9
Examination of witnesses
Simon Bryant and Kavitha Ramakrishnan.
Q118 The Chair: Welcome back to the second evidence session of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee, looking at the impact of the legislation passed five years ago and whether it is working well. We have two people who are going to lend us their expertise; first, Simon Bryant, who was director of public health for the Isle of Wight for many years and is now director of public health for Hampshire County Council. He has been very much part of strategic partnerships. Simon leads on domestic abuse and community safety and is chair of the Hampshire Domestic Abuse Partnership board. Welcome, Simon, and thank you for coming.
Secondly, we have with us Kavitha Ramakrishnan, who has worked within the violence against women and girls’ sector for over 17 years. She is currently the violence and vulnerabilities manager at the Safer Kingston Partnership and at Kingston Council, where she holds strategic oversight of the borough’s plan to tackle violence against women and girls. Welcome, Kavitha.
We will start with a general question about what is involved in the roles that you both play. If you can reply as briefly as possible please, we will then move on to the substance of the session.
Simon Bryant: I am the director of public health; my role is about improving health, which is a statutory duty for the council. As part of that, I also lead on domestic abuse and the implementation of the Domestic Abuse Act, chairing the partnership board, which—alongside other partnership boards—has been really helpful in implementing the Act in Hampshire. I am a statutory officer, so my other role is to advise councillors in the local area and lead partnership work in many different parts of public health.
The Chair: What advantages do you think that brings—working in that collaborative, multiagency way?
Simon Bryant: In public health, we are very used to partnership working from many years, as are others. For me, it is hard work bringing that together because the partners have different agendas. Hopefully, I bring the ability to see across the system and help partners have the vision of a system rather than inter-agency working; that is why I really value chairing the partnership. We are bringing that public health perspective to understanding need and understanding populations and inequalities so that we can get to the root of the problem, tackle it and improve outcomes.
The Chair: So it is about the bigger picture and looking at root causes. Kavitha, tell us about your role.
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: I sit within the community safety team in the local authority and support the domestic abuse partnership. That includes commissioning our local front-line domestic abuse services to ensure that we are delivering needs-based support locally. We also have oversight of safeguarding, and our team co-ordinates the domestic abuse MARAC. I strategically oversee our domestic abuse-related death reviews, which of course involve a lot of partnership working. In Kingston, our governance sits under the domestic abuse and violence against women and girls strategic board, which we co-ordinate. Alongside that, we also have a survivors’ forum. A big part of the work that our team does is in co-production; our recent ending violence against women and girls’ strategy was co-produced with survivors from start to finish. I find a lot of benefit in partnership working because—as Simon was saying—domestic abuse is everybody’s business. A lot of local authorities strive to achieve a co-ordinated community response model, so there is a real benefit in partnership working.
Q119 Baroness Sugg: As we are looking at the impact of the Act, I would be interested to know your thoughts on the difference it has made to multiagency working since it was introduced. If you see any remaining gaps, it would be great if you could highlight those. Simon, I will start with you.
Simon Bryant: The Act has been really helpful in putting this on a statutory footing and bringing the partnership board in on that basis. We already had a partnership board in Hampshire; there were a number of agencies involved as we are a two-tier authority, but having the Act really strengthened the board and put it on a similar footing to the safeguarding partnerships, which was extremely helpful. In that respect the Act has been fantastic. It has also meant that other agencies stepped even further up their input to the partnership. When a partnership is voluntary, people only think it is important when they have a role. The guidance behind the Act has also been helpful; there are some things that could improve it even further, but it is what we want to do.
As we heard previously, children are victims. What does that mean for us as a system? We all have to understand that. As a partnership, we can carefully and professionally hold each other to account for delivering different aspects of the Act.
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: I agree with Simon that it has given us a common language that was really needed. Domestic abuse has been a priority for the local authority; it is one of our top priorities for the community safety partnership, but we now have agencies that we can not only hold to account, but that are internally looking at their own processes and have domestic abuse policies in place. The feedback we have received from front-line professionals is that the definition is important—moving away from that idea that domestic abuse is only physical. A lot of work has been carried out locally around the concept of coercive and controlling behaviour, and we are trying to upskill professionals to understand the signs. Those have been really positive changes.
The reality of being an outer London borough is that the duty has put a lot of statutory responsibilities on us, but funding has not necessarily come alongside that. We are a very passionate team of violence against women and girls leads; we have all been IDVAs in our past lives. There is a lot of passion and a lot of innovation, but we have very limited resources, and we struggle with that.
The Chair: We will come to the resource issue in the course of this discussion.
Baroness Sugg: I was born in Kingston Hospital, so it is good to hear about all the work you are doing there. You mentioned survivors; they are obviously incredibly important. Do you feel the implementation of the Act has helped you to involve survivors in your work?
