Oral Answers to Questions

Julie Marson Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Julie Marson (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

3. What steps his Department is taking to support victims of crime.

[Dr James Davies (Vale of Clwyd) (Con)]

4. What steps his Department is taking to support victims of crime.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)]

Supporting victims has broadly three elements. First, it means ensuring harmful behaviour is comprehensively criminalised. That is why we have legislated to create new offences of stalking, coercive and controlling behaviour, upskirting, revenge porn, non-fatal strangulation and cyberflashing. Secondly, it means ensuring that the punishment fits the crime, which is why the average sentence has increased by around 50% since 2010. Thirdly, it means supporting victims before, during and after the court process. That is why we are funding over 1,000 independent sexual violence advisers and independent domestic violence advisers by 2024-25, we have set up a 24/7 rape support helpline, and we are quadrupling funding for victims’ services in cash terms since 2010.

[Julie Marson]

Cuckooing is not a victimless crime. The victims whose homes are invaded are frequently extremely vulnerable. Will the Secretary of State consider a separate specific offence of cuckooing in the Criminal Justice Bill to ensure not just that the punishment fits the crime, but that the crime fits the crime?

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend has been brilliant in raising this issue time and time again. At least in part because of the pressure she has put on, we held a stakeholder engagement exercise on this issue with the police, criminal justice system partners, local authorities, other Government Departments and so on. The exercise reveals that there are civil orders and criminal offences which are available to disrupt it. It might be, for example, that the underlying offence is the possession of drugs with intent to supply, the possession of firearms or common assault. However, this issue is worthy of further consideration, so I will invite a conversation with her in due course.

Domestic Abuse Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Julie Marson Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 11th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 17th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Jess Phillips]

Absolutely, I have absolutely no doubt that today in this building there is somebody serving us coffee or doing something of service who has no recourse to public funds and is affected by the problem I am talking about. My hon. Friend is exactly right. They are our careworkers and NHS workers. They are the students who keep our universities in money. They are the people who serve us every day. They are our family members. They are people who deserve help when they are harmed. They are taxpayers. They are people who give in both effort and resource. They deserve exactly the same as everyone else. If I walked into a police station today, nobody would ask me for my immigration status. Nobody would care. It would not be the thing that they thought they had to care about. They would ask me if I was all right and would treat me as a victim. If I was from Bolivia, they would ask me about my immigration status.

As the hon. Member for Edinburgh West said, we are at the precipice. It is not okay that some people matter and some people do not. It is one thing to try to undo things from the past—to topple statues and try to deal with complex cases from the past—but we are making this law today, and we are not making it for everyone. That is fundamentally wrong.

There are women like Myra—the final case study—who attempted to leave her abusive husband a number of times, having reported her rape to the police. They took no further action and did not refer her to local domestic abuse services. After three years, she made the decision to find safety and leave. She had no recourse to public funds, and contacted 10 refuges, which were unable to offer assistance due to the NRPF condition. During that time, she was forced to remain at home with her husband and faced further abuse, which took its toll on her mental health. She said:

“many times, I thought of giving up, many times.”

Those case studies all come from the Women’s Aid “Nowhere to Turn” report.

I can already anticipate that the Government’s response to what I said will be to point out the ongoing Home Office internal review into NRPF. I am sure the Minister will mention how the Government have recently announced £1.5 million for a pilot fund to cover the cost of support migrant women with NRPF in refuge in order to better assess the level of need for that group of victims to inform the spending review decisions on a longer-term basis. Both those proposals fail to appreciate the urgency and seriousness of the risk of abuse and destitution that abused migrant women on non-spousal visas face.

[Julie Marson (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

Yesterday, the hon. Lady referred to the destitution domestic violence concession as a lifeline to those on temporary visas. Does she agree that a very high proportion of migrant women are helped to access that kind of support thanks to the tampon tax funding?

[Jess Phillips]

I absolutely do think that, but obviously not all of them, by any stretch of the imagination. We were told that we were taking back control, but the only thing I feel we actually took back control of was the extra quid I have to pay when I have my period. We will not have to pay the tampon tax anymore. Some of the most vulnerable people in our society are relying on the good will of various pilot projects here, there and everywhere, and we are not expressing in our laws that we see those victims. I recognise that that fund has helped lots of people, but we have an opportunity to change this permanently.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jess Phillips]

It certainly is. In these circumstances, people turning up to my office, having forked out £5,000 for a form that they could definitely have filled in by themselves, even if English is not their first language, is a phenomenon. I am afraid to say, I even have some come to my office and ask me to refer people directly to them, as if, like a quid pro quo, they will give free legal advice if we send people. It is a wild west situation.

