuge provision at all. The last refuge in Cumbria closed in 2016, for example, creating a postcode lottery and resulting in a situation where 60% of referrals to a refuge in 2016-17 were refused. The current network of refuges is able to address less than half of the need for women and children fleeing abuse.

Refuge provision is unique within the supported housing sector in that it is not a local service. Two thirds of women entering a refuge do so outside their own local authority area. Refuge provision needs to be able to accommodate women away from their home for their own safety. The risk of being killed by a former partner is highest in the year after the relationship has broken down, so women need to access refuges away from the perpetrator they have fled in order to be safe. The current system relies on local authorities recognising the need for refuge provision and choosing to fund it on the basis that women from their area will be able to access refuge provision in another local authority area when they need it, but that is in a context where the overwhelming majority of funding for refuges comes through the local housing allowance, which is itself not fit for purpose because of the Government’s cap, which is resulting in real-terms cuts year on year. Nevertheless, it is a national funding source, meaning that the level of local authority grant is currently proportionately low, which limits the extent to which refuge provision competes with other demands on increasingly limited local authority resources and enables services to be responsive to demand.

Our inquiry report recommended that the Government work with Women’s Aid to establish a national network of refuges to ensure that reciprocity among local authorities is not left to chance; and that there is an even and adequate level of provision to meet the need for refuge places, to keep every woman and child who needs a refuge safe. It is therefore completely unacceptable that they chose to reject that recommendation and have instead announced that refuges, along with all other types of short-term supported housing, will be funded entirely by local authorities. They have explicitly ignored the main conclusion the inquiry drew: refuges have a distinct set of characteristics that make them unique within the supported housing sector, which demands a bespoke approach.

To reference a different but relevant example, levels of homelessness in the UK are a national scandal. In response to the public outcry and the highly visible increase in rough sleepers, the Government have announced a national approach to rough sleeping. Domestic abuse is an almost entirely invisible problem, but it is nevertheless a deadly presence in every community across the country. It is just as much of a national scandal as rough sleeping, and it demands the same level of commitment from Government to ensure that every woman and child who is fleeing an abusive home can find a place in a refuge where they can be safe and from which their lives can be rebuilt. I ask the Minister to reconsider the inquiry’s recommendation and to establish a national network of refuge provision across the country for every woman and child who needs it.