Victims Strategy

Debate between Sarah Champion and Tom Brake

Thursday 11th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I thank those in the Chamber for their kind words. We all do the best that we possibly can for our constituents and the most vulnerable, and sometimes the consequences of doing so are a little startling, but colleagues have given me the confidence to keep on going, and I appreciate that.

Like many in this House, I regularly meet victims of crime before, during and after their involvement with the judicial process. Regrettably, very few have ever received the level of care, support and service that they should be able to expect. Sadly, what I hear most often is how traumatic the experience was. Survivors of child sexual exploitation will invariably tell me that their encounter with the judicial system was a second form of abuse.

The Minister’s commitment to victims is admirable, and I will do all I can to support him in making the long overdue changes both in practice and the law, but we must now see real changes in how we support victims of crime. The Government’s plan to address the current deficit is most welcome, but we now need to focus on the detail. There are statements about co-ordinating and about combining and reviewing the effectiveness of funding, but, with the exception of the £8 million increase in funding for sexual assault referral centres—SARCs—over the next three years, there appears to be little additional money entering the system. The Government’s plans to reform the current funding streams do not appear to be fully formed. Minister, what is actually needed is simply more cash in the system.

In the strategy, it is acknowledged that in the current system for some victims,

“support is not always available as and when victims need it.”

That is correct, but it is the solution to this problem that we look to the Minister to deliver.

There are two areas of consideration in terms of victim support: first, the provision of early intervention services at the point of disclosure, such as SARCs; and, secondly, the accessibility of universal long-term services, such as mental health support, housing and benefits to victims in need of ongoing support. SARCs are of course crucial. A Council of Europe study found that there needs to be one sexual assault centre for every 400,000 women. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are currently 28 million women in England, but there are only 47 SARCs, leaving us 14 short of the recommended minimum standard. Please will the Minister look at making sure that this gap in provision is addressed, and that there is a SARC for everyone, regardless of where they live?

Providing such services is not just good for the victim; it is also good for justice. Bristol university has just demonstrated the vital role of independent sexual violence advisers—ISVAs—in improving criminal justice outcomes. Analysis of 585 rape cases showed that 36% had the support of ISVAs. Where an ISVA was involved, 43.2% of suspects were charged, as against 21.5% without their involvement. Convictions followed a similar pattern: a 12.3% conviction rate if the victim had an ISVA, as against 5.4% if they did not.

Predominantly, victims services are commissioned by police and crime commissioners using grant funding, but they are hamstrung by the Ministry of Justice, which generally makes grants on an annual basis. This means that small charities receive only short-term funding, which contributes to precarious finances, job insecurity and an inability to plan, making it much harder for them to invest in local services for the long term. As part of the review, will the Minister please commit to additional funding for services that act as first responders to victims, and consider granting PCCs grants for victims services for a period of more than one year?

The need for long-term support for services becomes even more pressing as there is so little detail in the strategy on securing such support for victims. SARCs and other victims services are brilliant at providing an emergency care package and then referring on to other services, yet too many victims receiving an assessment of their needs at a SARC face delays in accessing the recommended therapeutic services. The situation is worse for child victims. A University College London study this year found that 80% of girls aged between 13 and 17 experiencing sexual assault had at least one mental health disorder after five months, and that 55% had at least two. Last year, the Children’s Commissioner said:

“We know that most adult mental health problems start in childhood and that without treatment, children’s problems are likely to get worse.”

It is therefore appalling that Public Health England found in 2016 that only 25% of children who needed mental health treatment received it.

Where statutory services are unable to support victims, third sector organisations desperately try to make up the shortfall. Organisations such as Rape Crisis provide vital lifelines for victims and survivors in their time of crisis, yet they are unable to meet the demand with their current levels of funding. More than 6,000 women and girls are currently on Rape Crisis’s waiting list, and in my constituency, the Rotherham abuse counselling service has 260 people on its current waiting list. The average waiting time is now seven months. Not to address this is not only morally but fiscally irresponsible. To support victims of crime in a professional and timely manner enables them to quickly rebuild their lives. If we do not do that, the cost to the state resulting from, for example, mental health issues, drug and alcohol dependency, self-harm and issues around maintaining a job or relationship as a result of the crime will cost the state much more in the long term, not to mention the damage to the individual. Because of this, I urge the Minister to consider providing good-quality, statutory, immediate interventions followed by a seamless transition to statutory longer-term care for every victim and survivor of crime.

The victims strategy is an excellent first step, but for it to become more than words on a page, it must place a statutory duty on PCCs to publish a local victims’ offer that sets out the minimum standards for supporting victims. It is my view, given their responsibility for commissioning victims’ services, that PCCs are the best placed to co-ordinate this offer. It should include details of the services they are commissioning and the contributions of other key partners, including local authorities, health services and the third sector. Such an approach would force co-operation and encourage transparency, requiring local partners to use their funding and expertise to plug the gaps in the existing provision. The Victims’ Commissioner could then be mandated to hold the PCCs and partner agencies to account for the quality of their victims’ offer against an agreed gold standard.

[Tom Brake]

Does the hon. Lady think that PCCs might have a role to play in ensuring that all those who need to be trained to identify victims are properly trained to do so? I am talking about not only specialist staff but everyone in the voluntary sector, the police and elsewhere. In order to ensure that those services, which are often in great demand, can be accessed by victims, we need to ensure that those people have the right training to identify the victims in the first place.

[Sarah Champion]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s point. I know that a number of businesses are now training staff and colleagues to recognise the signs of domestic abuse and to support the victim by signposting the issue to the right agency.

I am now going to turn to my pet project. It involves a Government agency that is wilfully traumatising victims and operating a subjective system that often runs in the face of the law. Accompanying the announcement of the new victims strategy, it is most welcome that the Minister has announced a broad review of the criminal injuries compensation scheme and of the agency that administers it, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority—CICA. The scheme exists to provide compensation to victims of crime. Money can of course never heal the wounds, physical or mental, suffered by the victims of crime, but victims should at least be able to expect to receive the compensation to which they are entitled without those mental wounds being reopened by the administration body set up to support them. In short, CICA needs a radical overhaul to make it a victim-centred agency.

Victims’ needs, their rights and their wellbeing should be at the core of everything CICA does, but the reality is very different. My constituents’ experiences of CICA have been that it exists not to support them, to honestly assess their claims or to award redress for their suffering, but rather to pursue every possible option to deny their claims. This can include questioning their injury, questioning the rulings of courts, or more appallingly, accusing them of complicity in their abuse. At every turn, CICA ignores the needs of victims in order to maintain its balance sheet. The Minister’s review of the scheme cannot come soon enough for victims. Having supported a number of constituents through the process of making a claim, and through my extensive work with victims charities and organisations, it is abundantly clear to me that what is needed is a complete change in the culture of CICA and in how it treats the victims of crime. To be blunt, CICA’s attitude to victims stinks.

I first became aware of the failings of CICA as I was supporting victims and survivors of the appalling child sexual exploitation that took place in Rotherham. As the victims came forward and the investigations and prosecutions progressed, a number of my constituents pursued compensation through the criminal injuries compensation scheme. Those young women had been through the most horrendous abuse. Their childhoods were stolen from them by criminal gangs who groomed them, trafficked them and repeatedly raped them. For many, the psychological damage they suffered as children continues to haunt them years later, yet many of their claims for compensation were denied by CICA. Problematically, the rules of the scheme state that victims and survivors who have convictions, even for completely unrelated issues, must have their compensation awards reduced or withheld. This rule is particularly pertinent in cases of child sexual exploitation.