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: Yes, absolutely. We have been using the co-production model in Kingston for a few years now. The ending VAWG strategy was one thing, but every time we have a new policy, or go through a recommissioning process—even with our children’s services early help strategy—people are coming into our survivors forum and giving feedback. There is a feedback loop going back to them to say what we done with the work that they have done. That is something we have integrated, and the Act has supported it.
Q120 Baroness Neate: In our previous agency session we heard about domestic homicide reviews that state that a whole multitude of agencies were involved in the victim’s life, but nevertheless the worst possible outcome happened. With that in mind, in terms of multiagency collaboration, what would you say are the factors that make the difference for survivor outcomes?
Simon Bryant: At the practitioner level, they need to work together when they do domestic abuse-related reviews. There is a danger that we say it is all about communication; it is also important to really understand the risk and try to embed that understanding in all organisations. As we heard earlier, children’s services and adult services probably understand this better than primary care settings. In Hampshire, my team commissions services to upskill agencies that are not central to domestic abuse, so that they can pick up the risk and act on it.
As you say, it is very sad when we get a domestic abuse-related learning. In Hampshire, one of the challenges we have is that this is a district responsibility; trying to get the learning out can be very slow because the process of approval from the Home Office takes such a long time and agencies are, for some reason, reticent to share the learning before it comes out. We want the learning quickly; it is really important to speed up that process so that we can make a difference.
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: In Kingston we have benefited from the learning that comes from the domestic abuse-related death review process—as tragic as it is—and our partners are really interested in being part of that learning. Some of that comes from the fact that you get an independent consultant, somebody who is not part of the partnership, coming in to support you. It really helps if agencies look at the process from a learning perspective and not as taking the blame. We have also followed through with some innovative ideas. For example, a key theme in one of our domestic abuse-related death reviews was the complete lack of professional curiosity; I know that has come up time and time again in a lot of reports. So we worked with our professionals to develop a professional curiosity toolkit based on what they thought would be helpful to them. The feedback loop, which I have mentioned in relation to survivors, is also important with professionals too, and the DARDRs help to give us a foundation for that.
Simon Bryant: Training the chair is also really important. Because I have 11 districts with different chairs, I see a marked difference in the quality of chairing, so setting standards could be quite helpful. In a unitary authority it is probably slightly different.
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: In our case, obviously, we have an independent consultant who comes in and does that for us, who has already been trained.
Q121 Baroness Porter of Fulwood: Simon, you have called out the impact of the Act in recognising children as victims in their own right. Could you both say a little more about multiagency working with regard to children; where is it working and where is it not? The slight challenge of a lack of integration between multiagency services for children and multiagency services for adult victims also got called out in the last session; how do you see those coming together?
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: It is a welcome change to have children recognised as victims; that brings an understanding of childhood trauma. But the feedback I have had from our children’s services colleagues is that no operational guidance has come out alongside that, particularly around early trauma-informed intervention for children and therapeutic support. We do not have funding for that locally. We are still focusing on the crisis management statutory thresholds, and there is a lack of capacity for early therapeutic work.
One of the ways we try to integrate the adult and child model is to have an IDVA who sits with our social care teams; there is then a crossover of discussions about families as a whole.
I want to mention another gap; still keeping my domestic abuse hat on, I am also doing work on exploitation. We see a direct link involving children who are at risk of exploitation at a later stage in adolescence, who predominantly come from homes where there is domestic abuse. We see that link in Kingston time and time again; we are trying to do innovative things to reach out at an early stage, because what then often happens is that they often go on to become adults perpetrating abuse on to partners and to their parents. This is another cycle that I do not necessarily feel the Act identifies, or what the resources we can put in place for that as well.
Simon Bryant: The Act has helped a long way our understanding of the impact domestic violence has on children. In terms of safeguarding children, that understanding was probably there beforehand, but in a different guise. From my perspective—particularly with the accommodation duty, where there are a few children—there are many more children being supported in the community than in care, and the Act does not focus on them in the same way. Thinking really far back, we already have long-standing programmes such as Op Encompass where schools get informed but, again, that is not embedded in the Act; it is slightly outside. Going back to Kavitha’s point, how can we bring all aspects of this together to prevent problems right at the beginning, rather than just dealing with those at the acute end? The established mechanisms work quite well, but how do we bring in education and others? I suspect many children who are going through CAMHS have experienced family trauma. It is about bringing the whole system in to think about children, rather than just one aspect.
The Chair: On that point about operational guidance being necessary, people say they understand the message—that children are also victims—but they do not know what to do with that information. Certainly, the police do not seem to know what to do with it. That is something we have to be mindful of in writing up our report.
