Domestic Abuse Bill (Second sitting)

Lord Coaker Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 29th October 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Gillian Keegan]

Q Clearly, if implementation has been patchy previously, it is going to be absolutely key. Do you think this point about training and the patchy response is at all linked to the fall in the number of prosecutions and the number of people coming forward?

Zoe Billingham: When we inspect across domestic abuse, we try to take a whole-system approach, in so far as it relates to policing. We look at a whole range of measures all the way across; where we see drops in areas of performance, we are concerned.

Starting with the moment a call comes into a control room, if we see that forces are not attending to domestic abuse incidents as quickly as they should, that is warning flag No. 1. Warning flag No. 2 is when the responding officers who attend those incidents tend to arrest less. All forces have a policy of positive action, but the number of times that an alleged perpetrator of domestic abuse is arrested varies between 80% in some forces and 30% in others, and that variation worries us. Warning flag no. 3 is when too many cases are being discontinued post-arrest on the basis that the victim does not support police action. Nearly 50% of domestic abuse cases are discontinued on that basis, and that worries us. We see variance among forces in all parts of that whole-system approach, and the orders are one part of that system in which we see that variance.

As an inspectorate, we would like to see less variance and greater consistency, because a victim of domestic abuse in Cumbria is self-evidently entitled to the same level of police service as a victim in Camden. We set that as our expectation—rightly so, I think.

[Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)]

Q Thank you, Zoe, for coming along. Are there serial offenders among police forces in terms of variance? Are there forces that you go to that are not as good as they should be, and then you go back and they are still not as good as they should be? I think I know the answer. If that is the case, what can you do about it and why cannot we do anything about it? You identify the problem, but then it just carries on.

Zoe Billingham: It is really interesting; policing has a habit of working like the swing of a pendulum. A force may be at variance in, for example, its rate of arrest, and we will put in our report—our local report—a recommendation that that should be reviewed and looked at. When we come back, we are listened to and we will follow that through, and we find that that may have changed. However, the danger is that, in addressing and focusing responses on one particular area that we have identified in our report, the eye is taken off the ball elsewhere. Although the force may correct one part of the whole-system approach, there may be something that then surprises us and surprises them.

For example, the force may be arresting more but may actually then be disposing of more cases, on the basis that the victim does not support police action. Now, that may be an appropriate thing to do, but we are concerned that too often that resolution is being used because hard-pressed officers simply have not got the time to take the correct action to pursue the criminal justice route and outcome.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q But what if the public wanted to know that? If you want to know how good a school’s exam results are, it is quite easy to find out—it is quite easy to compare schools. That is not so true of police forces, is it? I mean, what you say is quite right, but we know that there are police forces that do not improve their way of tackling domestic abuse by their serious violence strategy going west—they do both, even with the same resources and difficulties, even rural forces compared with rural forces or city forces compared with city ones. Everything is the same, yet there is a difference in performance.

Would it not help if there was greater public awareness of that? How can the inspectorate publish that information so that people can look at it and say, “My police force is not as good as equivalent forces”? League tables?

Zoe Billingham: Well, I am not sure—

[Vernon Coaker]

Q No—I just threw that out there. I am just trying. I do not agree with that either, but I am frustrated by the lack of that sort of thing.

Zoe Billingham: What we have promised to do since 2014 is to inspect police forces on domestic abuse every year—year on year—until the service is what we would want it to be. We have lived up to that promise and we are still inspecting forces year on year, which is an indicator that we are still not satisfied with the performance that we find. We have to bear in mind that in the intervening period—between our starting in 2014 and now—there has been a whopping great increase in the amount of demand being placed on officers. There has been an 88% increase in recorded domestic abuse-related crime.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q An 88% rise? When is the base year for that?

Zoe Billingham: In the three years from 2015 on, there has been an 88% increase. It represents 10% of all crime and 40% of all crime with violence.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Sorry to interrupt; I am just trying to think. Was that 10% of crime that people have gone to?

