Domestic Abuse Bill (First sitting)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 4th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Before we begin, I have a few points that we always make. First, please put your devices on silent. Secondly—a rule that I never understand—you cannot have tea or coffee in here, on the grounds that they are supposed to be hot drinks. I would argue that it will have gone cold, but you still cannot have it. Obviously, I stress the importance of social distancing in the Committee Room. If at any time you feel that the social distancing is incorrect, let me know and we will take action.

We have a problem in that every member of the Committee cannot sit round the horseshoe, so some are having to sit in the Public Gallery. I would have liked Members in the Public Gallery to have been able to speak, but unfortunately, because of the recordings that we need to make for Hansard, that is not possible. I tried to put a Member where the hon. Member for Edinburgh West is sitting, but you will have to move, because I have been told that you cannot go there. You are too close to the Member in front.

If a member of the Committee wants to speak, they will have to come into the horseshoe and somebody from the horseshoe will have to step back. That is not ideal, because we are moving around, but trust me, before we started, we tried every form of social distancing to get it to work. If you want to know what social distancing looks like, I am exactly the right height. If you imagine me flat on the floor, you have to walk round me.

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

You will be flat on the floor, if the Government have anything to do with it.

[The Chair]

I will not be heckled—this is the easy bit.

Hansard has asked for you to email your written notes or speeches, because obviously these are not normal circumstances, to [e-mail].

Today we will first consider the programme motion on the amendment paper. We will then consider a motion to enable the reporting of written evidence for publication and a motion to allow us to deliberate in private about our questions before the oral evidence session. In view of the limited time available, I hope that we can take these matters without much debate. I call the Minister to move the programme motion that was agreed by the Programming Sub-Committee on Tuesday.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Before I call the first Member, Jess Phillips, to ask a question, I remind the witness that this is the only time that Ministers have fun in the whole of this process. They get to ask questions too.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Hello, Nicole, and welcome to our slightly weird distanced Committee. Some of my other colleagues will talk to you specifically about the role, the role of the Bill in creating it and some of those other areas, so I want to ask you more broadly about the Bill.

We keep hearing Ministers say, “We will be asking the commissioner to do a review of this, looking at different ways in which there might be a postcode lottery in the country for this, that and the other,” so that is expected to be part of your role. What do you think the Bill does well for the sustainability of services for victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse, and where do you think the main gaps are?

Nicole Jacobs: Thank you for that. I apologise to anyone who has heard me talk about the Bill before, but I appreciate that some Members are new here. I will say what I have said consistently from the start. I welcome almost all aspects of the Bill. There is nothing in it that I particularly disagree with, and I particularly welcome things such as the statutory definition and the inclusion of financial abuse. There are aspects that could be improved—I am sure we will talk about them over the hour—but on the whole, I support the key elements. I particularly support the inclusion of the statutory duty for accommodation-based services, because that has been such a vulnerable aspect of our services over many years.

What I have always thought is missing from the Bill and would greatly support the services sector is the inclusion of community-based services in the statutory duty. Everything I do as the commissioner in thinking about the monitoring and oversight of services—not just specialist services, but the breadth of what we expect of all our community-based statutory services—would be supported if there were greater inclusion in the Bill of the duty for community-based services. They are providing 70% of our services, and they are as vulnerable as refuges have been for years.

I am sure that I will talk about some of my mapping. Part of the reason why I am mapping services is to look at that postcode lottery. The reason why that gets a bit complicated is that all services, no matter where they are, will be cobbling together funding from all manner of places—the local authority, the police and crime commissioner, foundations and trusts, local fundraising and their own fee earning—and they will be doing that to cover the basic crisis response. There are very few places anywhere that would have the breadth of response that we would love to see, in terms of prevention, early crisis intervention, follow-up support and therapeutic support, which we know are really needed. The Bill is missing that element, which is a particularly strong one, and we have many people who have no recourse to public funds, which means there are many barriers to support.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I just want to pick up on that issue of the postcode lottery, which is potentially not harmed in the Bill but is not catered for in the Bill. In a situation where a child is a victim of domestic abuse directly or lives every day with their mother being raped, beaten and abused in front of them, are you confident that, if the child were to come forward, there would be specialist support—or any support—for that child, no matter where they stood up in the country?

Nicole Jacobs: No, I would not be confident of that. I did not mention that in my opening comments, but unless they met a particular threshold for children’s social care—most of the public would think children experiencing domestic abuse would meet such thresholds, but they often do not. Even if they did, there would be a lot of variance within our statutory provision of children’s safeguarding from area to area, let alone anything that is specifically commissioned to address domestic abuse. Children’s services, and services that help perpetrators to change, are probably the biggest areas where there are gaps in our system.