That brings me to new clause 29, which seeks to provide migrant survivors with legal aid. Often, the cases are complex and it cannot be left to specialist BAME organisations to provide that legal advice. As I mentioned, there is already a deficit in specialist BAME services. Failure to protect all migrant women from abuse has wide-ranging financial and societal consequences —consequences that exceed the cost of extending eligibility of the DV rule and the DDVC.

The economic cost of supporting migrant women with NRPF is often borne out. We might not be paying for it at the Home Office, but it is often borne out by local children’s services, local councils, health and education services, the police and the criminal justice system, as well as by non-statutory agencies. Many women rely on section 17 support under the Children’s Act 1989, which would not be the case if they were eligible for the DV rule and the DDVC. We end up somehow paying for it with either lives lost or some other scheme somewhere along the line.

In its briefing paper on migrant women, Southall Black Sisters highlighted that London boroughs in 2017-18 supported 2,881 households with no recourse to public funds, at a cost of £53.7 million. That was primarily linked to the discharge of their duties under the Children’s Act 1989. The average duration of local authority support is under two and half years, with 30% of families being made dependent for 1,000 days or longer, often because of Home Office delays in resolving immigration claims. One of the primary groups referred to local authorities with NRPF is single mothers who are subject to domestic abuse. The majority of households no longer require local authority support when they are granted leave to remain, because they go on to find work. Surely that is what we all want to see happening.

What assessment have the Government made of how much it would cost to extend the domestic violence rule to all migrant victims? I guess it would cost less than the millions run up by the statutory and non-statutory services to support migrant women. It would be cheaper, and it would certainly be kinder. Although it would perhaps not be so ideologically pure, it would be the right thing to do. Furthermore, by hindering access to life-saving support, there are wider implications for the Government’s international human rights commitments and obligations to combat violence against women and girls.

In their October 2019 report on the ratification of the Istanbul convention, the Government amended the status of their progress on article 4.3, which is the non-discriminatory section, and on article 59, which includes measures to protect victims whose residency status is dependent on a partner, from “compliant” to “under review”—going backwards. As a consequence of their inadequate response to migrant victims of domestic abuse, the Government must now use the opportunity provided by the Bill to ensure meaningful protection for all women.

I am nearly done—worry not—because I want the Minister to have plenty of time to respond. In the evidence session, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle talked about the national referral mechanism after it was raised by another Member. In fact, a victim of domestic violence was asked during the evidence session whether she had been referred to the national referral mechanism. As somebody who used to be one of the people administering the national referral mechanism and who ran one of the trafficking services for many years—in fact, I helped to set it up with the Salvation Army as one of the sub-contractors—I want to express, for the benefit of the Committee, some concerns about the cross-over with the national referral mechanism in such cases.

The national referral mechanism has never been used to deal with cases of domestic abuse; that was never its intention. I read the guidance during the weekend after the evidence session. The only mention of domestic abuse in the thousands of pages of guidance suggests that when people identify a victim, they should use some of their experiences with victims of domestic abuse, because victims might react similarly and might not want to talk. That is literally the only mention.

There is some mention of forced marriage and sham marriage in the guidance. However, I have been speaking to the providers this week and have been asking them about how many cases they have seen where those are factors. It is vanishingly rare. Lots of the providers offer both domestic violence services and trafficking services. There is Ashiana Sheffield and Black Country Women’s Aid, where I used to work. They provide both domestic violence services and trafficking services, which are completely distinct. There has never been any suggestion that migrant victims with no recourse to public funds would be able to get through the NRM. As someone who has taken referrals through the NRM, I can tell Members that if a person tried to take these cases through that mechanism—probably with some immigration lawyer helping them to do so—it would count against them. It would look as if they were gaming the system, because these cases inevitably would not get through the NRM. Almost no migrant women on non-spousal visas would be able to access the NRM: it is not for them. They have not been exploited, there are not means, and there are not the three main things that are needed to make a trafficking referral.

However, well over five days ago, I tabled some named day questions to the Home Office. I have not had a response, but I have chased them again this morning; maybe the Minister can answer some of those questions. I asked whether the Secretary of State for the Home Department would

“publish all correspondence between her Department and the contract provider for the Modern Slavery Victim Care Contract on the inclusion within that contract of support services for victims of domestic abuse with no recourse to public funds.”

I also asked the Secretary of State

“how many applications to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) made reference to forced marriage in the last full reporting year; of those how many people were (a) accepted into the NRM and (b) had their application declined.”

Southall Black Sisters, working with a number of other agencies, has circulated a pretty comprehensive guide to why these particular victims would not qualify. That is not to say that the NRM is not a good system; these victims just would not qualify for it, and it is quite laborious to try to put them through it, so I am not sure why we are currently wagering on the NRM.

[Julie Marson]

Given the schemes we have talked about—the hon. Lady has mentioned the need for data, and there has been mention of the £1.5 million fund—does she acknowledge the need for data and more analysis of where the gaps are, to determine where we can fill them and what we can do best?