Zoe Billingham: Some 10% of all recorded crime that police deal with, and 40% of all violence, has a domestic abuse-related basis.

We do what we call our police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy, or PEEL, inspections; I am sorry to go into so much detail. We review police every year, and within our vulnerability section we always look at domestic abuse. Within that, we always provide the public with a judgment on their police performance, of either “outstanding”, “good”, “requires improvement” or “inadequate”. We think that brings a degree of transparency, and we supplement that with an annual report. We have published four—in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019—to shine the light on this area.

However, I think that the sentiment behind your question is this: “Should the public be made increasingly aware of this issue?” Our answer would be a resounding yes. We are playing a small part in that as the inspectorate, but there might well be more that we can do—in fact, I am sure of that.

[Vernon Coaker]

That is very helpful.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

Q Clearly, from the numbers that you are giving us, there has been a huge increase in the trust in police for the victims to come forward and report. The work that you have been doing with police forces is clearly moving in the right direction, so thank you.

The Bill seeks to simplify procedures for police officers, which hopefully will result in higher levels of prosecution. It also gives new powers or responsibilities to police officers, particularly for two groups of people: children and family members. We increasingly understand that when children in households are under exposure to domestic abuse and violence, it will make them more likely to be either a perpetrator or a victim. From your inspections of the constabulary, what steps are you seeing them take to identify those children and refer them?

The other type of domestic abuse now caught in the Bill, which I think is brilliant, is adult family members abusing elderly members or people with disabilities in their families. Again, that is a new area for the police to be tackling. Bearing in mind what you said about resource constraints, what evidence have you seen of the police tackling those particular issues?

Zoe Billingham: I can help particularly on the children front because we do a lot of inspection, including with other inspectorates, on the police response and other agencies’ response to children. Since 2014, we have seen a far greater awareness, particularly among those initially attending officers on the scene, of the importance of considering the impact of the domestic incident on the child.

When we first started inspecting, I was new to the area, but I was pretty horrified that police officers would often go into households with children who were themselves victims of the particular incident, even though they may have been in another room. The police officers were not even speaking to the children and checking that they were okay. We have seen a big shift now in the police’s understanding of the importance of safeguarding children and referring them into local authorities as appropriate, so that the appropriate safeguarding conferences can then take place.

We have seen an increase in the workload, which is why forces have invested in protecting vulnerable people areas and departments, which includes children. We continue to encourage that as an inspectorate so that children are put at the heart of this. We also see the prevalence of schemes such as Operation Encompass—an incredibly simple scheme where, if police attend a domestic abuse incident overnight, an arrangement with all the local schools means that a single person in the relevant school is notified that the child has had the most traumatic experience. The teacher can take steps—perhaps seemingly very small ones—to care for that child during the course of the following day, and subsequently. Some of these things are very easily done. They take a bit of arrangement to put in place, but they are not that costly. They do require a will and leadership.

I am not as able to help on elder abuse specifically, but would be happy to write to you if there are any specifics that I can think of that would help on that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Luke Graham]

Q This is important, and I do not want to put you in a constitutional hotspot, but devolved does not mean separate. A lot of the Bill is meant to be set by the UK Parliament. Some Members will push for it to be extended in certain areas to Scotland. As I have experienced with my constituents, domestic abuse in relationships does not respect county or other political boundaries. Do you agree that—framed as the Bill is about sharing best practice, sharing standards, ensuring that certain standards are reinforced throughout the entire United Kingdom and ensuring that analysis is shared throughout the United Kingdom—this is a good space for the Bill to play in, and that it can respect devolution within the United Kingdom and the role of central Government?

