Domestic Abuse Offences

Debate between Josh Babarinde and Alex Davies-Jones

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alex Davies-Jones]

My hon. Friend is a tireless campaigner on this issue. To echo the words of the Prime Minister, the family courts should never be allowed to be used as a means for an abuser to continue their abuse, and this Government will report on the issue of presumption soon.

We need to ensure that the severity of domestic abuse is captured in our sentencing framework. We have committed to implementing two of the outstanding recommendations made in Clare Wade’s domestic homicide sentencing review to make murders involving strangulation and those connected with the end of a relationship statutory aggravating factors.

We are further strengthening our response through the improved management of perpetrators. We have launched domestic abuse protection orders in selected areas, combining the strongest elements of other orders to protect victims from all forms of domestic abuse. They put tough restrictions on abusers and can include orders for behaviour change programmes to finally stop the cycle of abuse from repeating. Since February, offenders sentenced for 12 months or more for coercive or controlling behaviour are now automatically eligible for management under multi-agency public protection arrangements. That rightly puts the response to this awful offence on a par with physical violence.

Alongside our work to tackle offending, we are strengthening protection for victims. Our new victims’ code will help ensure that every victim of crime, including domestic abuse, understands their rights, and will also ensure that we can properly monitor the service that local agencies are offering. The duty to collaborate will improve how local commissioners commission services for domestic abuse victims. We are also increasing the power of the Victims’ Commissioner, so that there is more accountability when victims are let down by the system.

On funding, we are continuing to prioritise support for victims and survivors of abuse. Police and crime commissioners are provided with funding to commission local practical, emotional and therapeutic support services for victims of all crime types, including domestic abuse. The criminal justice system is facing considerable demand pressures and a challenging fiscal environment. Difficult decisions have been made regarding funding, but we have continued to prioritise victims of violence against women and girls by protecting that spending within the Ministry of Justice, maintaining last year’s funding levels for sexual violence and domestic abuse support this year. This will ensure that domestic abuse and sexual violence support services can continue their vital work. That is on top of the core funding that we give to police and crime commissioners to allocate locally, and I should stress that we are encouraging police and crime commissioners to prioritise victims of violence against women and girls in their budgets.

Our work to tackle domestic abuse and better support victims will require a cross-Government approach—we have already heard this evening how important it is to include the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as well as the Treasury and financial services. We will use every lever in our power and work with key partners across Government to deliver against this ambition. I am proud to co-chair the violence against women and girls mission board, which brings together Ministers from across Government with responsibility for this area to drive forward delivery of our mission. I have also been engaging extensively across Whitehall on prevention and early intervention, as well as on the wider support that victims of domestic abuse need, such as safe housing provision or support for their pets. All of our important work will be underpinned by a new strategy to combat violence against women and girls, which we will publish later this year.

I now turn to the particular interest of the hon. Member for Eastbourne in creating a cohort of domestic abuse offenders in order to exclude these offenders from early release measures, as he has set out. As he knows, SDS40 was an emergency measure introduced to avert a prison capacity crisis that this Government sadly inherited. However, we made sure to exclude certain offences from that change, including: sex offences, irrespective of sentence length; serious violent offences with a sentence of four years or more; and a series of offences linked to domestic abuse, including stalking, coercive or controlling behaviour, and non-fatal strangulation. As the hon. Member has said, exclusions from the policy are based on offences, not offenders. This means that it has not been possible to exclude all offenders with a domestic abuse history, as there is no current single means of determining whether a given conviction was for an offence committed in the context of domestic abuse.

I am hugely sympathetic to the issues that the hon. Member has raised this evening. However, I am not convinced that his particular solution—creating a series of domestic abuse aggravated offences—is the right one. I am concerned about the unintended consequences of attempting to capture and define via a list of specific offences the full spectrum of offences in which domestic abuse could be a factor. As we have heard this evening, that spectrum of offences is vast, and I am extremely wary that attempting to capture them in a list could unwittingly create a system in which some offences are deemed serious enough to constitute offences that could be aggravated by domestic abuse, whereas other offences in which domestic abuse could play a part are not. For example, we should not return to the outdated view that domestic abuse only involves physical violence. As my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs Russell) has said, economic abuse should also be taken into consideration, and it will be a core part of this Government’s violence against women and girls strategy.

This Government are dedicated to ensuring that the harm caused by offences typically committed against women and girls—including domestic abuse—is appropriately and proportionately reflected in the sentencing framework. That is why the sentencing review chaired by David Gauke, the former Lord Chancellor, has been asked to look specifically at the sentences for offences primarily committed against women and girls. I recognise that being able to better identify domestic abuse offenders throughout the system and to capture that data is important in supporting victims and managing perpetrators.

[Josh Babarinde]

I thank the Minister for her response and for her feedback. I appreciate that setting a static list of offences to which a domestic abuse aggravation is connected could mean that when offences and the nature of domestic abuse change, things get left behind. Would she therefore consider a more open-ended aggravation that is dynamic and could attach to any offence? What I have proposed is an aggravation on the basis of the definition in the Domestic Abuse Act. Would she consider a more dynamic one that does not list a finite number of offences?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

The hon. Member makes an important point, and he has pre-empted the next section of my speech. The Government and I are actively considering how we can better identify domestic abuse offenders, and I want to reassure him that nothing is off the table. I would be happy to work with him, and I invite him to come and meet me to discuss how best we do that in more detail. I know he has a similar agreement from my ministerial colleagues and those he has already met to discuss it.

Tackling domestic abuse is a top priority for this Government and a core part of our mission to halve violence against women and girls over the next decade. We are working across Government and using every lever in our power to deliver against that ambition—not more rhetoric, but action; deeds, not words.

