Domestic Abuse Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Debate between Julie Marson and Jess Phillips

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 (Tenth sitting)

Debate between Julie Marson and Jess Phillips

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 10th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 16th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

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

Does the hon. Lady agree that, in some of these circumstances and given the really complex issues that she describes, a comprehensive training package is needed, as the most powerful place to intervene and help is the frontline? So, the training that the caseworkers in jobcentres receive, the tools they have and the relationships they build are really powerful ways to help people in those situations.

[Jess Phillips]

There is absolutely no doubt about it, and a good jobcentre worker is worth their absolute weight in gold. I have a gold star system for the ones in my local jobcentre, who are excellent in lots of circumstances. The hon. Lady is absolutely right. However, when we are talking about domestic abuse and universal credit, we have put in a huge amount, and maybe that could have been avoided if we had looked at some of the impacts of how this policy was going to be rolled out. For example, on the issue of split payments in universal credit, we are now asking jobcentre staff potentially to intervene directly when two people are sitting in front of them, saying, “So, would you like split payments?” It is rocky terrain for a jobcentre worker to have to try and deal with that.

In fact, if we look at the take-up of split payments, we see that it remains persistently low, compared with the number of victims of domestic abuse who are claiming universal credit. That situation means that there is potentially a need for the complete redesign of jobcentres, so that there are permanent private spaces for every single person who might need one, and so that people can be talked to separately. There are all sorts of things that can be done to make the situation better, and training at the frontline is absolutely key in that.

However, that roll-out of universal credit was not done in my own area; I had to go and ask what was being done. I have sat in the Department for Work and Pensions with Ministers and asked them what they are going to do about these issues. The issue of split payments was very much an afterthought, and I suppose that all I am asking for in new clause 24 is that it is not an afterthought but is built into the system from the very beginning. However, the hon. Lady is right—frontline staff are worth their weight in gold.

The way that universal credit has been designed means that women are forced to choose between staying with a perpetrator or being unable, in lots of cases, to feed themselves and their children. That cannot be right and cannot be allowed to continue. Although the reasons why a woman might return to a perpetrator can be complex, it should not surprise anyone in this room that their not having enough money to provide for themselves and their children is the most common factor. In a survey for Refuge, one refuge worker said,

“the changeover to Universal Credit has caused a significant delay in accessing benefits when women arrive at the refuge. The five- week waiting time means women have to survive with their children with no income, and only a few food bank vouchers. This means that many struggle with whether they’ve made the right decision to leave, if they can’t even feed their children on their own.”

Of course, the Government response is that advance payments are available for those who experience hardship during the minimum five-week wait. That is true, but the crucial thing about advances is that they are loans, which must be paid back immediately from the very first payment, at the rate of up to 30% of the person’s payment. In offering such loans, we are offering women the choice of having no money now or not having enough money for many, many months afterwards.

We must remember that this is often the period when women are traumatised, and supporting their traumatised children, while trying to rebuild their lives in a new place without their support network. They might well be going through the criminal justice process, or the family courts, or both. The system requires them to do that either without a penny, or with some money but in the knowledge that they will spend at least the first year of their life away from their perpetrator struggling to make ends meet, as they have to pay that loan back.

Specialist services supporting survivors tell me that many women they support do not take advantage of the advance payment, even though they desperately need it. Those women are frightened about the consequences of taking on debt at the very beginning of their life away from the perpetrator. Those who have experienced years of economic abuse might have thousands of pounds in debts that they were coerced into taking, with their perpetrator fraudulently putting their names against a variety of debts. That is very common. They know that they will likely spend the next decade paying that debt off and they do not want to start their new lives by volunteering for even more debt.

Those fears are often well founded. Research from Citizens Advice shows that people who take out an advance loan from the Department for Work and Pensions are more likely to get into further debt as they struggle to pay the loans back. The answer to this is to get rid of the five-week wait—some well-trodden evidence regarding everybody, but there we go. In the case of domestic abuse victims, the answer is to pay benefit advances to survivors of domestic abuse as grants, rather than loans.