Nazir Afzal: Yes, 100%. The victim referral pathways could involve a victim from—well, I had one a long time ago in London who was moved to Inverness. If we do not have common practices, and so forth, rest assured that that would be a recipe for disaster. You need to have an understanding across borders, despite the fact that, jurisdictionally, there will be differences.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q In your evidence to us just a few minutes ago, you said that there were some issues with the Bill and that you would be happy to share them with the Committee. Could you please do that?

Nazir Afzal: Absolutely. The main one is the public duty. We have found in Wales that unless you mandate it, it does not happen. Furthermore, unless you ring-fence it, it does not happen either. Our experience—the experience across England and Wales, actually—has been that if people have made cuts, they have made them in areas they see as soft, and strangely, they see this area as soft. That is ridiculous, frankly, but none the less that is what they do. Unless you say—we have not said this in Wales—“0.5% of your income must go on whatever it is” and ring-fence it, it does not happen.

The public duty side of it certainly needs to be clearer, because people do opt out. One third of mental health trusts in England do not have a strategy that deals with domestic abuse. Given the number of victims who will be suffering either as victims or, potentially, as perpetrators, that is scandalous. My experience tells me that unless you mandate these things, it does not happen. That is issue No. 1, and I clearly think that is right.

Black and minority ethnic victims have been let down. Do you know how many independent domestic violence advisors in England and Wales work specifically with BME people? There are four.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Say that again. Four?

Nazir Afzal: There are four IDVAs in this country who are specially trained to work with BME victims. Given the population, that is not right.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q How many are there altogether, do you know?

Nazir Afzal: Hundreds. That issue needs addressing.

There is also the rural-urban thing—I have said this specifically about Wales, but it is true of England as well. If you are a victim in a rural area, the perpetrator is probably known to everybody. To access support, you need transport—the support is not available locally—but we give everybody the same amount of funding. We give an NGO in Birmingham the same funding as we give one somewhere in Shropshire, but the one in Shropshire probably needs more funding per person than the one in Birmingham. We need to address that. Again, I do not know how you do that, but it needs to come from the top down, rather than the bottom up.

There are issues around refuge funding and refuge services. My personal view—it is the Wales view, too—is that the safest place for a victim is his or her home. The refuge should always be seen as an emergency, rather than as the first port of call, which is what it is commonly seen as. There are very few refuges with provision for children. You wait until mid-December, when it is coming up to Christmas: they will be turning away children left, right and centre, but what happens? They end up in emergency accommodation or going back to their abuser, because the support is just not available to them. Strange as it may sound, when I spoke to the Welsh Cabinet, one of the environmental Ministers mentioned pets. I was not aware of this. Victims do not leave home because of their pet. Apart from the Dogs Trust, as I understand it, there is very limited provision for animals in those circumstances, so they end up remaining with the perpetrator. Something needs to be done about refuge funding. It goes back to the sustainable funding issue I mentioned earlier, which needs to be addressed.

There are bigger issues. Your colleague, Sarah Champion, mentioned early marriage or child marriage yesterday. There are a substantial number of victims. I know the Minister asked for more detail, but my personal view is that you should ban child marriage under the age of 18. Too many 16 and 17-year-olds are forced into marriage, and too many suffer significant abuse at that age. Unless you put an age limit of 18 on marriage, you are not going to be able to prevent that from happening. The Bill offers you that opportunity.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Do you know what the estimates are? How many marriages are there?

Nazir Afzal: There are roughly 200 marriages of 17-year-olds every year.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Do you know what it is for 16-year-olds? The Minister will be able to get that.

Nazir Afzal: I do not know. The Minister will probably know better than I do.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Was that figure of 200 for England and Wales?

Nazir Afzal: Yes, but a lot of religious marriages are not registered. A lot more than 200 are not registered because they are religious marriages.

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Have the Government made an estimate of the number of non-registered marriages?

Nazir Afzal: I do not know. Again, the Minister will know better than I do. I have dealt with cases, and the most amazing ones—the most bizarre, horrible ones—involved people who were forced into marriage at 16 and 17. Some of them died at the age of 19 and 20. There is a gap that needs to be addressed, and maybe the legislation could do that.

