20
Examination of witness
Dame Nicole Jacobs.
Q170 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee, which is looking at a piece of legislation passed in 2021, five years ago. We are looking at whether it is achieving all the things that had been hoped for at the time of it being legislated. This is what is called post-legislative scrutiny. We have been hearing evidence from many people, and today we are going to hear evidence from the person who probably knows so much more than any of us, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. I am going to introduce her to everyone.
Dame Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, was appointed the first Domestic Abuse Commissioner in 2019. Dame Nicole Jacobs has dedicated her career to supporting victims and survivors. She has nearly 30 years’ experience in domestic abuse services, policy and intervention. During this time, she has worked as an independent domestic violence advocate and co-ordinated the community response to domestic abuse in the United Kingdom. She has also been the CEO of Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse. She has a lifetime’s experience. It is really wonderful to see you here, Dame Nicole. Welcome.
First, we wanted some quick background from you. We have consistently been hearing that the police still have a tendency to treat domestic abuse instance by instance. It is incident based. They are given a call-out, they arrive at a scene, and they deal with that particular incident, rather than focusing on a pattern of behaviour. In particular, there is that issue of coercion and control, which was introduced into the legislation five years ago. Whether that is fully understood is one of the questions we are addressing.
What needs to be done to change the incident-based aspect of this and turn it into more of an overall understanding of the history and patterns of behaviour that might be in the background? What needs to be done to ensure that our national police forces address the current regional variations in police response? We are hearing evidence that there is a difference in different parts of the country.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Good morning, everyone. I am really thrilled to be here and really pleased to see all the evidence you have gathered. I will not go into all of what you already know about this issue, and I will try to target your specific question. For coercive and controlling behaviour, you have to get over a couple of obstacles. First, police have to get to know the victim, which sounds really obvious. The victim has to be able to trust what the police are doing at this really quite confusing moment when they have called for relief, but they are not particularly sure what crime they are reporting. They may be reporting a whole range of crimes, but they will not know the actual names of those crimes, such as coercive and controlling behaviour. There is a need to decipher what they are reporting from the points of view of both the victim-survivor and the police.
You have heard from Amanda Robinson from Project Bright Light in one of your committees. It is probably one of the most illuminating pieces of work I could point you towards because those academics—who obviously you will know helped with bringing us Operation Soteria—in Avon and Somerset have interrogated exactly that early point of contact. They have found that response officers, first, do not have information in front of them, so they do not see the range of incidents and what the context is. That obviously puts the victim in further danger, and possibly them. Secondly, they do not have the time, training and confidence to understand all that is presented to them at first response.
We get very focused on conviction rates, which are very important, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who report to the police, and in that very first instance when you are trying to detect coercive and controlling behaviour, everything we do is setting the police up to fail. They do not have the information, the time, the confidence and the training, and they do not have that ability to build that bridge with the victim. What you would have to do about that is what they are actually doing in Avon and Somerset: they are having to reconfigure so much of how they organise their front-line response. That is something the Government should look at in the immediate term, and the National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection could help with that. Police reform also has a huge role to play in that.
The other thing that the Government could do quite imminently, because it is in their gift, is to look at the referral pathways to specialist support. Again, in Avon and Somerset, they found that you have a police force that is looking at different local authorities, seeing different referral pathways to that help and support for victims, including the domestic abuse services and the sexual violence services—they are all slightly different and all interacting with the police in a different way. That is confusing enough, but one of the other things they found was that, because of our definition of domestic abuse, they have little to no referral pathway for wider family violence—for example, adult child to parent violence, which they counted happening 20% to 25% of the time. Therefore, you cannot build that trust with victims and you cannot spend time understanding what they need. All that results in not bringing the right information forward on coercive and controlling behaviour.
The police will pick the most obvious crime that they think is committed, often an incident-focused crime, and they will record that and pursue that. Or they ask the victim, “Well, what do you want to do?” Then they may “no further action” it, which is the vast majority of the time. There are ways that you could add more coherent scaffolding in and around the police in those specialist services, to make that understanding with the police and that trust-building much easier for them to achieve. There is a lot there that is very practical.
Q171 The Chair: I am going to pick up on one thing there that came out of some evidence we heard. I will describe one of the suggestions that was made; I do not know whether this happens anywhere. A call is made to the police, “My husband’s just thrown his food at the wall and is screaming his head off at me”, or whatever. Would it not be possible for the person at the call centre to do two things: first, get on to the police saying, “Get to number 43 Crescent Drive”; secondly, look up something on the computer that says, “Just to let you know, you’ve been called to this address five times before”? The police officers going out to that one may not know that their colleagues have been there on other occasions. That could be done at that early stage, but apparently it is not done very often.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: That is right. In addition to that, what the academics found in the Project Bright Light work is that, in Avon and Somerset, for those five times, you would have to individually open up the reports—that would take 45 minutes—to understand the context of what happened. They could see that, in Avon and Somerset, the majority of the time women in particular were being arrested who were often victims earlier on. The police did not understand a lot of the context of that, because if you just hear that you have been there five times, you do not really know why and what the context of any of that was.
