Public Order

Laura Farris Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

I have been very clear about the protests over the weekend, and about how the Government and all Members of Parliament should look to work together to address issues of social injustice.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has quite properly said that residents should lobby local authorities to raise principled objections to offensive statues, but Bristolians have lamented the inconsistent response of their local authority. Will my right hon. Friend consider publishing guidance not to determine outcomes but to create uniform principles, so that law-abiding citizens who object to statues can feel sure that their complaints are heard?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend makes a valid and important point. If people want change when it comes to their local authorities and police and crime commissioners, they can do that the democratic way, which is through the ballot box.

Children and Domestic Abuse

Laura Farris Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips]

I absolutely agree. The Domestic Abuse Bill gives us a real opportunity. We will not get the moon on a stick—the Bill will not give us everything—but the annual case load at Women’s Aid, where I used to work, involved on average 8,000 women and 16,000 children. Children’s names are written down on a form and their social work paperwork is in the file, but no one from my organisation would necessarily have laid eyes on them. A tiny fraction of them would have lived in refuge accommodation—less than 10% of the total number would have gone through that in a year—so we are talking about thousands of children in the west midlands who, every day, are without someone to confide in, to talk to, or to deal with the trauma they are feeling in their lives.

Anyone who sits for five minutes with people who have been a child victim of domestic abuse, who have grown up in a home, will tell us that that trauma stays with them in adulthood. They are likely to suffer from PTSD and from problems within their own intimate relationships. All the findings from studies of crime data on knife crime or even terrorism show links to people who grow up in traumatised households. It is imperative for the future of those children and our country that we get this right. Children must be included in the Bill, and at the same time we must take a huge, wholesale look at funding for children’s services in the country. I ask the Minister directly: how many young people’s violence advisers and specialist children’s workers are there across England and Wales? The SafeLives data shows that it would cost only £2.5 million to provide those services across England and Wales. In the greater scheme of things, what it would save would be huge.

We are moving into an era when this will be talked about in schools. All of us in the Chamber have fought—some of us literally had to fight directly on the streets—to ensure that compulsory sex and relationship education will be available in our schools. As we roll that out and talk about such subjects in schools, we must ensure that we do not open a door into an empty room. We must ensure that specialist training and specialist single points of contact are available to handle this in every school, and to handle it well.

The murder rate of women and girls were released the week before last. I have forgotten the name of the organisation, but the data was released: 144 women and girls were murdered last year. That is an increase of about 27 on the previous year. Those figures include the murder of girls younger than three. The reality is that we need to provide support for victims of domestic violence who are children, and it is also imperative that they are safeguarded. We need to start looking at where we are failing in the system of children’s social care. To look at my own city again, I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) could tell horror stories about how the under-resourcing of children’s services is leading to dangerous situations for the city’s children.

I cannot stress one thing enough when it comes to the review being undertaken of the family court. All of us have been in meetings with the likes of Claire Throssell, whose children were burned in their home by a violent perpetrator who the family courts had allowed to have access to them, even though she had begged and pleaded against that. The presumption of access for domestic violence perpetrators has to end.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

To build on the hon. Lady’s point, the presumption in favour of access for a parent who in a criminal court would be considered a violent offender has a hidden dimension. Sometimes the perpetrator of domestic abuse will use the child as a pawn. Enhanced right of access will, typically, be used as a tool to torture the mother. The hon. Lady gave powerful figures not only for women who have been killed by domestic abuse but for children as young as three. She also gave an example of arson. That grim conclusion might not be reached, but children are still treated as pawns. They are placed with the perpetrator parent, in a highly dangerous situation, and they are denied access to their mother. That is a tool to torture the mother, and goodness knows what is happening. Another problem is the reporting restrictions in the family court, which make it difficult to know how the decisions are reached and the slipstream in which those children are moving.

[Jess Phillips]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I have seen hundreds of cases in which access to a child is used simply to extend the abuse. Children become pawns, and that has a psychological effect on them. They are pulled about and told that they have to go somewhere, such that they do not feel safe. Their mothers have to watch on and say goodbye to their children, putting them into the custody of someone they do not believe to be safe. That is psychological torture in our family court system—although, thanks to its secrecy, we will never truly know. However, I am sent emails with reams of accounts about that exact thing happening, day in, day out. We have to stop wringing our hands.

The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service is also an issue with regard to the family court. CAFCASS provides support and services for perpetrators to try to stop the perpetration of domestic abuse. I am not here to criticise that, but I note that CAFCASS does not provide the same support for women and children. I often found a disparity when people decided to fund local commissioned services for perpetrators. Again, I have no problem with that, but there was always a discrepancy between the amount of money that would go to the perpetrator project and the amount that would go to the project that ran alongside it for women and children. Double the number of people was always a fraction of the price, I noted.

