It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris), who made insightful remarks. Today’s debate has been incredibly valuable and informative. I am so grateful to all Members who have come here to share their experience, including the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips). Often we talk about her passion, for which she is renowned, but she brings to this place the very lucid voice of the women she has worked with and the chaos she has seen, and so often the work we do misses that voice. It is not just her passion for which we should be grateful, but her great experience and her capacity to bring it to us in this place in a way that we can all understand.
I would also like to comment on the hon. Lady’s remarks about children being taken into care as a result of domestic violence. She is absolutely right; the failure to protect so often causes women to lose their children to the care system, and anything we can do in this place to reduce that eventuality has to lessen some of the agony and pain that families go through in these circumstances.
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I am really pleased that we are here discussing the Bill. It is testament to the work of many Members that this issue has become centre-stage. I am grateful to the Prime Minister for giving her absolute commitment to tackling the issues of domestic violence and for keeping this manifesto commitment. We are all talking about it today, and that is what we need to do more of.
The Minister has given us a lot of reassurance today. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley will be pleased to know that I previously worked at a Women’s Aid refuge in Wandsworth Council’s area, and I can confirm that the women coming to that refuge were always coming out of borough for the sake of their own safety. I listened to what the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) said about amendment 1, and she was persuading me that I should support it, because I have seen that at first hand and know exactly what she is alluding to. However, we have received some clear and categorical assurances from the Minister, for which I am grateful. I have taken those on board and am very pleased indeed.
I welcome the other important measures that the Government are seeking to introduce, including the £17 million violence against women and girls service transformation fund. I am grateful that the issue has become central to our agenda in this Parliament, not least because in the past 18 months, three women in the
Telford area have been killed by partners or ex-partners in their own home or a home they shared with the perpetrator. Sometimes these horrific events can become normalised. We read about it in the Shropshire Star, but nobody even alludes to the fact that it was an ex-partner or that it was domestic violence. We need to talk about it, which is why it is so important that we are all here today.
I do not want to add any further comments to what has been said, other than on training. In my experience, women approaching housing authorities do not always come up against the type of treatment and response that we would like them to receive. I feel that demanding that all councils provide training is not the way forward. Councils have to take this on board and understand that it is their duty to provide a better level of response, and by having this debate, we are making them aware that women who go to housing authorities in these circumstances are not receiving the sort of response that they should expect and that we all want them to receive.
I am very grateful to the Minister for her comments and to colleagues on both sides of the House for the contributions they have made. This is a very important Bill. It is a short Bill, as the hon. Member for Great Grimsby said at the outset, but it is a hugely significant one, and that is why I wanted to share these comments.