I am sure that there are ways to do this that need to be urgently prioritised, such as the use of AI or better data systems, to extract the relevant information for the police so that they show up knowing the full context, at least in summary. I hear that happening as an idea, but that is something the Government could prioritise urgently. I am sure that the national centre is thinking about this, but the point is that we can see that there is not a coherent push for the key changes we want to see in all 43 forces to drive these improvements.
The levers for that are very weak, frankly. I worry that we will start talking about police reform as if this will change at all—it could with the right leadership, but that is still going to be quite a few years in the making. There is so much we should be doing right now. I applaud Avon and Somerset and others. Other forces are doing things such as using algorithms. There is a lot going on, but I would argue that, by the time you are hitting the algorithm for the victim, you are way too late. You are hitting an algorithm because you have already had how many call-outs.
I do not understand why we do not focus as early as possible on the quality of that interaction. I am not saying that every victim will want to pursue a statement and we are looking for a 100% conviction rate. However, we have to achieve two things. First, are the police doing everything they can at that point of early contact? Secondly, is it clear to the victim who is there to support them for that wider support? Many years ago I used to support victims but also call the police and have a partnership with the police, so that if things were happening and there was more information to be told, I knew who to call and how to facilitate that.
We have really lost a lot of those excellent working relationships between the police and wider support services. That is something that the Government absolutely can construct and build towards, because they hold a lot of the commissioning arrangements. They could make that happen in the way they commission services, and they could use funding to help achieve that. That requires join-up.
Q172 Lord Russell of Liverpool: One of the issues that we have raised more than once in recent Bills is the idea of having a unique victim identification number. Do you think that would possibly help? How practical is that?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: It would help in that you would be able to understand victims who have moved between force areas. I do not know whether you could achieve that with other IT solutions. If there is a technical way you could achieve the same thing would be outside my understanding. However, it is true that victims get lost in the system. This is exactly what you mean. If “Nicole Jacobs” reported to the police, you could not see how my data proceeds from the police through to the CPS potentially, through to the court and through to the outcome. That holds us back considerably because we know the data only in silos, so we cannot figure out the demographic data or any intersecting issues that we would be very curious and desperate to know. To achieve the ability to do that would be game-changing, without any doubt.
Baroness Gerada: I was going to ask a very similar question. I will just comment because there are so many echoes of what you are saying in my own profession in general practice. General practice is moving from a relational-based profession to a transactional one. It sounds very similar to what you are describing but even worse. You do not have a unique record because these are victims, not perpetrators of violence, so there is no criminal record, if you like. I assume that, for the perpetrators, the police do not spend 45 minutes; they do just a touch of a button with a summary record, et cetera. It is just the victims who do not have a record. Is that right?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: No, it would be for the whole of the record. The police do not have the ability to look at that address or any of the parties involved and have a very quick way of understanding the context of anyone.
Baroness Gerada: There is no summary record? You cannot go on to “Clare Gerada” and see a record of my criminal behaviour?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: There would be a summary record of incidents. It would be recorded in police systems, but it would be onerous to be able to open it and see it at one point. The only place you would see a very quick summary would be on something called the police national computer, which only records convictions. The vast majority of what you would want to know would not necessarily be there.
Q173 Baroness Gerada: We have heard a lot of evidence here—some very disturbing evidence—about the rise of online and cyber abuse. How is the system now adapting to that? How are you supporting victims with respect to that? What is your sense? How can we protect them?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: There is such a range of what we see going on online that would fall under violence against women and girls, and I am sure you have heard about a lot of that. For victims of domestic abuse, often the online abuse part is ignored because it is part of that wider pattern of coercion and controlling behaviour, so it may not be as obvious or as clear. Going back to what we have said, often what you hear in police responses is they will understand that there is an online element, but because it is hard for them to get the co-operation from tech companies, they will pick something easier to record and pursue rather than the online element.
Baroness Gerada: I am not an expert, but we were hearing about computers being hacked so people can follow and read all the emails, and phones being hijacked so that they can track someone. How can we protect women and girls from this?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: There are several ways. There is no easy way because perpetrators use the tools they have in front of them and have access to. The tech—all sorts of tracking devices and instruments, which are often created for other purposes—are misused because they have not had safety by design as a principle. That is very hard to detangle.
In the here and now, there is something about the ability for victims very quickly to get the right advice, and we are not investing enough in that. There is advice they get from the police, obviously—we have just talked about that. That could be vastly improved in terms of taking that on as a topic rather than sidestepping it because that is, in essence, what happens quite a lot with the front-line police response.
There is another thing that is critical that could be done here and now. You have heard from the organisation Refuge, which has tech expertise. We need much more expertise within specialist services about how they help with tracking devices and all the ways that these tools are being used. That has changed some of the current work of those front-line services coming into Refuge—including helplines and community-based services—as they have to do a tech screening to make sure that all that is taken care of. That requires support and expertise. I do not understand why there is not some movement, both in the private sector and in the Government, to help specialist services to arm up for that. That is the immediate impact.