Q122 Baroness Hussein-Ece: In your experience, how well do you think the Act is operating in guiding multiagency support for minoritised victims and survivors? In the earlier session, we heard from people who work in specialist services on the impact of referrals going straight to them. You are from statutory services; how well do you think multiagency support is signposted for victims and survivors, and how well are they guided to what they need?
Simon Bryant: In Hampshire, we have a majority white population but we also have Nepalese and white minority ethnic groups. There is no common data set of reports so it is quite hard to pull that data out. Our services certainly aim to meet the needs of different minority communities, and the Act has helped because it identifies inequalities in different groups—that is really positive—and the barriers they face. It is difficult in Hampshire as diverse populations are small, but we have a number of specialist programmes for those communities, so the Act has been really helpful. The new funding on dispersed accommodation has been really positive because different groups can access that in a different way to a refuge; it has been helpful in other circumstances from minority groups as well. As I said to your colleague earlier, this is about our services enabling, educating, and facilitating communities to understand their role in domestic abuse; a key part of that is changing the community and helping the community to support their own.
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: Based on our experience in Kingston, we would mirror criticisms of the voluntary sector service. The failure to include safe, comprehensive pathways, particularly for victim survivors with no recourse to public funds, has posed a tremendous challenge. The Act creates an expectation that we should protect everyone, but it leaves a financial vacuum around migrant women. Going back to what I said earlier about having to be innovative with limited resources, in Kingston we have the Cambridge Road Estate, where over 50% of the population are from minoritised communities. There is institutional mistrust, and that is a barrier a lot of times for minoritised victim survivors. We have therefore tried to embed services on to the estate through what we call a sisterhood sanctuary, so that there is a space for women to come in. There is also a minority outreach worker who is trying to do some work within that community, although again, there is an issue around funding.
In addition we have what we call standalone honour-based abuse high-risk MARACs—multiagency risk assessment conferences. Why did we do that? These are really complex cases; we did not feel we had the specialism as a partnership. We then have consultancy; we bring in the Asian Women’s Resource Centre to consult on those cases. Ideally, we would want to commission an entire specialist service to be sitting within our domestic abuse services but, because we do not have that funding capability, we are trying to use consultancy methods. That is quite a significant gap within the Act, and areas such as ours are trying to be as creative as we can.
Simon Bryant: I would support that. We developed an immigration toolkit in the same way; we have to do a lot of innovation locally, not because the Act is missing but because it does not specify that area. We are therefore developing our work on these issues and thinking about working with our university and academic partners to get some proper constructive research in this area; it is really important and sometimes missing.
Q123 Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: We have begun to touch on this a little bit, but Part 4 of the Act outlines local authority provisions, including that important accommodation-based support for victims and their children. I will come to you first, Kavitha; how well do you think the intentions of that provision have been implemented, and how could that implementation be improved?
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: The feedback from our housing colleagues is that it is a challenging situation for our team, particularly given London’s current housing crisis. In terms of safe accommodation for domestic abuse survivors in Kingston, we have refuges, and the other safe-housing pathway is the emergency temporary accommodation process. However, most of our victim-survivors tend to be placed outside Kingston in different boroughs; housing teams then find it difficult to follow up with a support network. We are again trying to be innovative; we have a housing IDVA through our commissioning service who sits with our housing teams and tries to smooth some of those processes, but it is very difficult. Our housing team understand the frustration of a lot of our voluntary sector colleagues, but it boils down to having very limited stock and having to work with other boroughs. That is the challenge we are seeing.
Simon Bryant: Our experience is very similar. We have a whole-housing approach in working with our tier 2 districts as well, and that has been really positive, but, like London, the south-east also has a housing challenge. I do not know if it is more of a challenge in the rest of the country, but we really struggle with move-on accommodation; there is a lack of social housing stock in our district, so we have to work out what we should do in that space. As I have said, there is some really good practice around the domestic abuse housing approach; we are also part of a working party around reciprocal schemes. I know people may not want to move, but if they want to swap geographies, how do that in a way that is one-for-one and really positive?
While we can move victims into safe accommodation, I would rather we left them in their own homes; that does not happen so much. I focus on that a lot. How can we use other services to enable women—mainly women—to stay safe in their own homes? But the accommodation-based service has been really positive and helpful.
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: Whether victim-survivors are moved into properties or remain in Kingston, we try to build a support network around them. I go back to the funding element. We have a lot of fantastic local charities offering support, such as Voices of Hope; it runs our women’s hub, but it also does multiple other things, for instance around food poverty and financial instability. However, it is not eligible to apply for large pots of grant funding related to violence against women and girls because it is not a specific domestic abuse or violence against women and girls’ service. I want to raise that point, as it is one of the challenges in supporting grass-roots level charities. It is important to bring them in; domestic abuse does not happen in a vacuum; there is intersectionality with so many different things. That is another thing we struggle with.