It is hard to overstate how much of a positive difference that would make to women and children up and down the country. It is the difference between a woman in a refuge hoping the food bank has not run out of baked beans and a woman in a refuge being able to treat her child to a yoghurt or some sweets after dinner on their first day in a new school. It is the difference between a woman feeling hopeful that she made the right decision and can look forward to a life without abuse or a woman feeling that she has no choice but to go back, because she simply cannot afford to live away.

When I explain to Ministers the impact of the five-week wait and repayment of advances for survivors, they often tell me that they cannot treat different groups differently under universal credit or that it is impossible because people would lie and pretend to be victims—usually they say both. In fact, last week the Ministers wrote to me saying that paying advances as grants to survivors includes significant fraud risk.

On treating people differently, there are many exceptions in our social security system. The Minister herself already referred to the shared accommodation exemption for victims of domestic abuse, which is a recent change. It is a strength that there are differences for different people. It makes our system work better and better protect people.

There are already exemptions for survivors of domestic abuse in the benefits system. For example, the domestic violence easement means that survivors do not have to comply with job-seeking conditions of benefits for a few months while they focus on their safety. The destitution domestic violence concession, which we will no doubt discuss at length tomorrow, is a crucial example from immigration rules, which provides a lifeline to survivors on spousal visas. Exempting survivors of domestic abuse from repaying benefit advances would be another important difference for survivors of domestic abuse that ensures the system works as a safety net for them and not as a barrier.

On the point of making it up, as someone who has worked in specialist domestic abuse services, I can tell you that it is a thousand times more likely that a woman will minimise the abuse that she has suffered, or think it is not abuse because they have started to believe what the perpetrator is telling them—that it is their fault and they are making it up. I understand, however, the Government’s desire to ensure that public money is not received fraudulently and therefore accept that some level of evidence is needed.

The best model for providing evidence is the legal aid gateway, which sets out the evidence requirements for survivors of domestic abuse to access legal aid. The same framework can be used here. This is an affordable policy that would make an extraordinary difference. I urge the Committee to support new clauses 38 to 40, which would ensure that benefit advances are treated as grants and do not need to be repaid.

I will now briefly turn to new clause 41, which would exempt survivors of domestic abuse from the benefit cap. The benefit cap limits the total level of benefits that a household can receive. It was introduced in 2013 and has impacted 250,000 households since the limit was lowered in 2016. While the cap was one of a number of policies intended to reduce our deficit, the Government’s own evaluation shows that only 5% of households moved into work because of the benefit cap; 95% did not.

Instead, the cap largely impacts lone parents and those with an illness or disability. Seven out of 10 capped households are single parent families, of which 69% had at least one child under the age of five and 24% had a child under two, according to figures from May 2019. Around 90% of single parents are female, so it is unsurprising that single female parents make up 85% of all households whose benefits have been capped, but the cap is having a particularly devastating impact on survivors of domestic abuse and increasing the barriers that women face in leaving an abuser. There is no free childcare before the age of two, meaning that lone parents with young children often do not work enough hours to avoid the impact of the cap. The issue is particularly acute where a women has fled domestic abuse and is far from her support network, so is unable to rely on friends or family for childcare and is perhaps unable to work due to the abuse she has experienced.

Although survivors are exempt from the cap while living in refuges—another exemption that has been put through—they are not exempt as soon as they leave. That is severely restricting survivors’ ability to find a safe new home and move on from refuge, as their benefits might not cover the cost of housing, either in social housing or in the private rented sector. It is leading, essentially, to bed-blocking, where women who are ready to leave a refuge are stuck in the service, blocking spaces that other survivors fleeing abuse desperately need.

The impact of the cap on survivors was made starkly clear in the case of R v. the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, which considered the legality of the benefit cap. Two of the claimants in the case were survivors. One was living in statutory overcrowded housing and was unable to move herself and her family anywhere suitable and safe due to the cap. Another was stuck in a refuge because the cap meant that she could not afford any move-on housing, and she was therefore blocking a much-needed space for another survivor. They told Women’s Aid that they felt financially penalised for escaping domestic abuse.