There are a couple of other things that the Government could do better. One is at DSIT. I spend a lot of time across all departments, and I have a fairly good understanding of their activity. When the VAWG strategy was published, my team and I tracked where the activity was across government and in each department, where they were looking at their respective actions. DSIT is one of two departments that does not have a working group. What that means is—
The Chair: I am going to call you up on acronyms because some people watching will not know what DSIT means.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: DSIT is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It would have the remit for anything that relates to responding to the harms from technology—good and bad, but in this case the harms. That government department needs much more proactively to bring together those on the front line and victim-survivors to hear about these emerging trends, because it is hearing them first. That is the only way to try to get ahead. However, it tends to be quite reactive and we are hearing about it later. It is not convening those stakeholders who are trying to help victims in a systematic way. That is holding us back. It means we are reactive instead of proactive.
I am sure you have heard a bit about this. On the prevention side of this, with children and young people, there are some commitments within the violence against women and girls’ strategy. Right now, the Department for Education has, in essence, taken the funding that it committed to—a £5 million fund and a £1 million fund—and delegated the Youth Endowment Fund to start commissioning more work that relates to this in schools and in building teacher confidence.
However, I think that we would all agree that that does not sound proactive enough. With the level of harm that tech is causing, and with the need to get to children and young people in a meaningful way, we need to accelerate that much faster. Those are modest commitments, if you think of all the schools and places where we want to reach young people in England and Wales.
The Chair: There cannot be enough hours in your day, but do the police invite you in to come and speak to people?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Yes.
The Chair: I imagine you would end up doing that quite often.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: I view that very much as my job: to interact with not only the Government and local government but the statutory leaders. I regularly meet with the CPS and with police leaders. I recently observed police training at the Met. Just a couple of weeks ago, I spoke to about 600 senior officers in the Met. The Met is not the only example; these are just recent examples. I meet with police and crime commissioners and police leaders as much as I possibly can, because I am always looking for excellent practice and to gain understanding about what is needed.
The Chair: This has been raised before with us, but in their training is it raised that there is quite a high level of domestic abuse inside the families of those who work in police forces?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: There are some vetting changes that have been made recently, which I really welcome. From the time I started in this role to now, the Home Office in various iterations has inched towards—then in recent times really raced towards—very practical changes in vetting and recruitment, things that should have been happening a long time ago. For example, if someone is charged with a VAWG-related crime, none of us would have any expectation that the person would carry on in policing duties. Policing is such a special and trusted role.
Things have really moved along there, but one thing has not moved along. Again, I keep worrying that we are going to wait for police reform to fix all this, but I do not know how many years that will take. In my own criminal justice report, we used the powers of our office to ask police forces, “What are you doing as a result of the super complaint about police-perpetrated domestic abuse? Do you have a policy? Do you have independent support for victims who come to you? Do you have some kind of arrangement for an independent oversight, maybe with another force, that will allow for victims to feel that it will not be the officers’ colleagues who are looking at some of these things?” The vast majority of forces do not have anything in place. That is just the truth of it.
Some forces have brought in some independent support, including the Met Police, for example. There are organisations, such as Hestia, which are working in several police forces. It is not to say that absolutely nothing has happened, but, going back to first principles, victims must feel supported to trust systems totally, so that they can say everything they are concerned about. They have to be supported to trust systems that they are being taken seriously. If the support and policies are not in place, none of us would have that trust moving forward.
It is a really mixed bag. I have to say that there is very slow progress. If you are a police leader thinking about what you know you must fix, those are obvious things that you must fix in every force. It lets really good officers down.
Q174 Baroness Hussein-Ece: You touched on this already. The statutory definition requires both the perpetrator and the victim to be aged 16 and over, as you know, in order for domestic abuse to apply. However, we have heard quite a bit about how this fails to capture domestic abuse in teenage relationships for those under 16, but also when the perpetrator in a family setting is under 16—it might be against the mother, for example. What advice would you give to the Government on how this can be addressed?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Lowering the age to 16 was a huge step forward. Some people in this room were instrumental in helping to define children as victims in their own right. There are lots of ways I can see that that has had a cultural impact in terms of the family court and our avenues into being much more assertive for children in many areas. That is an achievement. However, where we are still held back is when you have violence within teenage relationships and feeling that the definition does not fit them. The Home Office is undertaking some work about this because it is not quite as easy as saying it is a definite lowering of an age or not, because you obviously then have child safeguarding factors and all sorts of provisions of legal remedy and support.
The way it boils down is that there are two things to achieve immediately. The first is being able to understand this in data. It is tragic to talk to families where they have lost a child in domestic homicide, for example, or there has been serious stalking abuse, but it is not counted. You hear, “I can’t be a victim of domestic abuse”. That is about the way we collect data. That is one thing the Government could correct very quickly; they could create an expectation that the data is captured.
Secondly, and for me most importantly, we have to ask: operationally, what support do you give? There are some really excellent examples, such as Croydon setting up an adolescent team within children’s social care. In Northumberland’s MASH, in its early referral pathways, they have someone whose only job is to make sure they are giving support and advice for teenage relationship abuse. Why are we not doing that in absolutely every single children’s social care and early help hub? That is what would really help in the here and now.
If we were to try to pass that and only fix that through legislation, I guarantee you that we would be sitting here in another year or two, waiting for some of that to happen. The Government can do that and absolutely should do that in their plans. When I say “plans”, I mean the violence against women and girls’ strategy and within Families First, which is the huge reform for children’s social care. It should be really clear that every area should put these kinds of positions in place. Again, the Government could do that, they could require that and they could help areas learn from each other. That is achievable.
