Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

Mary Glindon Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I would very much welcome my hon. Friend’s views on the “Enough” campaign. We set out three scenes to tackle exactly that tendency to turn away, giving people the courage to call out so-called banter among their mates, and helping people who see behaviour in the street that they are not sure about to offer a helping hand and say, “We’re here if you want to talk.” That sort of approach is going to make the sort of societal change that I know we all want.

However, it is also vital that, when crimes sadly occur, victims get the support they need and deserve. That is why we have committed to increasing funding to vital support services to £185 million by 2024-25. Importantly, that includes increasing the number of independent sexual violence advisers and independent domestic violence advisers to more than 1,000. That is pivotal. The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford rightly said that there are various stages in the criminal justice system, and as I move on to the rape review I will try to explain a little more the very technical work that we have been doing on this. We know that there are certain pressure points, and there is emerging evidence that the role that IDVAs and ISVAs play in supporting victims can really help to tackle victim attrition rates. It can mean that victims are nearly 50% more likely to stay engaged with the criminal justice system.

We are also—again, I have listened to the responses that we have received and to charities and campaigners—in the process of setting up a national sexual violence helpline in England and Wales. That will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so that victims of sexual violence can get immediate access to support when they need it and when they want it. I think that will be a step change for many victims, knowing as we do just how important the domestic abuse helpline has been in offering support. We are also, of course, introducing a victims law. That is a critical part of our plans to ensure that victims’ voices are at the heart of the criminal justice process. It will strengthen the accountability of the players in that process and improve support for victims.

On another point of agreement, we want to see perpetrators of violence against women and girls ruthlessly pursued and brought to justice. Yesterday the Safeguarding Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean)—confirmed to the House that we will be adding violence against women and girls to the strategic policing requirement, meaning that it will be prioritised just as terrorism offences, for example, are prioritised. That is essential. I appreciate that it is the sort of technical thing that is all words and has very little meaning if one has just been raped and been the victim of a crime, but those of us who work in this process know how significant a commitment it is. We are now prioritising nationally the very crimes we are all so concerned about, in the way that serious organised crime and terrorism, for example, are prioritised.

However, we know that we cannot just look to criminal justice, so in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 we committed to giving the police new powers to help bring perpetrators to justice and to stop the abuse. Domestic abuse protection notices and orders were a very strong part of the Act. We will be publishing a comprehensive perpetrators strategy, which will set out our approach to detecting, investigating and prosecuting offences involving domestic abuse, assessing and managing that risk, and reducing the risk that individuals will commit further offences. The strategy will form part of the domestic abuse strategy, which is due to be published in the coming months.

[Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

Those announcements are welcome. Will the Minister recognise the work being done by the excellent Northumbria police and crime commissioner, Kim McGuinness, who has such a holistic approach to tackling violence—sexual violence and domestic abuse—against women? She has launched campaigns such as “Fun without fear”, and she commissions work with perpetrators, as well as with victims of domestic and violent abuse, to cover all aspects of work to stop this kind of violence against women.

[Victoria Atkins]

I genuinely thank the hon. Lady for bringing to the fore the vital role that police and crime commissioners play in their local areas to do exactly the sort of the work that she describes. We are giving police and crime commissioners the funding and flexibility to commission plans and work in their own local areas, but we are now supporting that, as I say, with the national strategic policing priority so that there is a focus not just at local level but at national level. We have invested an unprecedented amount—some £35 million—specifically in tackling the perpetrators of domestic abuse. This is very significant work, and I am sure that we will begin to see the benefits of it very soon.

We also want to build an evidence base on perpetrators. In the strategy, we committed to creating a “what works” fund to see what is working, with risk assessment and changing behaviours, and to looking at some frankly under-researched areas such as abuse within adolescent relationships. I see the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) opposite me; we discussed this in the Domestic Abuse Bill Committee. We know that, as part of our wider societal work, we need to focus on what is happening in teenage relationships before the age of 16, when the Act kicks in, so that both adolescents and those over 16 are being looked after in their relationships.

As I hope I have already set out, we are going to be able to deliver this change by ensuring that each of the agencies and parts of the system that are responsible for tackling these crimes plays its part and that they play them together. The policing world and the Government have accepted all the recommendations made in previous HMICFRS inspections. We have already supported the introduction of a national policing lead for violence against women and girls, DCC Maggie Blyth, who is co-ordinating the policing response. She is playing a really important role in policing at the national level, which of course informs local policing on the ground, a point that I know has been emphasised and that I will develop in a moment. That means we have a national policing lead fully dedicated to looking at the police response to these crimes. DCC Blyth has already published a national framework so that police forces have clear and consistent direction.

We have also taken the opportunity in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill to ensure that it is clear that domestic abuse and sexual offences are included in the definition of serious violence when local areas are determining how to fulfil their duty under the new serious violence duty in that Bill. This is a significant step forward at local level. I know that there have been grave concerns, particularly in recent weeks, about incidents of police attitudes and behaviour. The Home Secretary has commissioned a two-phase independent inquiry chaired by Dame Elish Angiolini QC to investigate the issues raised by events last year and also to scrutinise the robustness of vetting practices, professional standards, discipline and workplace behaviour. That is important work that needs to be done to help to restore public trust.

The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) intervened on the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford to ask about the pressure on courts. I think the Opposition acknowledge the impact that the pandemic has had on the criminal justice system and on our ability to run courts. We kept the criminal justice system and the family courts operating for the most vulnerable cases through the pandemic. I must correct him on one point. I am told that court backlogs were 19% higher in the last year of the Labour Government than under the Conservative Government in February 2020, just before the pandemic. However, I understand the spirit in which he raised that point. I am pleased—although not complacent—that the pandemic backlog in magistrates courts is well on the way to being resolved, and significant changes are being made in the Crown courts as well.

I turn now to the motion’s emphasis on rape cases and investigations. The reason I want to focus specifically on this is that it is such an important part of the Government’s overall work to tackle violence against women and girls. For reasons that have been debated previously, there are significant issues at every stage of the criminal justice process, and we are determined to tackle them. We have a highly focused programme of work looking specifically at the investigation and prosecution of allegations of rape. It is called the end-to-end rape review report and action plan. We took a hard and honest look at how the criminal justice system deals with rape, and we are clear that into many instances it is simply not good enough.

I have been asked about oversight of the system as a whole. Just to help explain, the rape review action plan is precisely about that oversight and grip of the national systems. Everyone in the Chamber will understand that the police have their role to play and that the Crown Prosecution Service has its role to play, and of course we respect the independence of the judiciary and of juries, but there must be, and there is now, oversight of the system as a whole. This is why the publication of the first six-monthly progress report and quarterly scorecard on adult rape cases is so important. If anyone wants to look at the scorecards, they are on the gov.uk website. In them, we are shining a light on every stage of the criminal justice process, not just for those who work in the justice system but for charities, for campaigners and, importantly, for the public to examine. We have a theme of non-defensive transparency running through the scorecards because we want to share what is going well—there are areas where we are beginning to see small improvements—as well as the areas where the system needs to do much, much better.

I am pleased to confirm that in the coming months we will also publish what we are calling local scorecards, because we understand that local areas will want to know what is happening in their area. As part of that, we are also rolling out Operation Soteria, which has already been mentioned today. This is a significant programme of work for policing and for the CPS. The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford has called for rape and serious sexual offence—RASSO—units in forces, but Operation Soteria is even more ambitious than that. It is about transforming the approach that the whole of policing takes to investigating crime. We are taking the focus away from the victim and putting it firmly on the suspect.