My Lords, it is a great privilege to take part in this debate. In her opening comments the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, echoed a profound sense of solidarity and all our best wishes for this Bill going through this process. We are very honoured to take part.
I wish to put on record my thanks to the many organisations that have so diligently briefed us; I also thank the Minister. As a former domestic violence officer and child protection worker, for decades I worked practically with families of survivors. This is an incredible opportunity to place their needs and well-being at the centre of legal frameworks. Recognition of the effect on children is long overdue.
I wish to address Amendments 6 and 8, and speak also to Amendments 11 and 12. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, whom I claim to be my noble friend, argues that this legislation should encompass matters of forced marriage victims and survivors within the context of the Bill, and I very much agree with her—I support her in her cause. Although I do not claim to have the legal wisdom or expertise of my noble and learned friend, my recommendation, as the chair of the Forced Marriage Task Force, was to ensure that we embed matters of forced marriage and murder—I have distaste for the words “honour killing”; it is murder, primarily of women but of course of some men, too—in mainstream legislation.
Like other noble Lords, I would like to see the eradication of disjointedness and silos in responding to victims, as though the violence that they experience is somehow different. Similarly, on Amendment 11, I am in constant awe of my noble friend Lady Campbell of Surbiton, who is correct to assert that disabled persons have absolute rights to be heard within the purview of all public and mainstream rights to receive the necessary safeguards, protection and services that this legislation will afford and facilitate to all other victims and survivors of violence and abuse. This was very powerfully reinforced by my noble friend Lady Wilcox of Newport, and I am really grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, for her insightful recommendations for trained advocacy. I hope that the Government will give their fullest consideration to her request.
I will make some general points in support of this group. Community-based services are a critical aspect of empowering survivors and their children. According to a survey undertaken I think by Barnardo’s, 70% of individuals experiencing violence wish to receive community-based support. Specialist services that may
be needed to address their welfare may include housing support, helplines and support for children, as well as programmes for perpetrators. The statutory duty on local authorities to provide accommodation-based services must not lose sight of the equal status and weight being mandated for community-oriented services, or we may unwittingly miss or discourage many hundreds of thousands of women who could find it prohibitive to seek urgent help and flee their perpetrators.
Postcode lotteries in access to services are well established, and lack of specialist services are well acknowledged. Nicole Jacobs has said that she is mapping current services. I feel that such an exercise will miss the value of all those women-led specialist services which have been shut down over the years, particularly by local authorities which have marginalised the needs of women from diverse backgrounds. I speak with some knowledge. In my own area, two critical women-led services, the Jagonari Women’s Centre and East London Asian Family Counselling, have been shut down, meaning that all the clients that they served over 30 years have nowhere to go. Whatever the excuse or rationale of local male leaderships, the end result has surely been that many women have been further alienated from reporting abuse and seeking urgent support.
Many specialist organisations have been a lifeline for women, particularly those who lack confidence and knowledge of the system and how to report or manage available services. Therefore, this legislative framework must widen its scope to ensure wide-ranging awareness of this law, once it has been passed. Also, leadership across different institutions must explicitly mandate organisations meeting the needs of all victims and survivors who experience additional distress or fears of discrimination. Furthermore, they must be held to account at the local and national levels for the quality and consistency of services for some of the most vulnerable in our society. I am grateful that the domestic abuse commissioner will broaden her reach to communities hitherto beyond the reach of the usual suspects and approved organisations.
I am grateful to have been able to participate in this discussion today. I want to make two final comments. I listened with a great deal of respect and admiration to the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, on Jewish marriages. She is right to be very specific. There are issues pertaining to other faiths, including Muslim marriages, some of which are stuck in the sharia councils—not sharia courts but councils, like the Jewish councils—