The Chair: I really want to understand what is at the heart of what you are saying. We have heard concerns about 15 year-olds replicating some stuff that we see in adult relationships and battering their girlfriends. Not just, “You can’t do this, you can’t see her, you’re not to be friendly with that person”—not just control but actual physical violence. Of course, it is not helped by the fact that there is so much pornographic material that displays that kind of thing. What seemed to be coming through was a call for a revisiting of the lower age. However, you are saying that that is not the route to start going down, and instead we should look at social services departments having particular units that deal with this kind of violence inside relationships between adolescents. Is that right?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: I am slightly saying a little of both. I am pleased that the Home Office is taking this on, to look at it and to understand what the implications are of lowering the age. However, the action-oriented person in me would say, “That’s great. While you’re doing that, there’s plenty you could be doing that would help victims and young perpetrators to have much more targeted help and support”. That is the priority. I know the Government could do that if they had the willingness in certain ways, because they have the opportunities in some larger programmes of work.
Lord Polak: Can I just push you a bit further on that, Nicole? There seems to be a disconnect. When you as the Domestic Abuse Commissioner turn around and mention two areas where things are being done well, and you say to the Government, whichever bit of government that is, “These are good. Let’s roll this out”. Where is the disconnect? Why is that not happening?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Some of the answer is that that should be happening. We have committed to it in the violence against women and girls’ strategy and the Families First programme of work. This encourages much more multiagency working, which in code means working with domestic abuse services. In my office, we are trying to be much more forensic about it. I have just been thinking about how each area has an implementation plan for Families First. This is not just a few million pounds; this is two point something billion pounds for Families First. That should be resulting in quite serious movement in family hubs, all sorts of early help and the kinds of things that will address teenage relationship abuse. That should be culminating in all those things. That is what we have been promised.
Some of my job is to look at that and be provocative with Ministers, who I know want to achieve these things. When you start really interrogating those implementation plans and seeing how things are coming out in the wash, if you will, then is the time to say that this clearly is either cutting it or not. I could name a couple of other areas, but I could not say that I am absolutely confident that every area has this coming and is planning for it. That feels quite urgent.
The Chair: That sounds like something we should really be heard on.
Q175 Baroness Porter of Fulwood: We have heard a lot, over the course of the past few months, about the success of the Drive Partnership and its focus on high-harm, high-risk serial perpetrators. Obviously, there are a lot of perpetrators who fall outside of that group, and people have raised concerns about whether they have access to relevant programmes. The rollout nationally of the positive requirements in the DAPO pilots is obviously meant to be part of addressing that issue. Could you say a little about how you see that working?
In your evidence today, you have brought out some pros and cons of when services and programmes are provided both at a national level—people’s ability to access them and their simplicity and uniformity—and at a very local level, where there is a degree of experimentation and local needs. There are lots of pros of very small organisations providing them. Could you say a little about that and your views on the ramifications in terms of how some of the commissioning for this should be set up as those DAPO programmes are rolled out?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Just taking on the overarching Drive Partnership initiative, I have really welcomed that because it has been something that the Home Office has supported. That is to say, in every area we want this oversight for high-harm perpetrators—in other words, perpetrators who are very well known to the police. You probably hear this a lot in this committee, but we place a lot of expectation on this new National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection, and rightly so. It is a huge issue, and it needs the resource and bandwidth to do this.
However, the Drive Partnership is not the only initiative. There are ways that police forces are using algorithms; I am sure you have heard about the top 100. There are various tools and methods—from Drive Partnership and beyond—that I still feel need a real reconciliation to be able to make it clear what good looks like in every single force area, regardless of how many forces we are headed towards, or local responses and regional responses. That requires a real bringing together of these methods, and almost a decision on these varying methods that forces are using and how to bed them down into something we would reasonably expect everywhere. That is just one thing.
So much that we do flies in the face of holding perpetrators to account, whichever ones, whether they are very well known to us or not. There are constant breaches of orders that go unenforced. There are lots of issues that relate to not holding perpetrators to account—and we are not talking about early release, but that is another emerging issue. There is so much to do there that the Home Office needs to get behind. It has done, I know, but it needs to invest in not just the Drive Partnership but piecing that all together. That is still missing, as good a step forward as that has been. In terms of the range of work, I am pleased that organisations such as Respect have had some funding for a centre of excellence, so we can see better what they do earlier before it gets so bad.
I would like to talk for a couple of minutes about DAPOs. DAPOs are the orders that were created in the Domestic Abuse Act. I am really concerned about the piloting and implementation of DAPOs. I see that as more like one tool that you use. If you were implementing the Drive Partnership, that is a tool potentially to use as it rolls out. You have had a piloting of this type of order, and the pilot ends this November. The stated commitment of the Government is that there will be a rollout across England and Wales in January. There was an interim evaluation, which maybe you all have had some access to, but it is not in the public domain.
The Chair: Have you had access to it?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: I have not had access to it.
The Chair: The Commissioner has not had access?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: I have asked for it this week. I have asked for it again and again, in anticipation of coming here. There should be a final evaluation after the end of the pilot. Again, I want to point out to you that there is a bit of this rollout afoot and a commitment, but we have not seen a lot of the evaluation.