[Jess Phillips]

Q In the follow-up to the Joint Committee on the previous Bill in a previous Parliament—it looks pretty similar to this Bill in this Parliament, so we will assume it is the one for this Bill—the Government came back and said they felt that, in the wider context of abusive behaviour towards a victim under the age of 16, it would be deemed child abuse and the extra support would come through social services. Is that a picture of our country that you recognise?

Nicole Jacobs: No. Before the lockdown, I started to visit some areas that our chief social worker had told me were particularly outstanding in children’s social care. She would think it is broader than this, but she suggested a handful of places for me to visit. In the places I started to visit, I was, like she thought I might be, quite impressed by the provision of services within social care. I was seeing something that I had never seen before: a point of contact for the abusing parent, for the adult victim and for the child. I had actually not seen that before in 20 years of working, and I have not only worked in west London; I have worked in organisations that are much broader. I was really inspired by that, but I recognised something that I thought was fairly unusual. I think what you said is true.

[Jess Phillips]

Q On the gaps that you alluded to with regard to migrant women, migrant victims and migrant children, and to British children who are the children of migrant victims, you said that the Bill did not currently do enough to help them. Could you please expand on that?

Nicole Jacobs: That is right. Having been there myself, I have experienced the feeling of having someone in my office on a Friday afternoon who has three children, has no recourse to public funds and is too scared to go home, knowing that I could do very little and that I had a long night ahead of me. I understand how that feels.

That is happening every day, all the time, and I do not see anything in this Bill that would address that. I am a firm believer that we should lift the requirement that people have no recourse to public funds. It makes no sense. If you are experiencing domestic abuse, and you are here in our country, then you should have recourse to routes to safety.

Those are the people who actually got to me. I was sitting in an office that was within a broader larger charity, and it was probably lucky that those people got to me. Many migrant women will have fears about the system and about the repercussions of coming forward. They will be highly dependent on word-of-mouth networks and much smaller community-based services.

[Jess Phillips]

Q I wanted to clarify that the women—I am assuming they were largely women—who you talk about that came to you, and the people I am talking about, are here in this country completely legally.

Nicole Jacobs: That is right. They did not have a status that would allow them to have recourse to the funds. It is true that that did not mean they could not come to see me in a community-based service, but it meant my hands were tied and I had very few options. I would hope for a possible night in a hostel somewhere, but I would know that we would be back to square one the next day. That would happen over and over again, until, quite rarely, we would find somewhere more suitable. I might have been ringing around the few refuge spaces that were possibly available. The next witness will give you much more detail about that.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Absolutely. I want to finish by talking about the gap you identified around perpetrator services. The Bill has wide-ranging changes with regard to domestic violence protection orders and other such issues. Is there a particular area of the Bill that you think needs to be more robust about how we manage the postcode lottery of perpetrator services?

Nicole Jacobs: It could potentially be addressed in a statutory duty that was broadened in the clauses about domestic abuse protection orders. I leave that up to you to decide. In my years of experience working in the sector we have had huge changes in terms of innovation. It is an exciting time to think about the broad strategy that we need for perpetrators to help them change and for early intervention, all the way through to much more punitive measures. There are a lot of pilots, a lot of evaluation and practice.

We are in a better place than ever, but I am concerned about the DAPO and the positive requirements on it. You will not be able to place the positive requirement if there is not a service in the area that meets proper standards, as it is fairly unusual to find an area that would have that breadth of services.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Would it be pointless to have a Bill that makes ways for domestic abuse protection orders to exist if, in your local area, there is not a service that would be accredited, by some standard that does not currently exist?

Nicole Jacobs: I have always understood that the DAPO is in the Bill to pave the way, through its two-year piloting. There is no doubt that it will prompt many questions: the implementation, the way we should be working together, the thought we need to give to how victims and survivors are communicated with in courts, and any number of other things.

Because I am an optimistic person, I always thought that while things are not covered off completely—there is a huge gap with the idea of the perpetrator and where all the constant requirements are coming from—the general strategy is for people to learn in the process of the DAPO. I guess my plea is for you to strength the evaluation of that pilot any way you can in the Bill. It needs to be implemented and resourced properly, including the voice of victims, and my other plea would be for the Victims’ Commissioner and I to be included in the learning for the DAPOs.

[Nickie Aiken (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

Q I want to comment on a few things that you said in response to Jess’s questions. A lot of the things you are saying about the DAPOs will obviously come into the statutory guidance. It is important to remember that there are things in the Bill, but the statutory guidance will be the backup, and I suspect a lot of your concerns will be addressed by that guidance. When you talk about community-based services, are you talking about the charitable sector—the third sector—or are you talking about local government? In local government, there is an ability to offer a lot of domestic abuse services, but some councils do not choose to. What is your definition of community-based services?

