Domestic Violence Refuges

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Davies.

I rise to speak about only one thing—the need for an exemption for women’s refuges from the rules surrounding the reduction in housing benefit. The Government are kicking the can down the road for now—in fact, they have kicked the can down the road every year for the past seven years, so they are saying, “Let’s keep on kicking it.” But in 2017, unless refuges are exempt from the reduction in housing benefit, there will be an enormous reduction in refuge beds across the country. Even if nothing else comes out of today and these weeks when we are talking about the Housing and Planning Bill and our benefit systems, I beg the Government to exempt refuges.

The money that the Minister will no doubt say at the end of the debate the Government are putting into refuges will be completely and utterly wasted and useless without housing benefit. As someone who has run 18 different women’s refuges, I know what a balance sheet for a refuge looks like, and I can tell the Minister what will happen without housing benefit. The £10 million was allocated well, as my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) pointed out, and no one will criticise that allocation. However, I saw at least one third of the applications that went in, and I know that every single one had in its business plan that the sustainability of the refuge would be based entirely on housing benefit-plus. The Government signed off on a load of documents, agreeing the sustainability plans of organisations up and down the country, based on a premise that they were about to completely and utterly undo by reducing housing benefit.

It is complicated and difficult for people to understand what running a refuge actually looks like. The grants that the Government give are what we use to pay for staff. They are used to pay for a family support worker, who will enable a child to re-engage with a mother who has had no control over their relationship because her control has been completely stripped away by a perpetrator of violence. They allow key staff to give counselling and support to women who have been brutally raped, beaten, kept locked away and controlled to a degree that no one in this Chamber could ever imagine. That is what the grants from the Government pay for.

What pays for the nuts, the bolts, the beds, the buildings, the place where people live, their home, and their security is housing benefit. The reduction will directly and entirely damage what refuge providers use to pay for things such as CCTV, security support and all the extra stuff that people do not have in their house but might need if they have been ritually raped for the last six months of their life. That is what housing benefit pays for. I cannot say this with any more dramatic effect: half of the refuges that I ran, and half of the hundreds of beds that I used to manage at Sandwell Women’s Aid, would not be there without housing benefit. Already, 115 women and their children are turned away from refuges every single day in this country. Already this year, in 2016—it is only the beginning of May—46 women are dead.

I want almost nothing else; I just want to hear that the Government will permanently exempt refuges and support accommodation from universal credit, from the changes to housing benefit and from the rules on localisation. I am pleased to say that one of the women who lived in my refuge managed successfully, with the Child Poverty Action Group, to take the Government to court and win back her local support allowance for council tax benefit and local crisis money. She had been told that she was not allowed to have that because she had not lived in the area. She had lived in the neighbouring borough, a metre over the border in Birmingham, but she did not have a local connection thanks to the delegation of rules. The Government did not give in. They were forced to by the courts.

[Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if the cuts go ahead, society picks up the cost elsewhere, including in health circles? Women and children turn up at A&E units, GPs dole out antidepressants, and there is the cost of counselling. There is a cost to children’s education, and future opportunities are lost. Families who move between bed and breakfasts or are in insecure homes end up in debt. There is a human cost, as children do not enjoy the love, support and parental guidance that so many of us take for granted. Without that guidance, they may well get into trouble. Does my hon. Friend agree that society will pick up a far bigger cost if the cuts go ahead?

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

Thank you for that short speech. Ms Phillips, could you begin to wind up?

[Jess Phillips]

I will. Not only do I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Marie Rimmer); it is a fact. We must do something and act sensibly by exempting refuges. We know it is going to be done, so we should just do it today so that refuges can look at their budgets for next year and not have to offer redundancy to brilliant staff—every single year, staff are put on notice. Let us allow refuges to thrive and to do the job that they are better at than we are.

[Geraint Davies (in the Chair)]

I would like hon. Members to keep their speeches to less than five minutes—ideally four minutes. May I ask Jim Shannon to set the precedent we need?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

I assure the hon. Lady that I anticipated that that issue might come up. It is already written in my speech, and I will explain the Government’s position in a few moments.

As I was saying, planning for local need must take account of the needs of all women in our local communities, including those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, those from isolated communities and those with complex needs. It should also take account of the need for women and children to move from one area to another to build safe and independent lives. That point has been made by a number of hon. Members. It is absolutely wrong that services are not provided for women who need to move from one area to another when they seek refuge and safe haven from the situation they are in.

Although that approach needs time to work, we must act if it does not deliver a transformation in service provision, so we will review what we are doing after two years. We are developing the national statement with service providers and commissioners to ensure that it reflects their significant expertise. To answer the hon. Member for Burnley, we hope to publish it very soon.

We understand that meeting the expectations that we are setting will be very challenging, so it is vital that local areas are funded to meet those standards and to provide the critical bedrock of specialist accommodation-based support. We will launch a two-year fund to help local areas put in place the reforms needed to meet the national statement and to support the provision of accommodation-based services. We secured £40 million in the spending review to support victims of domestic abuse. That builds on the £10 million of funding for strengthening the provision of safe accommodation in the previous spending review period and the £3.5 million fund to support the provision of domestic violence services in 2015.

We invited bids for that funding. There was interest from across the country, and 46 successful bids were announced in December 2015. We hope that there will be a similar degree of interest in the upcoming funding. To answer the question asked by the hon. Member for Burnley, we hope to open that fund very, very soon.

[Jess Phillips]

Is the Minister aware that the funds he is talking about, which were allocated in December 2015, had to be spent by March 2016? As always with these rounds of 10 million quid here and 10 million quid there, there is no eye on the future. It is short-termist, and if anything it provides work, not help, for women’s refuges.

[Mr Jones]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. I know from her speech that she has significant experience of this area. To give her a bit more assurance, the funding that we are putting out is to cover a two-year period, which gives more time in the way that she mentioned.

I want to talk about a subject that many hon. Members mentioned—the future of refuges and the supported housing sector. My Department and the Department for Work and Pensions commissioned a major evidence review of supported housing to give a better picture of its scope, scale and cost. It will report shortly, and we will continue to work with and listen to providers to develop a long-term, sustainable funding regime for this sector.

[Mr Jones]

We all do what the Whips tell us when they say “shortly”. I will have to leave the hon. Lady with the word “shortly”, but I assure her that we take this issue very seriously and that we will come forward with a long-term, sustainable funding regime. We have been absolutely clear that we want the most vulnerable to be supported through the welfare reforms, so we are deferring the application of the local housing allowance cap to supported housing for an additional year so we have more time to get this right.

At the start of my speech, I said that we want to make ending violence against women and girls everyone’s business. The Government have to lead by example. The Department for Communities and Local Government is working with the Home Office, the Department of Health, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury to ensure that no woman is turned away from the help that she needs. The point that the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) made is very important. We are certainly looking at that across the relevant Departments to ensure that no woman in the position that she mentioned is turned away.

We rely on the knowledge, the expertise and the critical friendship of many organisations. We are talking to the providers of refuges and services for the survivors of domestic abuse as we develop our policy. We are also talking to the Local Government Association and local authorities to understand how we can support their work. I sincerely hope that together we can all seize the opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of women living in fear of abuse.

[Jess Phillips]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Jones]

That is the end of my speech.

[Jess Phillips]

He successfully did not mention housing benefit once.

[Mr Jones]

I did.