Domestic Violence Refuges: Funding

Stella Creasy Excerpts

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips]

I absolutely agree. One of the things in the proposed new formula is to do with a ring fence, but it is how we put that ring fence on and use it that will tell us whether it is working.

It is important to say that I do not think that the Government are wrong out of malice. I believe they are trying to solve an age-old problem of finding sustainable funding for supportive accommodation for vulnerable people at the same time as wanting to reduce the housing benefit bill. The new model is their well intentioned if naive solution.

To set the scene, I must explain what happens now. Most refuge providers fund their services through a mixture of Supporting People funding from council grants and housing benefit. To use my old organisation as an example, we had three refuges funded by a council-commissioned service, topped up by the housing benefit system for the women who lived there. We opened another refuge to meet the need, as every day we were turning people away, especially women with no children. That provided an extra 10 beds, fully supported, completely funded by housing benefit. It was not part of the commissioned service in the area; it responded to the needs as they actually were, not according to a pre-planned contract.

Does the Minister honestly think that if a ring-fenced funding pot now went to that local council, which has to make tens of millions of pounds-worth of cuts this year, it would not just use the money to cover the contract fees of its commissioned service? Councils would rightly use that money to ensure that their refuge contracts can be maintained in a time of cuts. At my old organisation, that would close the extra 10 beds—which, by the way, were nowhere near enough.

To use the example of the specialist refuge accommodation provider in Slough, an organisation called Dash, we can see how precarious council-commissioned services can be. Dash was always the refuge provider in the old days of Supporting People. When its council set up a commissioning process for the local refuge service, Dash did not win. Instead, the contract went to a generic housing association service. Dash, however, maintained its 14-bed refuge with housing benefit and its own charitable fundraising. Years later, when the council decommissioned its refuge offer—again because of council cuts—the generic provider did not carry on because it was no longer financially viable for it. Its 18 beds closed. Unlike the specialist service, the generic provider’s commitment went with the contract, not with the needs of the women and children. Slough used to have 32 beds servicing the local area; now it has 14. Again, does the Minister think for a second that when the Government give the proposed money to the council, Slough will go back to 32 beds? Or will it just backfill and fund the 14?

Historically, refuge support costs in Devon were funded through the Supporting People programme, administered by Devon County Council. Mirroring national trends after the demise of that funding, in 2014 Devon County Council ended grant funding and began to tender for domestic abuse services—but refuges were not included in the tender at all. That decision forced one of the two operating refuges in the county to close, cutting 12 rooms for women and children.

How will the Government decide which local area gets what? Will it be decided on the basis of what exists now, which will leave many local areas without anything? Incidentally, the Prime Minister’s own council, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, stated in a letter that I had yesterday:

“We do not commission places directly but we spot purchase accommodation for eligible clients through our housing options service”.

How will we give money to those local authorities that currently do not bother to take responsibility themselves, but rely on the housing benefit system to send women to other boroughs? I find it quite remarkable that the council area of the Prime Minister’s seat, a place that looks after her constituents, does not commission a single bed space. Instead it relies on no doubt a poorer neighbouring council and the well meaning specialist agencies to do the heavy lifting so that it can send its women there. How on earth, in the Government’s proposed system, will they get a fund that has to react to need rather than to guessed figures at the beginning of the year?

Local grant funding for short-term supported housing will be based on current projections of future need and informed by local authorities, according to the Minister’s Department. That will be a fixed pot of money, and it is not clear how that will flex or respond to actual levels of demand for refuge. Refuge demand far outstrips supply, and there is no clear model for predicting future need. For example, demand for refuge is likely to increase if the Government’s ambitions in the domestic violence and abuse Bill are achieved, and more victims come forward to seek help. It will be extremely challenging, if not impossible, accurately to project future need for refuge by consulting with local authorities alone. What happens if all the money is spent by November? Will we turn women away? The housing benefit system responded to demand, not guesswork based on already under-supply.

So to quality, and I return to the families I talked about at the beginning of my remarks. What are the Government going to do to make sure that local councils use that fund to provide more than just a bed? As the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead council said in its letter to me,

“the housing option service is confident in securing emergency accommodation for its customers”—

I would say “citizens”, but whatever—

“through either refuge space or its temporary accommodation providers”.

It goes on to say the council ensures that people are housed in “appropriate” temporary accommodation.

What does “appropriate” mean? I have been to appropriate accommodation. I have seen the bed-and-breakfast accommodation where vulnerable people get stuck. I have seen five beds all in one dirty room, a bathroom with used condoms left in the shower by the previous tenant. I have seen how appropriate temporary accommodation means placing young, 18-year-old girls who have been sexually abused and exploited in the next room to men released from prison that same week. How very appropriate. I have seen families left in rooms with no cooking facilities at motorway service stations around Birmingham—left for months to eat packets of sandwiches and travel two hours a day to get their kids to school.

