21
Examination of witness
Jess Phillips.
Q182 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee. This post-legislative committee is looking at the effectiveness of a very important piece of legislation, to see what its impact has been, looking at the positive developments from it but also recognising that there might be gaps, and seeing how it can be strengthened, if needed.
I introduce our witness today, who is known to many of you: former Minister Jess Phillips, Member of Parliament. It is very nice to see you. You served as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls) for two years from the beginning of this Government’s term in office so far. You entered Parliament 11 years ago, and before that worked for Women’s Aid in the West Midlands, developing services for victims of domestic abuse, sexual violence, human trafficking and exploitation—a whole range of crimes mainly experienced by women. You were also a member of Birmingham City Council from 2012 until you became a Member of Parliament. You have a great deal of experience, and I welcome you. We are going to benefit from your wealth of experience. We really wanted to encourage your presence today and we thank you for your time.
What do you consider to be your substantial achievements during your tenure as the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls? What other things did you want to achieve, and what, if anything, made that difficult? You can move to the second part but first please tell us about how it went and what you felt was being achieved.
Jess Phillips: Thank you for having me; it is a pleasure to be here. I have worked with most of you around the table at some point in one form or another. On what I wanted to achieve, the overarching commitment that the Labour Party made in its manifesto was that we would halve violence against women and girls within a decade. That was just words on a piece of paper, which, frankly, Yvette Cooper, Sarah Jones and I got into the manifesto on a wing and a prayer. I did not think it would be agreed, if I am honest, but when it got signed off, I was very pleased.
The reason we did that was because we count what we care about, and we knew that if there were no targets within it, violence against women and girls would just be, as I often say, an issue that political systems care about on International Women’s Day and not otherwise. We tried to make it a very fundamental part of the work of the Government by having something that we could be tested against. When I came into office, it was about putting meat on the bones in how you measure it in the first place, because violence against women and girls does not have a measure—it is made up of many different crime types—and what would need to be done to get towards achieving that.
The machine immediately goes about looking for policy solutions, which is absolutely right—tangible, specific things that people can announce. I think there are 189 different policies in the violence against women and girls strategy. That is all very important—in and of themselves, each one of those things will move the dial a bit. But, for me, the thing that had to be changed was the culture of violence against women and girls, initially within government, apart from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, but also within broader institutions. All of this policy sits within the Home Office; it leads on the policy, so I was at the Home Office. I could just busy myself all day with issues around police reform, domestic abuse protection orders, domestic homicide reviews—you could just sit and make all those things slightly better. But for me, it was far more important to recognise that, although the rate is growing, as few as 10% of victims will ever interact with a police officer, so you are missing 90% of the issues. That was the line that I took.
The Domestic Abuse Act fails to do that, apart from, arguably, Part 4 and the statutory duty on homelessness and housing provision. It fails to have that much that has anything to do with health, welfare, the military or any department you might pick. Online is entirely missing from it. The places where people actually live their lives is entirely missing from it, so it was about trying to change the culture within education, health and other departments to get them to step up and sweat their assets. The first iteration of the violence against women and girls strategy—I will give some praise to MHCLG, which was a willing participant—was heavy on the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, and the reason it was delayed was that I was not satisfied in any way, shape or form that that was enough. I suppose the biggest achievement is that the document does two things that are different to what has gone before.
The Chair: Can you name the document?
Jess Phillips: The violence against women and girls strategy, titled Freedom from Violence and Abuse: A Cross-Government Strategy to Build a Safer Society for Women and Girls. It is about making other areas of life accountable, measurable, testable and active in the field of violence against women and girls. It also started, for the first time, to have a heavy dint on how we prevent it, because you cannot halve violence against women and girls by continuing to just do what you have always done. In fact, we are living through a time where the risk is not just that we will not halve it but that it will double, because if you look at the age profile across sexual abuse, for example, it is falling—the profile is becoming younger. As the mother of two sons, I genuinely believed that it was going to be better for their generation but, actually, it is worse. It was about looking at how we do the stuff that will get the numbers down. How do we prevent people becoming perpetrators? How do we stop repeat perpetration? How do we look into the data of those who are at the highest risk of harm? How do we make the Department of Health realise that domestic abuse makes you bad, as my mother would have said. It makes you sick; it makes you ill.
I spent quite a lot of time annoyed that, apart from Part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act’s allocation of funding for refuge accommodation, the vast majority of funding for victim support in the community comes from the Ministry of Justice. I found it to be a complete and utter misnomer that, at my local rape crisis centre, the greatest number of referrals come from GPs and health professionals—I think it was over 60%. I asked various different rape crisis centres around the country to get me their local data. Why is it that, if a GP refers to a rape crisis centre in our country because the person in front of them is suffering from mental or physical ill health because of the trauma they have suffered, they do not think they have to pay for it? They would not send them for an MRI scan and say, “The NHS has no responsibility to pay for this scan”.
I could come up with a million examples of other government departments that do the same. Why is the Ministry of Justice not paying only for things that achieve better justice outcomes? It is absolutely right that the independent sexual violence advisers and independent domestic violence advisers are funded and ring-fenced by the Ministry of Justice, but that was in the days when those roles were invented—some of the people in this room were there when that happened. They were invented to help people go through the criminal justice system. That is not what they are now. Why are hospital IDVAs—we like to just get any word and put it in front of IDVA—being funded by the Ministry of Justice? It became an obsession of mine that government departments did not take their responsibility. All the work that was going on in education or among children and young people, which is not very much—
The Chair: Was it coming from the MoJ?