I wanted to raise something with you. Before you started, we talked about this triage function. Police or a family court identify a need for a DAPO and they refer to get that started. They decide what positive requirements they think are needed: should it be a mental health assessment? Should it be a behavioural change assessment or a substance misuse assessment? They refer that into a triage team. I have some information from a separate report from the triage team, which has been run by the same people who are rolling out the Drive Partnership, so they have a lot of understanding.
I want to make sure I am getting this right. When this reported, there were 281 referrals into the triage from all these various pilot sites. Some 97% of those were from the police. My first question is: why are the referrals not coming from the family courts? They are designed to do that. There has to be a reason why that is not happening. That is a question that needs to be answered.
Of those 281 referrals, there were 147 recommendations for this triage for positive requirements, and 82 of those 147 perpetrators attended the assessment. That means that the pilots found this early problem: it was voluntary. They were not mandated to attend. That has now been fixed in legislation by an provision in the Victim and Courts Act, but that has not been implemented yet. For the whole the pilot, we have not had the mandatory attending of an assessment in place. We have to test what happens when you mandate people to go to the assessment. That is really important for us to know.
Of the 82 who attended, 51 people took on a positive requirement for the DAPO. We started out with 281. We get very excited about the DAPOs because of these positive requirements, and 51 have ended up with a positive requirement: 43% for behavioural change, 30% for drug and alcohol and less than any percentage for a mental health assessment. The question there is: why are they allowed to pick only one positive requirement?
The Chair: That is crazy. Someone could have a drink problem but also have other problems.
Baroness Gerada: Is gambling included in there? Gambling and domestic violence are intimately linked.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Not for an assessment. There are a few things about this that we really have to understand before we roll this out. The other thing that was really important—
The Chair: Nicole, before you go on, which body is doing the interim and final assessments of DAPOs?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: It would be an independent contractor for the Home Office.
The Chair: Are they reporting to the Home Office?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Yes. The other thing they found in this triage report was that very often the victim—keep in mind that we are doing this for the victim—needed safeguarding actions well before things got to triage. If the police or the family court think, “We’re going to apply for a DAPO and get this in place. We’re going to recommend these positive requirements. We’ll go through triage”, that will take about three weeks. The triage report has said that those victims have needed some safeguarding much earlier, and it is only getting picked up at triage. That is worse than where we started with all this. Where you start with just a normal, regular non-molestation order, we would hope you would be doing that quite quickly.
Where is the family court? What are the timescale issues here in getting support to the victim? Why is there only one positive requirement? Is that good enough? What kind of funding is genuinely required to get this right for England and Wales? Keep in mind that you can only do a positive requirement if you have a behavioural change programme in your area. I feel like we are slightly kidding ourselves—if I have to be really frank—that we are ready for a rollout. We have to take this measure seriously. If it is meant to be the order that is much better for victims, we have to see what support is being put in place and what resource is needed to get this right. I can see some of your frustration, and I feel frustrated too.
The Chair: It has been some years now. This is not something that just happened last year; the Act came into existence in 2021 and then we had the business of some things having to be set up. We are quite far down the line now, and we have not had a report from whomever this independent entity is that is supposed to be overseeing the pilots and assessing them on the data.
Baroness Gerada: Can I ask a technical question? You said it is not mandatory, but with respect to someone attending a mental health assessment or even a drug and alcohol treatment, I thought you could not mandate unless it is covered in the Mental Health Act. Can you mandate? Is it a separate piece of legislation that you are looking for?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: In the pilots, there was this understanding that you could not do that. In a provision that was recently passed but has not been implemented yet, that loophole has been closed to mandate the assessment at least.
Baroness Gerada: To mandate the assessment but not the treatment.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: That is right.
Baroness Gerada: You cannot mandate mental health treatment.
The Chair: Nicole, is there anything else that you would like to say? Obviously, you are very concerned about the whole business of how DAPO is developing, and the prospect of having a rollout in January is looking very questionable. Is there anything you want to add to that? That seems concerning to me, too.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: I would not want to take the wind out of the sails of what a good idea it is. It is a good idea; that is why I am frustrated when I see it is not being implemented well enough for victims.
The Chair: I got the feel of the room, and your concerns are shared by us all.
Q176 Lord Polak: We discussed a little before about 16 and 17 year-olds, but of course the Act has named children as victims in their own right. That is right, but following on from the previous conversation just now, are they being looked after? What actions would you now say the Government need to take to make this more effective for children?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: My starting point is: if it is true that the headline commitment within the violence against women and girls’ strategy has been Families First—there has been the work in schools that I mentioned earlier and those commitments that are now being implemented through the Youth Endowment Fund—they should be really clear that the commitment is actually resulting in support for children, specifically for domestic abuse. I understand this ambition, but my worry is that they say, “We’ve done this big review of children’s social care. We’re now putting all our time and energy, from the Department for Education’s point of view, into correcting those basic services within children’s social care”.
However, what I know from doing the “Victims in Their Own Right?” report is that most areas still do not understand what we meant when we made that definition change in terms of services that should be in place. Children have said to me that they want specific help for recovering and understanding domestic abuse that they have been through and that has impacted them.
