And so, my Lords, we come to tail-end Charlie. What is probably not obvious to those listening or watching today’s proceedings who are not around the Palace of Westminster is that they have been taking place with the sound of helicopters circling almost ceaselessly. I think that is because a group of people who feel strongly about what we are discussing, some of whom may even have been on Clapham Common on Saturday evening, have decided to come to Parliament Square today while we are having this discussion, and I suspect while another
place is beginning to talk about the policing Bill, to voice their concern and—in a respectful way, I am sure—are trying to demonstrate how strongly they feel about this issue.
What an irony that we have a female Home Secretary and a female head of the Metropolitan Police, and that it was a female assistant commissioner who, under huge pressure, took a decision on Saturday evening that with the benefit of hindsight she may possibly regret. The evidence around the country of demonstrations taking place where the police decided to be judicious and hold back is that they seem to have gone off without event, while the two that I have heard of—one in London and one in Brighton—where the police decided to take a different decision have ended badly. I hope lessons have been learned from that.
7.15 pm
In preparing for this debate, I looked back very carefully at the Minister’s replies in Committee. I will not go through them in detail but, broadly, they say that there is a range of laws, forms of guidance, processes and technology systems, all of which have been carefully designed to try and produce particular results. However, when you look at those results, they are very mixed. I know from talking to people who are involved in this area that some of them would say that parts of this are working extraordinarily well. All I can say is that, as and when we come up with a new, all-singing, all-dancing strategy to deal with domestic abuse, part of it must be—as when a strategy is formulated and rolled out in any organisation—to tell the world what is going well, what is working, that you are doing more of that and improving it; not, as we do mostly with domestic abuse, listening to an unspeakable litany of the occasions when it clearly is not working.
I suspect that that does a disservice to the many people in the various organisations that are dealing with domestic abuse, which is probably one of the most difficult areas to deal with, and who are working their guts out. In some cases, they are probably achieving excellent results. However, I ask the Minister to reflect on why, if that is the case, we do not know about it. If we are doing some things well, why can we not find a way of talking about that, and communicating it in a way that is not triumphalist, or scoring political points, but in a way that is actually helping the people who it is designed to help?
Having been in business for many years, working with very large companies, going through all sorts of strategies, S-bends, U-bends, takeovers and all the rest of it, my normal reaction when somebody proposes a new strategy is to reach for my tin hat. If the Government are going to proceed with their ambition to have this wonderful, holistic, joined-up domestic abuse strategy, we have to learn from our failings in the present and our many failings in the past. If we do not, we are simply going to repeat them. As somebody once memorably said about the situation in Ireland:
“In Ireland there is no future—there is only the present and the past”,
endlessly repeating itself. With domestic abuse, we run the risk of doing that unless we recognise what has not worked; unless we recognise that some of the promises
that have been made, some of the semi-answers that are given, are not satisfactory.
The discipline that I always apply in a situation such as this is to imagine that the Gallery up there is filled entirely with victims and their families. I wonder what they think as we talk, pirouette, and demonstrate our rhetorical flourishes; as people are, occasionally, unable to resist making political digs. I wonder how they feel as they listen to us talking about incidents which have, in many cases, pulled their lives completely apart. It behoves us to think about them always when we are talking about these subjects. It is their graves that we are treading on, so we need to be very careful and mindful of that.
I would like to put on the record the experience of another woman who was killed, to do justice to her and to the many people who obsessively look into these cases. For them to have to live with what they do day in, day out, must be extraordinarily difficult. This is the story of Kerri McAuley—and this means she will now be remembered in Hansard.
Kerri was brutally murdered in Norwich by Joe Storey in January 2017, just over four years ago. She suffered 19 injuries to her head and face following an attack by the perpetrator, who then smeared her blood on his face and took a selfie, then left her there to die. He had previously violently attacked five former girlfriends, dating back to 2008, nine years before, and at the time he murdered Kerri, he had no fewer than—I stress—three restraining orders to prevent him abusing his former partners. Prior to that, Kerri had endured hours of being attacked and locked away and, in the last violent incident before she died, she managed to escape, wearing only her underwear, by jumping out of one of her windows. She called 999 and for 22 minutes she pleaded for help, telling the call handler about the previous assaults on her, which was the first time she had ever told it to anybody, saying that she was scared of further attacks and that she was afraid he might kill her. In July 2016, Storey—guess what?—received a restraining order for this prolonged and vicious attack, just like the other ones he had accumulated like a badge of honour with his previous assaults. Therefore, even with this additional restraining order, six months later, he murdered Kerri.
There can be no excuse for having a system that is trying to deal with domestic abuse which has been built on repeatedly over the last 20 years and which tolerates results like that. It is simply unacceptable, and we need to fix this. We need to do so for the victims, for their families but, most of all, we need to do it so that we can live with ourselves. I support both amendments and I hope the Minister will be able to give a convincing reply.