Why, on a dark Sunday night, did I receive a phone call from a group of women in a refuge commissioned by Kensington and Chelsea council, whose ceiling had fallen in? My very first question was, “Where is your on-call manager for this service?” Why was there no one there? I have been an on-call manager and I have spent my nights putting on boots over my pyjamas and going to deal with a problem in a refuge: a baby being born or the fire alarm constantly going off. The bare minimum is that someone should be no more than a phone call away. These people are at risk; they are in danger. How will the Government check that councils spend the money and what they spend it on? What audit function will they put in place to make sure that quality refuge services are commissioned and actually help people? Local need, which is what has been outlined, means very different things. I want to see little girls given back their childhood. I want to see caring, well paid support workers sitting over their clients who are so traumatised that they cannot eat. I want lives to be rebuilt. I do not want a bed for the night.

One of the domestic homicide reviews I was involved with, where a young mother with three children was brutally murdered, told the story of a woman housed in “appropriate accommodation”. Left lonely in a Birmingham hotel, without any of the safety measures or supports that the proper refuge, which was full, would have provided, she went back. She is dead now.

Who will check that taxpayers’ hard-earned money is paying for care, safety and love, rather than lining the pockets of hoteliers and money-driven contractors? It is money down the drain. If Ministers care about taxpayers —I believe they do—quality and value for money matter. Currently, much of our taxes go on nothing at all. I have heard the Government talk about the thousands of new bed spaces and the experts on the ground. My own experience of trying to house victims tells me a very different story.

I asked the Department, in a parliamentary question, to tell me exactly where the bed spaces are. The Minister handed me a document just before the debate, and I received the response to that question at 8.51 this morning. I understand that there was an issue and I will give the Minister the benefit of the doubt. As I looked at the data this morning, I simply could not see a reality: the data says that there are 34 new bed spaces in Solihull, my neighbouring borough, which has joint refuge services with Birmingham and Solihull Women’s Aid. I texted the manager of Birmingham and Solihull Women’s Aid this morning; so far, she is not sure what that is on about. We shall wait and see.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful case. Is she as worried as I am to read that only a third of women who need a place in a refuge get one? The changes she talks about could make that situation even worse. Does she agree that that is an untenable situation?

[Jess Phillips]

It is a totally untenable situation. I understand that we all have to cut our cloth to meet our needs; however, I never hear Ministers just say, “We can’t afford this.” If that is the reality, they should come out and say it. We cannot say that we will do something about the problem, when the reality is laid so bare across the country.

I would stake £100 million on the fact that the first page of the Minister’s speech is about the £100 million that the Government are investing to prove their commitment to the problem of domestic violence. He has time to amend that now; otherwise I will owe him £100 million. Where the hell is the money going? By all accounts it is stuck in a local authority commissioning problem in most cases, which should be a warning for the future. I am not seeing any extra money. What I am seeing is 90 women and 94 children turned away from refuges every day. I am seeing Birmingham City Council removing 2 million quid from their supported accommodation budget in 2020, including refuge accommodation. The local drop-in services for victims across the city have already gone and the housing and homeless advice provided in local neighbourhood offices has also gone—but then so have the neighbourhood offices.

Where is the £100 million? Has the Minister’s Department done an assessment of how much local councils have taken out of domestic and sexual violence services in the last seven years? The £100 million cannot be a number that people say at the Dispatch Box; it needs to mean something. Although I am not normally a betting woman, I will go double or quits with the Minister that, in fact, much more than £100 million has been taken out of local services.

I pay tribute to the 118,000 people who signed Women’s Aid’s petition to stop those changes. The specialist women’s sector have all come out to say that the proposed refuge funding changes will potentially cut a third of all refuge beds. We must listen to the sector and think again. In total, Women’s Aid estimates that 588 bed spaces will be lost—places that would have supported 2,058 women and 2,202 children during this year. When added to those who were already turned away, as my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) said, the result is 4,000 women and children being turned away from life-saving services that they desperately need.

I will add my two pennies’ worth—or my £10 million; I seem to be in over my head financially—and say that is not that complicated. We must make refuge accommodation a statutory requirement of local authorities and give local councils exactly what that costs, along with guidance and standards. We have written those before and it is not rocket science; we used to have them when I first started. We used to require councils to provide one bed space for every 10,000 of the population. I remember filling in the very dull monitoring forms myself. Let us look at what is actually needed and fund that.

We cannot just let some councils opt out. I have been a local councillor; in fact, I oversaw much of the vulnerable adults commissioning. Local councils care, but if there is a homelessness problem and a pot of money that will pay to solve that regardless of the actual needs of those who need housing, councils will take the path of least resistance. Local commissioning practices, which often lack domestic violence expertise, have severely damaged specialist refuge provision. In the context of major demand for refuge and other short-term services, budget constraints and pressures on local authorities to improve homelessness provision, there will be little incentive to commission a range of specialist services that meet differing needs. Instead, this one-size-fits-all model will further encourage generic, short-term housing that can be provided at lower cost but does not deliver the specialist support of a refuge. I will not bore hon. Members with details of what a murder costs the taxpayer, or how much money we spend on victims of violent crime in our A&E services. I am bored of saying how much money would be saved if we got this right. I have been saying that for years and I will say it for years to come.

I ask the Minister to do the following, and I am sure he will recognise that I will keep on pushing until he agrees, so he could save us both a lot of time and effort: he must halt the proposal to include refuges in the new funding model for short-term supported housing services, at least until the Government’s comprehensive review of refuge funding has been completed in 2018. I ask him to work with me, Women’s Aid and specialist refuge providers to design a new model that will provide a long-term and sustainable funding solution for refuges.