I feel slightly out of sync with the Government. Of course, within Families First there are family hubs and there is early help. Does that mean that when those decisions at are being taken a local level, that results in a colocation of domestic abuse services targeted for children and families in those family hubs? Is that happening? Are there counselling and support services for children? In theory, yes, but in actuality, I still question that, as I do with the police. We spend a lot of time trying to make these connections to the local in my office. That is not what I hear consistently. There has to be something more provocative with the Department for Education saying, “You have to show that and expect that”. We are not there yet. You need independent help for children in community-based and specialist support.
Lord Polak: You talked a little about positive examples before. Are there any positive examples of where the children are benefiting?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Oh, absolutely. There are positive examples.
Lord Polak: It would be useful for the committee to know where they are, to highlight that.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: We could send along some areas where we feel they have some good, positive examples.
The Chair: In my experience, one of the fears of women who are experiencing domestic abuse is that, on the one hand, they want it to stop and they are very concerned for their children, but on the other, they have fears about their children being taken away from them, even on a temporary basis. The automatic thing is, “If I call the police, they are immediately going to let the family hub and social services know. Then there is a risk that they will be round at my door and they will start questioning my mothering and so on, and I might find that they are all over us like a rash, and I will not be with my children”.
A lot of women really are as fearful of that as they are fearful of other kinds of consequences. What do you do about that? How is that managed when you have young police officers who are coming straight into the police force with a certain amount of training, but who may have never had direct experience of that kind of abuse or the fears that live in the hearts of mothers of children?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Thank you for raising that. The way you fix that, in part, is you offer victims independent support. That does not mean support that would not flag safeguarding concerns or address things properly with people who are not professional or trained well, but support that is situated in an independent service such as specialist domestic abuse services. Victims will say, “I can trust you”, and that helps them get over those hurdles of concerns.
Frankly, that is what a lot of our serious case reviews have said over and over. When you have some of that independent, community-based support—I am a huge believer in by-and-for support, meaning the more specific community-based support—you are more likely, just as a human being, to feel you will be able to talk to someone about your worst fears and concerns. They will help navigate these systems better and will advocate for the victim if they feel they are being mistreated or misunderstood. We have to bake that into our way of working and what we choose to prioritise in terms of funding. We are not doing that well enough.
The Chair: We have heard from some community groups that work with the police and with social services departments when necessary. It seems to me that the best outcomes are where they are very proactive. We had a marvellous woman from Exeter, who had very clear understanding of domestic abuse and who was absolutely marvellous in the way in which she could connect very quickly and easily with victims and gain their trust. That piece is one of the essential bits of all this because once it becomes, “I’m the Government. I’m here to help you”, it is not something that people often relish.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: I agree with you wholeheartedly. There is a way—this was of course debated in the Domestic Abuse Act but failed—to have that statutory provision of support, and which we achieved in Part 4 for accommodation-based services. There was a huge amount of work, which I very much supported, on creating a similar duty for children and community-based support. You are describing exactly what that is. That has been rejected. To this day, that funding is still very fragmented. It gets to these local services—although sometimes it does not—in various ways that could be vastly improved.
The Chair: One of the things that I am hoping will come out of our report is to try to push that up the agenda, because it is so essential.
Lord Polak: We pushed amendments on that. We tried very hard, but for some reason it did not succeed.
The Chair: We really have to ramp that up and let people see why it is so important.
Q177 Baroness Gohir: We have heard about migrant victims of domestic abuse. Their situation is worsened by the fact they have an insecure immigration status and cannot access public funds. In turn, the knock-on effect is they cannot get safe accommodation. Then there is the issue of a lack of a firewall between the police and immigration enforcement, and now we are hearing that the police will ask the victims for permission to disclose. It would be good to know what you think on how free and informed that consent is. How can these issues be addressed? Specifically on accommodation, what is your assessment of Part 4 of the Act, the duty of local authorities to provide safe accommodation? How well funded do you think it is nationally?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: On the issue of the firewall and asking for consent, I disagree with that obviously. That does not work in practice. If you put yourself in the position where the police have arrived, you are not sure and you have all these barriers. The imbalance there is such that there are so many ways that that will go wrong. It will not work. It needs to be straightforward—just a clear firewall. That clarity is the only way that you achieve anything there.
In fact, I cannot recall any police colleague I have ever talked to who said, “Nicole, please don’t argue for a firewall”. They do not see any reason why they would not have a firewall. I do not know why we do not just do that. Certainly, victims will say that. I very strongly agree with that provision and the need to change this idea of consent being sought. I do not even want to go down the road of if you did that, but what would have to be in place for you to really feel confident that there would be consent?
In terms of Part 4, the simple answer is it would be a lot easier to understand what has been achieved in Part 4 if local areas were required to submit that and that it was in a public-facing, clear document. There are returns and there is an exchange of information between MHCLG and local areas, but it does not culminate in, “Let’s have a look and see exactly what area this is, how many bed spaces there are, what kind of accommodation-based activity is happening, who is accessing those spaces and what the demographics are, so we can make sense of it”. That would make it much easier.
It has been a step forward, but there is very valid concern about the in-housing of the funds. In the data return, we should ask, “You were given X amount of money, how much of it did you spend on what?” That is important to know, but it is not something we know because what we hear from time to time is areas have decided to commission something out but not the full amount. They have kept some in-house. What has that been used for? That is the simple answer to that question.
