My Lords, we support these amendments. It is not just victims of domestic violence who need help and support from housing authorities in escaping serious violence. Young people groomed and exploited by criminal gangs also need and deserve to be urgently rehoused in certain circumstances, as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, so clearly set out.
Again, this needs to be a truly multiagency approach to reducing serious violence and not a police-led enforcement approach. The police need to provide information to housing authorities where they believe that someone is being coerced into criminal activity and is threatened with serious violence if they do not comply, and that taking that person out of that scenario by rehousing them can reduce the risk of serious violence.
I repeat that option 2 of the Government’s consultation on the serious violence duty is the best option and the one preferred by the greatest proportion of respondents to the Government’s own consultation—that of enhancing existing crime and disorder partnerships. These are
the existing and well-established mechanism, where local authorities and police forces work together to prevent and tackle crime and disorder and where the local police chief and the local authority chief executive are equal partners in doing whatever each partner and others can do to reduce crime and disorder.
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As I said to an almost empty Chamber last Wednesday evening, the overwhelming response of the non-governmental organisations that I have met, which have concerns about this part of the Bill, is that the Bill is actually about forcing agencies to support a police-led enforcement approach to serious violence, not a public health approach or even a true multiagency approach to preventing and tackling serious violence. I listened very carefully when the Minister said that the Government’s intention is for it to be a public health approach—but we are debating this Bill, and that is not what is in it. We have to address the perception that the Bill is creating: that it is about a police-led enforcement approach.
In a previous group, we discussed the fact that many of the young people involved in county-lines drug dealing had been groomed into criminality and were victims of child criminal exploitation, with adults as much preying on their emotional needs as alleviating their poverty. Once trapped in such criminal enterprises, if they are robbed by a rival drug dealer of either drugs or the cash proceeds of drug dealing, for example, the young person’s family can then be targeted and blackmailed into paying back the drug supplier, with threats of violence against the other family members if the sums are not repaid. The only escape from such a situation is often the parent taking out a loan that they cannot afford, potentially from a loan shark, to pay back the drug dealer—or, otherwise, to flee from the area. It is in exactly this sort of scenario that the police need to work with social housing agencies to provide a route out of the cycle of debt and further violence.
As in the case of child criminal exploitation, the flow of information needs to be from the police to other authorities to enable a non-enforcement solution to a problem of serious violence and not, as is the concern—as I have said—of representatives of those non-governmental organisations that I have consulted, to have the provisions in this part of the Bill be about forcing others to provide information to assist the police in their enforcement role.
We support all the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 51, so powerfully proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, which adds
“a person at risk of serious violence”
to the list of those who have a priority need for accommodation under the Housing Act 1989, if the provision would reduce or prevent the risk of that person becoming a victim of serious violence. My noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville quite rightly raised the issue of funding for local authorities to enable them to fulfil this vital duty.