There is another area in which I would agree with other campaigners. Twelve years ago, I met with somebody called Iain Duncan Smith—I don’t know if you know him—and he was running a campaign with Refuge about driven suicide. A lot of victims of domestic abuse are driven to commit suicide, and as it currently stands, there is no law that can hold somebody to account for that. I tried to bring one in back then, and the Court of Appeal said that we could, but we were not able to succeed. You probably know the fact that two women are murdered every week in domestic abuse cases, but you probably do not know that 10 women kill themselves every week.

[Vernon Coaker]

Ten women—

Nazir Afzal: Ten women, every week, in England and Wales will kill themselves because of domestic abuse. That is Refuge’s figure.

[The Chair]

The Minister wants to come in on this point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Emily, could you say a little about the difficulty with elderly people disclosing the fact that they are victims of this sort of abuse, and how difficult that must be? This morning, somebody raised the issue of older people, and I think this is a problem as you get older—hopefully, younger people have a different attitude, which is that you don’t suffer in silence. Have you made any estimate of the number of people that this affects? What initiatives have you found that have made a difference? What can we do about it, given that it is not only physical abuse and the economic abuse that Sarah was just talking about, but emotional abuse, control and those sorts of things?

Emily McCarron: You are right to say that older people often suffer in silence because they face a range of barriers to reporting the abuse. In many instances, it might be that they have suffered from the abuse for a very long time and are simply resigned to it or feel that no one is really listening to them. They might be very frightened. It is also the case that some older people have cognitive and physical decline, which makes it much harder to report. We know that there are very few services available to older people. We have reports from older people that they think that domestic abuse services are not for them; they think they are for younger women and do not want to take up the places of younger women and children, so are reluctant to report the abuse. It is also due to fear and a reliance on people financially. In many instances, they might not want to leave the perpetrator, so it is about what the correct response to that person’s needs is. That is why we are calling for a better response from healthcare professionals.

As it stands, the Bill is very focused on the criminal justice response, and that may not always be the only response that is right for older people. We are calling for better co-ordination and links between the criminal justice system, the healthcare system and local authorities, for a more co-ordinated response that is also linked up to social care, which obviously plays a part.

We are also calling for greater links with local authorities. At the moment, the possibility of domestic abuse is not always fully considered in assessments under the Care Act 2014, so we are calling for a better understanding of it. Certainly some successful training programmes have been delivered specifically to train people up on the needs of older people, because it is not always the criminal justice response that is needed.

[Huw Merriman]

Q Emily, may I take you back to your suggestion that the definition be widened to include carers? I can absolutely see the logic of that, but is there not a danger? Currently, “personally connected” effectively means being or having been in a relationship or being a relative. If you extended that to carers, why would you not extend it to people who provide paid services to the home, for example? There is a danger that you go from “personally connected” towards “comes into contact”. Where would you stop? I wonder if you have thought about that in terms of extending the definition.

Emily McCarron: We have. We see that there is a role for the Care Quality Commission to play in ensuring sufficient safeguards for professionals who provide paid professional care. We are going on the evidence we see at Age UK, on what the calls to our information and advice service tell us, and on case studies. We are seeing that, in addition to intimate partner abuse, older people raise concerns about the abuse they experience at the hands of unpaid carers. I can see that there would be some concerns about how far that goes, but we are just going on the evidence.

We see that older people are experiencing abuse at the hands of their carers. As I have said, that is related to their vulnerabilities, and often that person is the only person who they see—they are not in contact with many other people. We are seeing evidence of the same coercive control and of older people adapting their behaviour to deal with the abuse that they experience—for example, sticking to their rooms and avoiding all conflict. That is exactly the same pattern of abuse and coercive control that we see in other examples of domestic abuse. That is really what is driving our desire for this amendment to expand the definition of abuse.