Baroness Gohir: Specifically on transnational marriage abandonment victims, what could be done to support them? I know when they get back, they can access funding now, but is there more that can be done? It is a cohort that is quite often overlooked.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Yes. It is a lot about the transparency of what practice directions are being used within the family court. How often is that happening? Where is that happening? What kind of support is being put in place? In terms of the FCDO, some consulates will be very skilled and good. Is it clear that that is the case in all areas? This is where, for particular groups of people where very significant harm happens in smaller numbers, we have to have better transparency and oversight about what those mechanisms are and how they are being used. How do we bring that much more to light? Again, that is very achievable. It is just something that needs encouragement and to be given priority.
Q178 Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: We have heard that some victims’ experience of family courts can at times be as traumatising as the original abuse. Certainly, from when I was doing front-line work with women, some of whom I accompanied to a family court, I can absolutely recognise that characterisation, unfortunately. However, we have also heard some really positive things about the pathfinder courts pilot, which will be renamed the child-focused courts when rolled out nationally. What needs to be done to ensure these positives are retained and then developed in that national rollout when it comes?
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Yes. I am billing myself as everywhere all the time, but I have genuinely spent a lot of time on family courts. We have published two reports. I have been to most of the pathfinder sites, although they are rolling out more and more. The child-focused courts are very good news. It is so important to have a child impact assessment done as quickly as possible. In sum, it is the way you would set up the family court if you were designing it now. It is important. It allows you to have domestic abuse understanding quite early.
Earlier this week, I was speaking at a conference of all the family justice boards. I say this a lot to MoJ, and, to be fair, I feel like it is quite open to listening. This is a part of government that is really moving forward and is quite open to these changes. I know I deliver a lot of bad news, but that is some very good news. What we have to do in the rollout is maintain the quality. They turn out to be very efficient because, lo and behold, you do not have people going down the road of very long, protracted adversarial proceedings. That is a very good thing for everyone, obviously including the children. However, if it becomes an efficiency pilot, that is where we would go wrong because it was not set out to be an efficiency. It was set out to fix the problems that were in the harm panel report, which were about not understanding domestic abuse.
This is the biggest advice I will give. In the rollout, the domestic abuse element of that assessment at the start has to stay robust. It has to include the funding and join-up to make sure those assessments are getting done at a high quality, making sure that there is the funding and training for the rollout. Everyone would go to great pains to say that the early sites were not places where everyone was in agreement and everything was fine. There has been a lot of change. However, as we roll this out as business as usual, we want to maintain the quality and the effect it was intended to have, which is to understand the context as early as possible of each child so that that is what the court focuses on.
We have agreed with the Ministry of Justice to do another iteration of our research in child-focused courts. We will be starting that in the autumn, so that we can maintain a bit of oversight of how these courts are really changing the way domestic abuse is addressed. Very importantly, we have the ambition. I hope we are able to speak to and hear from children directly in that research. I am very hopeful about that.
Q179 Baroness Rafferty: Thanks, Nicole, for the clarity of your answers. The Government have been telling us that they are developing a number of specialist telephone support services, including for ethnic minority groups and the disabled and LGBT+ communities. I wondered if you had made an assessment of these and what your view is of how they are operating on the ground.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Helplines often get overlooked. I have been prone to that myself because you just think of them as a given. They are so important as a first point of contact for someone who is very worried about systems or the perpetrator—all sorts of things. It is important to have that ability to call and speak to someone. The quality of those helplines is incredibly important. They are commissioning over the summer. There are tenders out right now.
You might think it is a strange place to sit, but the Home Office holds the ring on those contracts, by and large. There is a little at the MoJ as well. What has been tendered over the summer is this idea that there would be a very clear ambition that you would have more bespoke, obvious helplines for particular groups, as long as those helplines are working together. That is all in the way they will be designing right now and bidding in together. It is for them to decide how they co-ordinate, or it could be a large organisation that tries to achieve all those specialisms. That will be in the tender to decide.
However, it is really important that particular groups know they have that pathway to support: victims of honour-based abuse, male victims and LGBTQ+ victims. It is very true that those survivors will often think, “Maybe I will call”, especially if they see those overt signals that these are people who understand them. That is a really great ambition. Where I would pour some cold water on it is that obviously helplines will always be very dependent on the services locally that they have to be able to refer on to. Then we are back to your point and Lord Polak’s point.
Q180 Baroness Sugg: This follows on from a question from Lord Polak earlier. Your role was obviously established on a statutory footing within the Act. Is there anything that you would change to enable you to fulfil your role more effectively? Are there any barriers that the way it was set up has given you? You talked earlier about working across so many departments. You mentioned DSIT and Justice, I imagine there is Health and Education. It is so cross-cutting. How is your ease of access to very senior levels at that department? Do you feel as though the way your role is set up enables you to be able to take action and get stuff done?
The Chair: That is a very good question, Baroness Sugg. Please be frank.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Yes. I received some very good advice about this early on, which was to say, “Nicole, everyone is individual in these roles. These are quite unusual roles. It will be what you make of it”. That is the wonderful thing about the role and the kind of thing that always makes you feel like you have not quite achieved everything, because how much can you do? There is that.