[Jess Phillips]

Of course I do, and quite a lot of data has been gathered. It is funny, though, that we are asking for data on some things but not others. Women’s Aid holds at least as much data about no recourse to public funds as Southall Black Sisters, if not more, because they run the No Woman Turned Away programme. However, I noticed that at the evidence session, Lucy Hadley was not asked to provide data.

There is plenty of data out there, but it is also important to say that we cannot prove a negative and cannot rely on these organisations to do so, no matter how much funding we give them. I see these cases all the time, all over the country, and I would not necessarily refer the victims to schemes that are largely based in London. We are asking these organisations to tell us what does not exist. All Members present recognise that there are masses of data about domestic abuse that we will never know anything about, because people do not come forward.

We give people money to run a scheme and then say, “It has to be entirely based on evidence”, but the Government bought a contract for ferries from a company that did not have any boats—that is just one example I could give—so I find it hard to understand why more evidence is required from some people than from others. Of course evidence is needed, but pretty much every expert is saying that the extension of the DDVC is a very simple extension that would not cost loads of money. We are beginning with the thousands of women who are on those particular visas, then reducing that to the women who are more likely to come forward, and reducing it again to those who have been victims of domestic abuse—we are going down and down. It is just the right thing to do.

I have not been presented with loads of data about lie detectors, or about other things that are in this Bill; I just take it on trust. We have never before had a charge of economic abuse, but nobody is saying that because no one has been charged with that offence, we should not introduce it. I just think that it casts aspersions on the organisations that might be doing that work, as if to say that the evidence is not there when it clearly is. I know that that is not what the hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford was trying to do. The Government have to find a reason why they are not doing this, because the reality of why they are not is not particularly palatable. Evidence is obviously the one they lean on.

Domestic Abuse Bill (Eighth sitting)

Julie Marson Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 11th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Julie Marson (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

I want to touch on my experience in the courts, particularly the specialist domestic violence courts. However harrowing it has been, it has been a genuine pleasure to be able to sit in those courts.

There are some common themes that I have seen in court. It is usually women and children affected. There is always a power and control dynamic; it is never just about the violence, although there usually has been violence. And there is always fear on the part of the victim, even with the special measures that I have seen—the screens and so on. I could still see the victims, and I saw them crying, shaking and trembling. This is so important. What such a measure does is take away some of the power that the perpetrator has to control the victim in the courtroom environment, because they are still trying to control, even right at that moment, with looks, sounds, movements—with everything they can muster at the time. Therefore, I profoundly support special measures across the piece, because I think that they are really valuable in limiting that control right through the justice system.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

In the hon. Lady’s experience of dealing with these cases and being able to see the impact on victims, was she aware of the challenges that victims have before they get into the courtroom, because often in family courts it is very difficult to separate victims from perpetrators? Was she aware, in her job at the time, that that was also an issue that needed to be dealt with?

[Julie Marson]

The hon. Gentleman makes a really important point. Long before I ever see a victim in court, there has been a huge process to get there and to provide the right support. Independent domestic violence advisers and different support mechanisms are in place; there are supporting people who come in and sit with the victim in court, but it is a hugely traumatic experience and support is needed throughout that process.

I would add a point about a common theme among perpetrators. When, in normal criminal cases, shoplifters or burglars or other violent offenders are convicted and sent to prison, there is a shrug of the shoulders—it is a part of their life; a general hazard of the criminality that they are involved in. When I have had—I will use the phrase—the pleasure to convict a perpetrator and send them to prison, it is noticeable that all the power has all of a sudden been stripped away. Their indignance and fury is palpable; you can sense it and see it. That is what makes it a different crime and a different experience, and that is why special measures are important. I speak to that experience.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

Will my hon. Friend indulge me for a moment? I take the point that the hon. Member for Hove made about the geography and layout of court buildings. Some we cannot change because they are very old. Has my hon. Friend seen the measures that clever judges can introduce to control when defendants are permitted to turn up according to the conditions of bail? For example, the defendant is not permitted to arrive at court until 20 minutes before the court case starts, so that the victim has time to get into the building and into the witness room, or wherever she will be based, and there is no risk of crossover. Does my hon. Friend agree that little tweaks such as that can make a difference?

[Julie Marson]

Absolutely; I completely agree. We cannot legislate for everything you can do in a court—every courtroom is set out differently. I have seen a lady with two teenage daughters, with the husband, and some really clever dynamics were needed to keep everyone separate, including in the toilets. In my experience, such measures have been very positive. There have been specialist domestic violence courts. Everyone is keenly aware of what is needed and is trying to think ahead for the kinds of measures that can make justice effective and make sure that justice is done. Such measures are all part of that.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)]

I am delighted to see you in the Chair once again, Ms Buck. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford for her excellent contribution. It speaks to the strength of the Committee that its members have real-world experience and can apply it to the important matters that we are here to discuss.