The Chair: Thank you for raising that; it is helpful.
Q124 Baroness Gohir: That nicely brings me on to a question about funding. What are the issues for local authorities and agencies working together? You may also want to highlight good practice. You have touched upon it already, but I am particularly interested in whether there are specialist organisations—any kind of specialism—that get left behind. You also mentioned that you have a passionate team, full of innovative ideas, but do not have the funding. If you had the funding, what innovations—such as the professional curiosity tool you touched upon—would you consider?
The Chair: That is a great question. What would an inventor choose if anything could be afforded?
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: A wish list. Funding-wise, I have touched upon a few things around our local charities; another one is our domestic abuse-related death reviews. We do not get any funding for those; we do fund them but we do not have the budget for them. Central funding would be tremendous because of the value of what comes out of those reviews and the changes they bring.
Historically, we have had one year of funding at a time, which causes instability, so we welcome multi-year funding, particularly with MOPAC. We definitely want to see more of that longer-term funding rather than short term crisis funding so that we can plan and work with our local charities. If we had further funding, we would love to expand the work that we do with our survivors; as I mentioned, we do a lot of co-production work, but we have one survivors forum and we would love to expand that. Kingston University is currently working with us because it is keen to have a survivor forum within the university. I would love to replicate the satellite model on our Cambridge Road Estate in other parts of Kingston. Funding for community-based therapeutic care for women and children is essential, and any support we can get with statutory safety for migrant women is important. But multi-year security gives our team the ability to plan ahead of an eight or nine-month funding plan.
The Chair: That sounds like an interesting and challenging list; thank you.
Simon Bryant: I agree with all that; the three-year funding settlement has been really helpful, and going from year to year was unhelpful, although I know that it is not unusual. The Ministry of Justice funding is on a different cycle, which is challenging; we use that funding on our service for those perpetrating harm, which is the other side of the issue. We need to help people who are causing harm to understand, challenge and change their behaviours; without that we will not get anywhere.
Some funding does not take inflationary uplifts into account; you get the grant, and it is three years of the same amount—you are basically cutting your service, because pay rises. I agree with the comment about the cost of domestic abuse-related death reviews, but I would put a different slant on it. Safeguarding adult and children reviews are done in a very different, more cost-effective way. If domestic abuse-related reviews are costly, can we find a better way of doing them? I would focus on children and young people for funding, and those coming out of safe accommodation; safe accommodation is really well funded but there are a lot of young people on our waiting list for counselling. I would also add that we need to help people who are both victims and perpetrators and who have co-occurring issues with drugs and alcohol services to get the right support for everything. As you say, these issues are not isolated. Suicide prevention is important and coming right up the agenda; I do not think we have grasped that. I also lead on suicide prevention and see that crossover as really important. Many people under mental health services experience domestic abuse, particularly women, so I would focus on those areas.
Q125 The Chair: If there is anything that you would like to add, please put it in writing to us. Is there anything you would like to say before you go?
Kavitha Ramakrishnan: Another thing to highlight that we are seeing locally, where we feel there is a bit of a gap in the Act, is that there is not really a difference when we are looking at intimate partner violence and familial abuse and what we see on the ground in child-parent abuse. We know that it is rapidly increasing at a local level, so having more support and guidance would be really helpful. The partnership is looking at it locally and we are doing a deep dive on our data to try to understand this emerging theme.
Secondly, I would highlight that a local domestic abuse-related death review has brought to light the gap around dementia and domestic abuse, and the need to support older victims. We are working locally with the Silver Project to develop training for our professionals, but it is a hidden cohort of people and we would really welcome some guidance on that as well.
The Chair: That is very interesting; thank you for raising that.
Simon Bryant: Child-to-parent violence—involving adult children and teenage children—is really important. We should embed trauma-informed practice across the whole of the spectrum so that victims are treated and supported in the right way by all agencies. How do we embed the diversity of survivor experience?
I really welcome the Act. I see other Acts of Parliament come through, such as the well-being Act and its focus on the safeguarding aspect of domestic abuse. How do we bring this back to the whole spectrum of domestic abuse? We do not see it much in the new NHS legislation, but it is key. How do we embed this Act into other legislation so that agencies looking at this more closely can relate to this legislation as well? It will impact on health and other things.
The Chair: On previous occasions we have heard in evidence about a gap that might need to be filled in relation to boyfriend-girlfriend relationships under the age of consent; for instance, 15 year-olds being abusive towards their girlfriends and young girls accepting abusive relationships.
I want to thank you both; this was really useful and you gave your evidence in such succinct and clear ways. It was wonderful, and I am indebted to you. This is the conclusion of the public evidence session.
