Domestic Violence Refuges

Debate between Jess Phillips and Marie Rimmer

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?