Domestic Abuse

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wasserman (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, on securing time for this important debate. I draw attention to my entry in the register of Members’ interests. I do so because for a number of years I was employed as an adviser to a multinational company which pioneered some technology which I want to discuss today. I am no longer associated with this company, but I thought it sensible to mention my former relationship and put it on the record.

There are few subjects more worthy of public debate and more in need of urgent government attention than domestic abuse. Domestic abuse threatens the very fabric of our society. It is literally a matter of life and death. According to the Government’s consultation document, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Jenkin, 243 women and 72 men were the victims of domestic homicides between March 2014 and March 2016. That is more than three deaths a week. If the first responsibility of government is to keep us safe, as everyone says, then dealing with domestic abuse, particularly domestic violence, should be among the Government’s top priorities. Sadly, I regret to say that this does not always appear to be the case.

I say this because almost three and a half years ago, on 6 November 2014, I spoke in this House in a debate on “Women: Homelessness, Domestic Violence and Social Exclusion”. In that debate, in which several noble Lords speaking this afternoon also took part, I urged the Government, as a matter of urgency, to commission trials or pilots of a piece of technology known as proximity notification tagging, which I knew from experience in other countries was effective in reducing domestic homicides. Yet, despite the fact that I had useful discussions with several police forces which had purchased this technology and were prepared to trial it, the Government did nothing to get these pilots off the ground, and, in fact, none was launched. But between the date of that speech in this House and today, nearly 300 women have been the victims of domestic homicide. How many more people have to die before we at least trial this technology?

I say straightaway that I do not believe that this technology, or any other piece of technology, is the silver bullet which will eliminate the age-old, and far too common, problem of domestic abuse—of course not. I understand that we need to change the culture surrounding domestic abuse and improve and expand the whole range of non-technological support services for victims, particularly those with special needs. However, changing culture, providing more safe accommodation and recruiting and training more independent domestic violence advisers takes time. In the meantime, there are lives in danger.

For this reason, I particularly welcome the proposals in the Government’s consultation paper for a much more flexible domestic abuse protection order aimed at dealing with weaknesses of the present domestic violence protection orders. I am delighted to see that this new order will be far more flexible both in terms of the conditions that could be attached to it—such as prohibitions against coming into contact with or coming within a certain distance of the victim—and the positive requirements that could be placed on perpetrators such as attendance at alcohol and drug treatment programmes. I am even more pleased that the new order could require perpetrators to wear electronic monitoring tags which would tell us where they were at all times and how much alcohol they have consumed.

There is nothing new in the use of such GPS-based electronic monitoring tags to keep victims of domestic violence safe. In Spain, this technology has been in use in the domestic violence context since 2009. There are currently 2,000 couples in the scheme. Since its introduction, there has not been a single homicide related directly to domestic violence. Similar systems are currently in use in Portugal, Uruguay and Argentina and are now being piloted in New Zealand. These are the tags that I urged the Government to trial three and a half years ago. That is why I was so pleased to see electronic monitoring receive a mention in the consultation paper. But a mention in a consultation paper, welcome as it is, is a long way from implementation across the country.

Rolling out new technology to tackle social problems—like keeping victims safe—is especially complex, even with a technology as tried and tested as proximity tagging. This is because the problems concern people rather than things and because, as in this case, tackling them effectively requires a number of agencies to work together to develop effective operational specifications about who does what, when, to whom and how. For this reason, rolling out this technology will require careful planning and carefully monitored trials or pilots. Because we are dealing here with situations of life and death, however, we cannot wait until the new domestic abuse orders come into force before we begin these trials. I therefore urge the Government to begin now to organise trials of proximity notification tags so that they are able to roll out this technology across the country as soon as the new domestic abuse orders come into force.

As I have already said, electronic monitoring will not deal with the root causes of domestic abuse or the serious harms which domestic abuse inflicts on individuals and their families, but by providing victims with early alerts that their potential attacker is in the vicinity—whether these victims are at home, at work, with friends or on the move—this technology can significantly alleviate the intolerable stress of knowing that one is always at risk of attack. It can save lives, and there is nothing more important than that.