Question put and agreed to.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Josh Babarinde and Alex Davies-Jones

Tuesday 11th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)]

On behalf of the Liberal Democrats, I start by associating myself with the comments made at the beginning in relation to Joanne. So many victims and survivors rely on the victim contact scheme to know when their abuser is being released from prison or moved to an open prison and to have input into the kind of conditions that should exist when they are released. However, the system that we have inherited from the last Government is such that only survivors whose abusers have been convicted for more than 12 months qualify for the scheme. In the upcoming Victims, Courts and Public Protection Bill, will the Minister commit to scrapping that threshold so that all victims and survivors can qualify for the scheme?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

We are looking carefully at the victim notification scheme as part of any forthcoming legislation, to ensure that victims’ rights are taken into full consideration and that victims are aware of the situation if that is deemed appropriate. I look forward to working with them closely, and I have no doubts about how we should develop the best and strongest possible laws to support the victims of all crimes in our country.

Prison Capacity Strategy

Debate between Josh Babarinde and Alex Davies-Jones

Thursday 12th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of the statement, and I thank the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), for the point of order that I think helped to bring the Minister to the House with this statement today.

Years of neglect under the previous Conservative Government have left our prisons overcrowded and unequipped to provide the tough rehabilitation required, which has let down victims and survivors in my patch and across the country. In fact, as recently as this week, the Conservative Opposition let down those victims and survivors by voting against the measure to exclude people such as stalkers and murderers from the early release scheme.

The result of the Conservatives’ incompetence is the SDS40 scheme—the standard determinate sentences early release scheme—which has seen thousands of ex-offenders released early to unlock emergency prison places. The Minister knows my concerns about that scheme, particularly in relation to domestic abuse, and I hope she will support my proposals to patch it up. Will she, however, confirm what the criteria will be for reviewing the scheme next year?

Ultimately, Liberal Democrats believe that we need a sustainable solution to tackling this problem, because more prisons mean more offenders, more offenders mean more victims, and more victims mean more failure. With 80% of people in prison being reoffenders, we know that reducing reoffending must be the key. I know that from having spent my career before reaching this place supporting kids out of crime and gangs, so why, in a prison capacity statement of over 1,000 words, was reducing reoffending mentioned just once? Will the Minister reaffirm her commitment to that effort, and can she provide more details on how she will reduce reoffending to protect victims and survivors across this country?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesman for his comments, and he is right to raise the issue of reoffending. It is important to note that we have prison capacity available to protect the public, to lock up high-risk offenders and to ensure we have public safety measures available, but we obviously see tackling reoffending as a serious priority. We are looking at it across Government and pulling every lever available to us. Every Department must come together to tackle it, and part of that is the independent sentencing review. As he knows full well, however, when we have a prison population that is running at boiling hot, we cannot get into our prisons and do rehabilitation work. Yesterday, I was really pleased to visit His Majesty’s Prison Downview and see the vital work being done with the women in that prison, which is really important to achieve rehabilitation on the outside, prevent reoffending and protect the public.

On SDS40, the hon. Member will know that we had to take immediate action within days of coming into office to protect the public, and to ensure we had places in our prisons to lock up high-risk offenders and keep the public safe. Legally, we could only exclude offences, not offenders, and we did introduce a wider set of exclusions than under the last Government’s early release scheme. All offenders released under the scheme are on licence and are subject to recall. We are working to ensure that we never again get into the position of having emergency releases, and that we have prison places available and can work on rehabilitating our prisoners so that they can serve a vital role in society.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Josh Babarinde and Alex Davies-Jones

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)]

I welcome the new shadow Justice Secretary to his place. As he has campaigned to withdraw from the European convention on human rights, I am sure we can rely on him to champion international law for all of us across the world.

I want to ask about domestic abuse. For too long, domestic abusers have been able to exploit a loophole in our legal system, whereby the domestic abuse that they perpetrate is masked by the ambiguous conviction of common assault. This has meant that, under this Government and the previous one, domestic abusers have qualified for early release schemes. When I pushed the Secretary of State on this issue the other day, she admitted that her measures to exclude domestic abusers from early release were

“not of course fully comprehensive.”—[Official Report, 22 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 206.]

The Liberal Democrats believe that things need to go further. Will the Minister meet me and domestic abuse charities to discuss some of our proposals for closing the loopholes so that victims and survivors get the justice they deserve?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I thank the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for his question. He will know that certain offences are excluded from the SDS40 early release scheme, not the offender. This Government put in strict protections to protect the public, unlike the previous Government, who introduced an end-of-custody supervised licence scheme. Those who are released from sentences for common assault are flagged for domestic abuse markers, and they are given priority for electronic monitoring and risk assessments. I meet the sector regularly to look at what else we can do. We are learning lessons from SDS40, but this Government are committed to halving violence against women and girls.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Josh Babarinde and Alex Davies-Jones

Tuesday 10th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I thank the hon. Member for his question. He will know that this Government have a mission to tackle violence against women and girls. As I have said, that vision pulls together Departments across Whitehall, including the Department for Education—I recently had a meeting with an Education Minister to discuss exactly that issue. I have been clear that sex with anyone who cannot consent is a crime, and we are working across Government to tackle it.

[Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)]

From my own experience, I know that independent sexual violence advisers provided by amazing charities such as SurvivorsUK are critical guides to help survivors navigate their path to justice and peace. Could the Minister commit to redoubling her support for ISVAs and the organisations that make them available to the survivors who need them?

[Alex Davies-Jones]

I know that the hon. Gentleman is passionate about this field of justice. His question gives me the opportunity also put on record my thanks to ISVAs, who do immense work across this field day in and day out, supporting victims of these abhorrent crimes—the work they do is invaluable. This Government are committed to introducing independent legal advocates to help victims and survivors get the support they need, and we are working with our stakeholders across the sector to ensure that support is available.