Before turning to the amendment and new clause, it is worth taking stock of where we are in terms of the court process and the framework in which the amendment and new clause sit. Over the last 10 years or so—probably a bit longer—the environment for victims and witnesses has been completely transformed. It was not so long ago that a complainant in a case of serious violence or a serious sexual allegation had to turn up at court and eyeball the defendant. It required an extraordinary effort of will, and a lot of people just thought, “This isn’t worth the candle.”

Legislation was introduced that provided the opportunity for screens and giving evidence via live link. At the time, that was considered utterly revolutionary. People were clutching their pearls, saying, “That’s it; justice is dead in our country; there is no opportunity for people to get a fair trial” and so on. The culture has changed. Now, at plea and trial preparation hearings such orders are routinely made and, lo and behold, juries—indeed, benches of magistrates as well—seem to find it perfectly straightforward to make a judgment in the interests of justice on the facts in front of them.

Setting that context helps to bring us up to the situation at the moment. Let us imagine some facts for a moment. The allegation is one of sexual assault on the London Underground. At that early hearing, before the Crown court, long before the trial has even been scheduled, the judge will ask the prosecutor, “Are there any applications for a special measures direction?” The prosecutor will stand up and say, “Yes, there is a complainant in this case and it is an allegation of a sexual nature, so I will be inviting the court to make a special measures direction in the normal way.” That is precisely what will happen, because it will be automatic.

I pause to note one further point. If the complainant says, “Forget this. I don’t want a screen, and I don’t want to give evidence on a live link; I want to be there in the well of the court, because that is how I feel I will get justice”, that will be accommodated as well.

Domestic Abuse Bill

Julie Marson Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th April 2020 Commons Chamber

[Julie Marson (Hertford and Stortford) (Con) [V]]

Nearly 10 years ago, one summer’s day, I remember sitting in a stifling hot room looking at a photograph of a cute, blond four-year-old boy who was beaming up at the camera. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think, and I expect that many of us have similar photographs of our own children smiling and laughing at the camera, just as they should be at that age, making happy memories. The difference on this occasion was that I was in court, sitting as a magistrate. The photograph had been taken by a police officer, and the little boy had an enormous black eye. He had been trying to protect his mother from being attacked by his father and had strayed too close to a flailing fist. He was just four years old, and he had already been subjected to more emotional and physical trauma than most of us can imagine. Domestic abuse is a crime and an abomination against victims and their families. It is a crime against our whole society. I have been lucky; I have never personally experienced it, but other Members of this House have done so, and they have spoken incredibly movingly about their experiences.

I will be supporting the Bill today, and I am proud that the Government are taking this lead. I pay tribute to all those involved in the development and drafting of the Bill. It is remarkable that until now there has been no cross-government statutory definition of domestic abuse, and no commissioner to give a voice and prominence to this issue and to hold the Government to account. I welcome those measures, along with the trial of protection orders and protection notices and the extra cross-court safeguards in the justice system, which will give more effective protection to victims and their children—explicitly, whatever their immigration status might be. I very much welcome the legislative inclusion of Clare’s law. I would also like to take a moment to recognise the pioneering work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who worked tirelessly for this legislation and to ensure that provisions on coercive control would be included for the first time.

In Hertford and Stortford, we are fortunate to have Future Living, a charity founded and run by the amazing Sandra Conte, which provides outstanding community support and services for victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse, male and female alike. Everyone who meets Sandra and knows what she and her colleagues do at Future Living becomes an evangelist, and I am no different. Unapologetically, I shall use this opportunity to encourage the Government and our local authorities in Hertfordshire to continue to provide Future Living with the support and resources it needs to do its vital work, especially as Sandra has told me today that she is seeing a significant increase in cases, particularly where a separated, abusive parent is using the covid crisis to keep children away from their victim and flouting contact orders. We expect even more of an increase in demand for the charity’s services as we come out of lockdown.

I truly understood the dynamics of domestic abuse for the first time only after I experienced the training given to magistrates. It opened my eyes and completely changed my perspective. It is vital that those involved in policing and the justice system have rigorous training so that they can recognise the abuse cycle, from subtle control to murderous violence, and the fact that the most dangerous moment for a victim is often when they leave the relationship and try to regain control of their own lives.

Domestic abuse is a dangerous and destructive cycle. It was about 10 years ago when I saw that photograph. That little boy will be 14 or 15 by now, and what I wonder most is whether he spent his childhood in that environment or whether things might have changed for him. Perhaps his father received the justice or indeed the help he needed; perhaps his mother managed to escape. Heartbreakingly, that boy might be condemned to repeat the cycle of control and abuse he grew up with, knowing no different and believing that that was normal family life. I support this Bill, because I think it will help children like him. It has been a privilege to contribute to this debate.