Policing (England and Wales)

Laura Farris Excerpts

Monday 24th February 2020 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

It is an absolute honour to make my maiden speech today, 100 years to the day since Nancy Astor, the first woman to take her seat in Parliament, made hers. It is also an honour to make this speech as the MP for Newbury, succeeding Richard Benyon, who represented us for 15 years. Richard was totally dedicated to the community. He was a brilliant campaigner who, during his time in this House, slashed rough sleeping, championed mental health services, secured transformative upgrades to the train service and, after some devastating winters, brought in permanent flood defences that have protected thousands of homes during the battering we have seen over the past fortnight. He was an outstanding Minister at DEFRA and a true environmentalist. Whether it was protecting global marine life or introducing beavers to the River Kennet, there was no issue, big or small, that he would not fight for. He is missed in Newbury. Even now, 10 weeks after my election, there are people who have taken the trouble to look up their new MP, written out my email address and begun their email with, “Dear Richard”—I think perhaps more in hope than expectation.

It is the honour of my life to represent my home in Parliament: where I was born and where I grew up. That place is in my bones. The constituency takes its name from the town but it includes two others, Thatcham and Hungerford, surrounded by a web of west Berkshire villages that run approximately from the west of Reading to the Wiltshire border. It is home to Vodafone, the constituency’s biggest employer; the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston; and the famous racecourse, of course. As of last week, I can add that we boast the best pub in the country—the Bell at Aldworth.

Ninety-five per cent. of our schools are good or outstanding, but the thing that I am particularly proud of is the quality of provision for special educational needs. We have Mary Hare School for the deaf, which has the largest sixth form for deaf students in the country and sends many of them on to further education and university. We also have The Castle School, which provides an outstanding education for children with particularly complex special educational needs.

It is a beautiful part of the world. If you go up to the Berkshire downs in Lambourn to see the racehorses training at dawn, you will find country that is as wild as Dorset, but if you plunge down the pathways that link the villages of Bucklebury, Stanford Dingley and Frilsham in the east, you will find woodlands that are as mythic as anything in English folklore. It has context in the story of this nation. During the civil war, there were about 48 hours when the history of England was determined on the battlefields of Newbury. It has felt the smack of resistance during the Greenham peace camp and the pulse of insurgency during the protests over the Newbury bypass. And it has experienced catastrophic human tragedy—the Hungerford massacre, the dark day in 1987 when that little town endured the mass shooting of 17 people.

Those incidents took place during my childhood and are scored deeply on my memory, because at the time it was my father who was the MP. He served the seat for 18 years until 1992, and he was the MP when I was born. The way that he supported, defended and championed that community, particularly through its darkest hour, shaped my entire view of public service. I am not the first daughter to take her father’s seat—it has happened once before: on the Labour Benches, in the seat of North West Durham—but it is the first time that it has happened in my party. Nearly 30 years have passed since my father died, and I was young when he did, but he sparked a passion for politics, and he always taught me to think freely and to keep testing my ideas. I think of him every day that I walk through these corridors and I am proud to follow in his footsteps.

This debate concerns the new funding settlement for the police. My constituency welcomes the £33 million for the Thames Valley police, from which we will benefit and which will lead to 50 new police officers. Before I entered the House, I worked as a barrister with a specialism in employment law, and I bring that interest to Parliament. I saw that, as with so many sectors of work, the primary challenge in employment is not always recruitment but the retention and development of staff in a modern society.

One of the great challenges we face is the age of our workforce. In the last 20 years, the number of people working beyond their 60s has quadrupled and, with an ageing population, that trend is likely to continue. I noticed in the cases I worked on that there was a fundamental divide between those who felt that, by their late 60s, they had earned the right to retire, and those who found the suggestion of retirement an insult and felt that there was still a place for their skills and experience in the workplace. While we must, of course, respect personal choices, the fact remains that those who wish to continue working into their old age are sometimes treated as an eccentricity or an indulgence, rather than people of vigour and capability. There is an imperative for us to recalibrate our attitude to the potential and prospects of older people in the workforce.

We also need to think about the way we work. I am delighted that my party’s manifesto raised the possibility of making flexible working the default for all jobs. For too long, flexible working has been confined to women, usually linked to motherhood and—tacitly, perhaps—to an inferior participation in the workplace. But all the research shows that, regardless of gender, the benefit that employees most value after their pay is the ability to work flexibly, whether in terms of location or hours. We know that flexibility has a crucial role to play in the retention of women, the reduction of the gender pay gap and the equitable distribution of home and childcare responsibilities, all of which I know to be core objectives of this Government’s one nation agenda.

I conclude by saying that, in the cases I worked on, I saw that, for so many people, their job—which they had usually lost by the time they reached me—was about so much more than pay. It was fundamental to their sense of self, in terms of what it said about their talent, their dignity and their place in the world. So I will always fight for the jobs and security of my constituents, and it will be their opportunities and their aspirations that will guide my work in this House.