I know that the Department for Work and Pensions states that discretionary housing payments, which are paid by local authorities, are available for survivors in such circumstances. However, DHP allocations remain inconsistent, short term and dependent on different councils’ policies and practices—it is yet another postcode lottery. They are not monitored by the Government centrally, so it is impossible to know whether they are providing an effective solution.

The Department for Work and Pensions has repeatedly claimed that the benefit cap is saving money. As I have highlighted, however, the cap creates significant hardships, and the Department therefore gives back a significant proportion of the money it takes from claimants by providing funding for discretionary housing payments to local councils in order to help them support capped claimants. The circular process of transferring public money from one budget to another fails to consider the impact that has on families, particularly survivors, who rely on less stable support and are certainly under somebody’s “discretion”.

The Department does not include in its figures the cost of DHPs included in administration costs, nor does it consider the increased cost to local authorities through temporary accommodation or the wider cost that the hardship created by the cap might have on other public services. Women’s Aid is concerned that the DHP allocation remains inconsistent, short term and dependent on different councils. The DWP confirmed that it has not carried out a full cost-benefit analysis of the cap. In 2018-19, however, the DWP allocated £60 million of DHP funding for local authorities in Great Britain to support capped households.

For those reasons, I urge colleagues to support new clause 41 in order to exempt survivors of domestic abuse from the benefit cap. To summarise, the Bill must do more for survivors of abuse, including those suffering economic abuse, than merely define what is happening to them. The new clauses would ensure that the Bill has a legacy of not only recognising that money is used to control and abuse, but making significant changes to reduce the number of women who are forced to stay with their abusers because they cannot afford to leave.

Domestic Abuse Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Julie Marson and Jess Phillips

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 11th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Jess Phillips]

Absolutely. Sheldon police station is no longer a police station, and there is now a planning application for it to become temporary accommodation. To return to the debate, police stations were often built in communities. My father was born in Sheldon, on the estate that the police station looks over. It is built on a sort of plinth, making it possible to see across the whole community. It can be seen from pretty much everywhere in the Garretts Green Chestnuts estate, as we call it colloquially. It is not hidden; it is not discreet.

The building was sold and, in the planning application that was put in for temporary accommodation, that accommodation was going to be provided for a list of people. One item on the list was victims of domestic abuse. Another was offenders. Another was people with drug and alcohol misuse problems. There was to be no specification about whether there would just be women in the place, or just men. Those people would be housed together. Every single council in the land will have a planning application exactly like this one, through which private landlords seek to make money by turning the property into temporary accommodation for victims of domestic abuse, even though it is completely unsafe. None of us would be happy to place them in such accommodation, but the Bill does nothing to prevent that from happening.

To avoid that situation, the definition must align with definitions established on Routes to Support, which is a UK-wide service directory, partly funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, relating to violence against women and girls. The only accommodation-based service on the Routes to Support model is a refuge service. I ran refuge services, and it was not just buildings with different flats in them. It was dispersed accommodation. We had about 18 flats in the community that were single-use, for all sorts of reasons, including the need to provide disability space and space for boys over the age of 14. In sex-based, women-only services, as boys become older there are safety issues involved in having males in a women’s refuge. So, for women with teenage boys—my teenage boy is nearly twice my size and he definitely looks like a man—we made sure that dispersed accommodation was available.

We are talking not just about refuges that people might imagine to be a house where lots of women live together. We are talking about refuge accommodation in its broadest terms, including shared houses, self-contained and dispersed accommodation. The amendment seeks to require that the relevant accommodation, as defined in the regulations, must be safe for survivors and their children.

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

The hon. Lady mentions the relevant accommodation. I cannot help looking at subsection (2), which notes that

“‘relevant accommodation’ means accommodation of a description specified by the Secretary of State in regulations.”

What the hon. Lady is covering is covered there, and will be specified in the regulations.

[Jess Phillips]

Hope springs eternal for what I am covering here being in the regulations. Had we seen the regulations, we would not have to debate whether it is going to be in them. Unless the regulations are drawn according to clearly defined grounds, I fear that there is a real risk that people will just say, “Yes, I am a provider for victims of domestic violence.”