Nicole Jacobs: In general, I am talking about the ones that are commissioned for domestic abuse services, usually—although not solely—by the local authority. Sometimes those are outreach workers or independent domestic violence advocates; at one point, I was one of those. All aspects of the local authority are highly dependent on those services—housing officers, social workers, teachers—and a whole breadth of referrals come into those types of services. Just to give you an example, in the area of west London where I worked the year before I took on this role, they had 4,000 referrals of people into those community-based services, so we are talking about quite high volumes of cases. Each worker will be supporting 30 to 40 people at any given time. That is on a rolling basis over the year, so by the end of that year, just that one worker will have probably supported well over 100 people, if not more.

There are a few places where that team will be employed within the local authority, but those are few and far between; the commissioning-out of that service is much more common. I prefer the commissioning-out of the service, because people who experience domestic abuse have such a lot of fears about seeking help because they worry about the consequences. They do not know for definite what the police, particularly, are going to do, or social workers or anyone else, and they really value the independence of that role. It is not that they would never share information: if they have safeguarding concerns, for example, they have a duty to share those, but there is a level of independence that gives them a bit of safe space to think through the complexities of their situation, and it is fairly well evaluated that these are critical services. They are also quite cost-effective. It is incredible what these individual workers will do over the course of the year. If you shifted that into a local authority, they would cost more and the relationship would change, so the case I am making is for us to recognise how critical these services are.

My worry is that if we go ahead with the statutory duty for refuge-based or accommodation-based services, local authorities that are cash-strapped or concerned about budgets will obviously prioritise that duty, and the unintended consequence could be that these community-based services are curtailed or cut. They are not in main budgets, but have to fight year in, year out or in each commissioning cycle, which are relatively short: two years or sometimes three. I worry that because they are not part of a duty, they will be cut or curtailed, when even now they are barely covering the breadth of support that they should. There could be some serious unintended consequences from the implementation of the duty.

If it stays that way, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government should include in the current set-up of the statutory duty for accommodation-based services a firm responsibility to understand what the consequences could be for community-based services. In practice, the pattern is that it is hard to see the expansion in these services that you might think there would be, considering the prevalence rates. I think that surprises many people. It might not surprise you, but it does surprise many people when they realise how these services have to survive on a shoestring with such a lot of cobbling together of funding.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Q We will now hear oral evidence from the Southall Black Sisters. I am very grateful that our witness sat through the first session, so I will not repeat all the information about social distancing and the fact that Members are sitting behind you, as you have heard that. I would be very grateful if you could introduce yourself.

Pragna Patel: My name is Pragna Patel, and I am the director and a founding member of Southall Black Sisters. We were established in 1979 to meet the needs of black and minority ethnic women, certainly in our local area of west London. Although we are based in west London, we now have a national reach.

Most of the women who come to us have been subject to all kinds of gender-related violence and, related to that, issues of homelessness, poverty, trauma, mental illness and, of course, difficulties with immigration matters. We exist as an advice, advocacy and campaigning centre, and have been at the forefront of many campaigns to highlight the needs and experiences of black and minority women in the UK.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Hello, Pragna. Thank you for coming in today in these slightly strange circumstances.

For a number of years, this Bill has been getting to the point where we are sitting here today. Organisations like yours, Southall Black Sisters, are run for and by migrant women and black and minority ethnic women. Could you estimate how many hours you have spent trying to help build the Bill, working with the Government and advocating in meetings in this House? How many hours do you think you have spent asking for things to be in this Bill for migrant women and victims of domestic abuse?

Pragna Patel: During the course of the Bill, I would say hundreds. It has become a core element of our work. The reason why we have put so much time and resources into the Bill is that, like many, we see it as a landmark Bill—a once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity Bill—to try to get things right for abused women. For us, it is vital that it includes protection measures not for some women but for all women, and particularly the women we work with.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Could you briefly, in one line, set out what exactly you—not just you, but organisations like yours and lots of more generic organisations—have been asking to be put in the Bill?

Pragna Patel: There are lots of aspects of it that I could talk about, but the key thing is the inclusion of protection for migrant women, who represent some of the most marginalised, vulnerable, forgotten women in our society. If covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that there are glaring inequalities in our society. If we want to create a new normal, we have to seize opportunities like this to combat the inequalities that are being shored up, which lead to problems in the long run. We have seen that in relation to the exclusion from the Bill of protection for migrant women.

