My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 176 and 177, in my name, and I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby, and the noble Lords, Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Rosser, for their support. Amendment 176 is broad, and, to try to help the House, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby will speak to non-discrimination and the need for specialist services; the
noble Lord, Lord Rosser, will speak on community-based services and how they support victims and provide perpetrator programmes; and the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, will speak to the unintended consequences that the Bill risks having.
As I said last week, I am delighted that it is my Government who are putting forward this Bill, which has my strong support. I thank Barnardo’s and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, among others, for their help and advice.
At the outset, I welcome the announcement today of £40 million funding for community-based sexual violence and domestic abuse services. The Government have acknowledged the effect that the pandemic has had. This welcome government support only strengthens my argument that community-based services need long-term and sustainable funding. I hope the Government can solidify their good intentions by announcing that they will place community-based services on the same statutory footing as accommodation-based services.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, was right just now. On 16 June last year, the domestic abuse commissioner designate wrote to the Domestic Abuse Bill Public Bill Committee in the other place to follow up on her oral evidence to it. I am happy to quote from her letter:
“As I said in my oral evidence, I strongly welcome the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s proposal to require Local Authorities to provide accommodation-based services, but it must go further. In order to address the breadth of domestic abuse services, the statutory duty must encompass those community-based services that are accessed by the majority of victims, survivors and their children, and must also include quality provision for perpetrators. I have very real concerns about Local Authorities redistributing their funding simply to meet the statutory duty, and therefore deprioritising those critical community-based services that can intervene earlier and prevent a survivor from being forced to flee to a refuge. There is already ample evidence to support this, and while my mapping work may well add to this evidence base, it is wholly unnecessary for Parliament to wait for it to complete before considering this issue.”
This is very clear. The commissioner designate acknowledges that the exercise will provide useful analysis of spending by local authorities on community-based services, but, crucially, she says that Parliament does not need to wait in legislating. She said this in June, and she has not changed her mind. This governmental concern about waiting is not shared by the commissioner and so many others, and I ask my noble friend the Minister to look at this again.
The other main concern has been the need to consult other public authorities. The new clause in Amendment 176 is structured so that it would improve service provision with immediate effect, with public bodies able to take into account relevant circumstances in deciding what constitutes “reasonable steps” and sufficiency. Taking new information into account, the nature of what constitutes “reasonable steps” and sufficiency will change accordingly as and when the outcome of any consultation or mapping exercise becomes available.
Many agencies are needed to tackle domestic abuse: among them are the police, housing, children’s services and the NHS. A multiagency approach is critical to
ensuring that victims of domestic abuse are able to live and rebuild their lives free of abuse. The amendment brings these agencies together in a holistic approach.
The path to tackling domestic abuse is ensuring that all victims, adults or children, are able to access the support they require to recover from the trauma that they have experienced. For some victims, fleeing their home and seeking refuge in safe accommodation —a truly traumatic event in itself—may be their only option. Of course, this is no easy decision to arrive at: they may move miles away from their support networks and abandon their possessions and, sometimes, livelihoods, and their children may be taken out of their school—all for the pursuit of safety, while the perpetrator remains in the comfort of their own home.
For many victims, leaving home is just not an option: 70% of domestic abuse victims never set foot in safe accommodation, and it is clear that victims who are disabled, elderly, BAME or LGBTQ all face additional barriers to accessing safe accommodation—not to mention the vast number of child victims who are trapped. This is why I urge the Government to be bold and ensure that the Bill will help as many people in need as possible.
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As I said at Second Reading, I am concerned that community-based services will become the poor relation. People will suffer; children will suffer. They will not be educated to know what is and what is not a healthy relationship. My amendments are an effort to find a way of ensuring that this becomes a landmark Bill that includes community-based services in a statutory duty. Children are at risk and I am endeavouring to ensure that they are at the heart of the Bill. The Government took an incredibly important step by recognising children under the age of 18 as victims of domestic abuse. However, they also need to receive support to ensure that the cycle of domestic abuse can be broken.
As it stands, the Bill will not ensure support for all children. Research from Action for Children suggests that there is significant variability in the level of provision for children and young people impacted by domestic abuse, both between and within local authorities in England and Wales. Children face barriers to accessing support in two-thirds of the local authorities included in the study, and there were no specialist support services at all for children in more than 10% of those local authorities. The Children’s Society found that only 39% of local authorities were providing a specialist support service for under-16s experiencing abuse in their own relationships, with 26 local authorities providing no specialist support for this age group.
Where support exists, it can and does change lives. Access to meaningful support is important for children’s long-term recovery. My fear is that, by excluding community-based services, we are in danger of creating a two-tier system of support which could result in victims having only one option left if they need support: that is, to place themselves at great risk by fleeing home. It could also result in diverting funding away from community-based services to ensure that the new duty on local authorities is fulfilled.
To truly tackle domestic abuse, we must be bold. We need to take a holistic, whole-family approach, with targeted interventions; to support adult victims to rebuild their lives; to support children experiencing domestic abuse; and to ensure that perpetrators have access to quality programmes to prevent offending and reoffending. This holistic approach is working in Norfolk and west Sussex. Barnardo’s Opening Closed Doors programme, funded by the Home Office, is working well in five local authorities in south-east Wales. By putting accommodation and community-based services on the same statutory footing, and placing a duty on the key public agencies which commission domestic abuse services, including local authorities, police and crime commissioners, and health, we can ensure that a holistic approach is available throughout the country.
The new clause proposed by Amendment 177 will ensure that the duty works in harmony with Welsh legislation. In Wales, health boards and local authorities are devolved. The new clause will require police and crime commissioners in Wales, who are not devolved, to take reasonable steps to comply with co-operation requests from Welsh local authorities or health boards on domestic abuse service provision. This will ensure co-operation in Wales between the key bodies with responsibility for such provision and aims to improve the provision of joined-up holistic services, to ensure a level of equivalence with the changes proposed by Amendment 176.
Amendments 176 and 177 are not only supported across this House; they are supported by the designate domestic abuse commissioner, the Victims’ Commissioner, the Victims’ Commissioner for London, the Children’s Commissioner, a range of police and crime commissioners, the British Association of Social Workers, and many organisations supporting victims and working with perpetrators. I reiterate that we have waited for this vital piece of legislation and I appeal to my noble friend the Minister: let us be bold and help as many people who need support as we can.