On the access, it is important to say that I have not felt held back by getting into meetings I want to be in or asking for information that I would like to see, by and large. We talked about an exception earlier, some DAPO evaluation work, but that is a little rarer. I meet across departments with Ministers, and I very much go out of my way to meet with civil servants because they will be implementing so much of what is going on. That part of it has not been difficult. I understand when I am meeting with people who are genuinely engaging with me and want good advice, and when they are thinking, “I know you’re telling me I should do this, but I’m not intending to do it”. Of course that happens. You try every lever you have, whether that is public influencing or aligning with others. We try very hard to use all those levers, including the powers in the Act. You should feel confident that the Commissioner’s role gets in there.
Where we have had a lot of trouble in the past year—this had not happened for quite a while—is we have been caught up with constraints within the Home Office on budget, where we have not been able to hire for vacancies or spend funds. That has greatly frustrated me the entire year. It took me a while to realise because, frankly, it had not happened before. The argument we have made is if we are allocated a budget, as long as we are staying within it, we should be able to do that. As an arm’s-length body, we should not be in any cost-cutting constraints that the rest of the department is in. I appreciate if that has to happen, but if we are allocated a budget, we cannot be an arm’s-length body on one hand and then considered part of the core on the other. That is not the way it should work.
We are in the middle of revising our framework document. The Act sets out that we must have a framework document. We also have a memorandum of understanding. On our end, we have fixed all those problems and suggested how those things can be fixed because I want for me and my team to be held accountable, and I want that to work. However, I do not want to be swept up into wider problems. The Home Office has not signed all that off yet, but I have been assured that that will happen in due course.
Baroness Gohir: I just had another question about the helplines and minority ethnic victims. They have higher domestic homicide rates, for example. They make up one-quarter of domestic homicide rates. In terms of the helpline funding, it is about £900,000 for the minority ethnic cohort over two and a half years. That is about £350,000 roughly per year. How does that compare with the other groups? Is that enough? It seems like a tiny amount, given the scale of the problem. I wanted to get your opinion on it.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: It is likely not enough. With the helplines in general, they have said to the Government over many years that most helplines are having to supplement with other funds and kinds of income. I know that the Government have increased the overall envelope in this round, but I am quite certain it will not be enough. That is the whole point. The better we are doing, the more likely we will have people calling. That would be a good thing. We should equip our services with the ability to scale up to that ambition. In this area in general, it just requires so much more ambition and focus. I know funding is not the only thing, but in an area where services are so chronically underfunded, we have to face up to that.
I would really encourage some work that we have published on by-and-for services. I say it all the time, but they are far and away the most impactful of services for victims and survivors, and they get the least amount of funding. I have figures, which we can make sure you have, about the serious investment that that requires. Again, as we move more to this idea of localism and local governance, the risks of that will be that some of the most impactful services get lost, because they will not have the ability to be as successful as others at local grant-making. If we know that, it means that the Government have to step in and mitigate that risk and make sure that we have regional, national funds that are adequate for these types of services.
The Chair: I wanted to add that one of the things that has become very clear is that it is by contact with helplines and community groups that the women themselves start finding the language to explain some experiences. For example, women themselves are not likely to say to the police, “I’m suffering from coercive control”. They do not say that. They say, “He’s not letting me see my mother. He’s not letting me visit my sisters. He’s not letting me have friends over to visit me”. All that sort of thing. They get a greater understanding of the ways in which their lives are shrinking as a result of behaviours. It is so important.
Q181 Baroness Rafferty: This follows on from the point on the helplines, Nicole. Looking at other areas of government policy for defence, for example, the strategic defence review talked about a whole-society approach. That means having—it is beginning to happen—a national conversation about how we build resilience and our defences against potential attack, et cetera, and educating the population on that. I wondered if you had any data from helplines on the split between the numbers of cases that are raised by neighbours, bystanders and people who are witnessing this through the walls—I have been in that situation myself—and victims themselves. Putting everything on the victims is not going to crack it, is it? I am interested in your view on a broader whole-society approach to educate the public about this.
Dame Nicole Jacobs: Yes. Helplines will absolutely have that data. I am sure it would not take too much to get that over to you. I will try to make sure you get it. They often have colleagues, housing officers or social workers call. A lot of that goes on in helplines as well as individual calling. There are a couple of initiatives that are incredible. I know one called Findaway, which is in the northern part of England. It is geared completely to friends and family and wider networks, because often they will have concerns but will need to talk and to get some expert advice and support about how they can effectively support. That kind of thing needs to happen much more.
Yesterday, Baroness Hyde and I were in a meeting with the Faith and VAWG Coalition on people who really trust their own religious community and how much work needs to be done there. There are public campaigns that change public awareness, and that is happening. However, the trouble with some types of really innovative initiatives with much more granular ways to allow people to have a role that is positive and informed is that they do not sit very easily in government. That is what we were discussing yesterday. Where do you find the funding for that? You have departments that will say, “We’re about the police. We’re about housing. We’re about children’s social care”. We have to expand our understanding of where people go early for help and how we support those kinds of initiatives and that kind of work. They do not find a very easy home in the way we organise ourselves in government.
The Chair: This has been a really fantastic meeting, Commissioner. You have helped us with pointers in directions where we really should be making recommendations and might pursue greater information ourselves in the meantime. I want to thank you on behalf of the committee.