[Jess Phillips]

Q So after all those hours of work and, I believe, two reviews—please correct me if I am wrong—on migrant women, with one completed and one not completed, do you see any of your work written on the face of the Bill in front of us?

Pragna Patel: I cannot tell you how disappointing and frustrating it is for us to feel that our voices continue to be unheard. It is not my voice, but the voice of those who remain invisible, that I am trying to amplify here. It does not signal confidence that, in the governing structures of this society and in the criminal and civil justice systems, there will be protection afforded to all women who need to engage with statutory, legal and voluntary services to obtain protection and justice. The women I work with are some of the women who suffer the most disproportionately from violence and abuse, who face some of the most prolonged and extreme forms of harm, and who have the least ability to exit from abuse and protect themselves. That is why it is so important that people here today take account of the need to make this Bill the best that it can be, in terms of protecting those who cannot protect themselves. The litmus test of this Bill has to be: are we protecting those who are the most marginalised and the most vulnerable?

[Jess Phillips]

Q Just so that people can hear this, if a victim comes forward who is working in, let us say, a hospital and has no recourse to public funds, would she be able to easily access a refuge bed for her and her children in any local authority area?

Pragna Patel: No way. There is no way. No recourse to public funds prohibits abused women who are subject to it from accessing any kind of support. They basically cannot access the welfare safety net.

[Jess Phillips]

Q Have you ever met any women in that circumstance who have children—let us discount single victims at this point—and who have been told that they would have their children removed from them? Obviously, local authorities have a duty to provide, under section 17 of the Children Act, for every child who comes forward. Have you ever seen circumstances in which women have been told that their children will be removed because the women have been victims of domestic abuse?

Pragna Patel: All the time. One of the areas of work for us has been working with our local authorities to try to encourage them, support them and challenge them to support women and children, because they have safeguarding duties to the children at least, even if women have no recourse to public funds. We are finding that there are two problems to this. The first is that many of these women have insecure immigration status. Immigration and Home Office enforcement officers are now embedded in many social services, which increases the level of fear that women have in even getting out, reporting abuse and seeking help, because they are afraid that data will be shared with the Home Office and that, instead of being offered help, they will be subject to possible deportation. That is the first problem we are facing.

The second problem we face is that, for all sorts of reasons, the local authority response is one of deterrence. It may be because they are cash-strapped; it may be for other reasons. It means that when women go and report domestic violence, particularly if they have no recourse to public funds and have children, there are three or four common responses that we are always met with. One: “We do not have a duty to accommodate you, but we can pay for your return ticket to your country of origin—this is without assessing needs and risks. Two: “We have a duty to your child but not you, and therefore we will accommodate the child and not you.” Three: “The child has not been the subject of abuse, and therefore the child can remain with the abuser.” That way, the safeguarding duties are discharged. Reconciliation and mediation meetings, offering immigration advice when they are not experienced enough to do so, having immigration officers in the building speaking to those women, which drives up their levels of fear, encouraging women to return to their country of origin or sometimes encouraging women to go and obtain asylum even though that is not appropriate, are some of the most common responses that we have received from local authorities, not just in London, but also outside.

We are in the middle of producing research to bring together the evidence around local authority responses. What I would say is that over three months last year—October to December—we had occasion to seek legal advice in 18 cases involving local authority responses, because they were not fulfilling the statutory duty in relation to section 17 of the Children Act and the need to safeguard children.

[Jess Phillips]

Q This is my final question. If it was written into the Bill that victims of domestic abuse who have no recourse to public funds, regardless of their status, were able to access welfare, security and support from any agency, would that save people’s lives?

Pragna Patel: There is no question that introducing such a measure would provide almost certainty, in terms of protection and safety and providing life-saving services and access to justice for many women.

I really want to emphasise the context of this. We have seen with the covid-19 crisis that inequalities that have always existed have been exposed and exacerbated. We have also seen, in relation to what is going on in the US, the racial uprisings, which are also a reflection of historical and glaring inequalities—in both cases, in relation to the protected characteristics of race, age, class, sex and so on. When I say that migrant women are excluded from the Bill, I am also talking about discrimination and inequality.

We have an opportunity to redress that balance and to ensure that those who need protection and justice can get it, regardless of their status, regardless of their background. That is what the Istanbul convention that the Bill is seeking to ratify—it is a step towards that ratification—is hoping to do. If we really mean that, if we really want to change and to combat inequalities and create a new normal, introducing measures that will support the most vulnerable and the most invisible—those who are most likely to be subject to the hostile immigration environment—is critical. I encourage the Committee to really think about the opportunity we have got to signal a new normal.

[The Chair]

I am going to call the Minister next, and then I will go to Peter Kyle and then Mike Wood.