Jess Phillips: It was coming from the Home Office, not the Department for Education. That is unacceptable to me. It basically comes from a tradition of people relying on the free labour of women. Brilliant women set up these organisations in localities and run them on a shoestring, totally undervalued, and our state exploits that. Act more like big pharma. If somebody came to you because they had diabetes or even severe mental health problems, you would not think you could have the medicine for free, but you do think you can have the cure to this for free, provided by a load of underpaid women.
The Chair: Would you say that, although this seems to be simply about money, it is also about culture, and if you want to change culture, you have to feed this into all the different ministries?
Jess Phillips: Absolutely. It had to be about changing culture. It was initially about changing culture, even just in terms of the number of Ministers and civil servants leading on it—well, not leading on it; many of them were not leading on it at all—and making people in departments take accountability. To pick on the health department, which has come on the biggest and best journey, if I were to give it praise, NHS England funded SARCs—sexual assault referral centres—around the country. It is the responsible authority, but as soon as it was not forensic and was about health, they were commissioned for forensics. Yesterday, for example, I was with the Institute for Addressing Strangulation. It would be better if we had better clinical evidence in trials on cases of strangulation. Most of that evidence is clinical and medical—about having brain scans and about the effect of oxygen. I am not a doctor—I realise there is one in the room—and I do not want to pretend that I am, but when I speak to doctors, unless they are commissioned to do the forensic work, knowing that it will definitely go to trial, there is less concern about whether they will not do that if the person seems okay.
Those sorts of things are happening all over the system. Over many years, I have tried to make different parts of the system responsible for it. When I was on Birmingham City Council, for example, I made it so that there was routine inquiry in housing around domestic and sexual abuse. I will never forget sitting in a housing office in Northfield in Birmingham. There was a slight screen between the person next to me and the person I was supporting. The person asked, “Have you been a victim of domestic abuse?”, and the woman said yes. Then they asked, “Have you been a victim of sexual violence?”, and the woman said yes. Then they asked, “Have you got any pets?”.
Routine inquiry will not do it, and system change will not do it. You have to make a culture where people feel responsible and like they will get in trouble, or where they will get praised for doing a good job if they take it on. We are in a better place than where we were when we came into government, but there is still a long way to go, and there are some good and bad players across the board.
The Chair: That was a very interesting assessment of what you think the problems are. Our doctor is in sunny climes, but she wants to ask a question.
Q183 Baroness Gerada: Thank you so much for all the work you have done, Jess. Are you describing the complexity of not having joint commissioning? I am old enough now to know that the only way we tackled unwanted teenage pregnancies was to bring the various departments together under a joint commissioning framework. Are you describing that it is so disparate? We have heard a lot of evidence from some people that have managed to navigate their way through the commissioning process. Is that your dream?
Jess Phillips: There are brilliant examples. The ICB commissioning in Devon and Cornwall is a really good example of good, localised joint commissioning being done incredibly well. In fact, the model that went into the violence against women and girls strategy was pretty much based on the model that we saw in Devon and Cornwall. However, we now have the “duty to collaborate” piece of legislation—it is not in the Domestic Abuse Act; I cannot even remember which Bill it is in—that was championed by the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. As to how that is playing out with joint commissioning in the field, I went to the West Midlands duty to collaborate meeting recently, and the best review I can give of that is to say that it is early days. I do not think I was well liked by anyone in the room when I left.
When the CSR was done, the violence against women and girls strategy should have come alongside it with a big pot, whereas what actually happened was that each government department had to beg and borrow from within itself. We all put in CSR bids; some were successful and some were not. There was a sense that we were doing it in a collective in some ways, but none of the collective bids was granted.
You make a good point, and you could say the same about knife crime. The trouble is that everybody wants a ring fence for their thing in government, so I can see the Treasury’s concern. But if you do not ask for enough, it never crosses the proper desks in the Treasury—anything less than £1 billion and they do not care. Do not worry, I ask for more than that all the time. I once, in a letter, wrote: “You can give me this free thing, or you can give me £3 billion—you choose”.
That is what I would suggest, going forward, in the next CSR, if we are truly going to try to do it jointly. But that does not make commissioning happen jointly on the ground. You need both; you do need joint commissioning on the ground and the violence against women and girls strategy does commit to doing a proper centralised guide. But I do not like the word “guide”, I want it to be completely and utterly mandatory for commissioning.
The Chair: You did not finish the sentence when you said that there should have been “a nationally commissioned” something.
Jess Phillips: There should have been a joint bid across government for a pot of money—this was not not asked for; it was asked for repeatedly—to do the violence against women and girls strategy, because it covers every government department. It is very hard when you go to Secretaries of State who have got a prison crisis or immigration or SEND to deal with. Every government department has an iceberg—pick your poison. While we were getting to the end of writing the strategy, Wes Streeting said to me that it felt like I was holding him upside down and shaking out his pockets. He said it in a charming way, but that is essentially what it was.
The Chair: We need someone who will turn people upside down and shake their pockets.
Jess Phillips: I am more than happy to do that, but it became my job to do it. The Prime Minister, to be fair to him, would regularly convene meetings of the Cabinet, but there was never anyone saying, “You have got to give a certain percentage of your budget”. Everybody would come for that treatment if I got it. It was a lot of shaking people down, sometimes with success, sometimes not. The Department of Health admittedly gets a better settlement than anyone else, apart from the Ministry of Defence, which also put its hands in its pockets.
The thing I am proudest of, because it shows a forward-looking, complete cultural change, is that the Department of Health is footing the bill for the first time for all the children’s sexual abuse services, including the bit that is courts and police going into these multi-agency centres. Health is paying money into the Ministry of Justice victims’ pot, because I managed to win the argument that they should pay for what they use. The ICBs will also all be given money to do specific domestic abuse work and to fund domestic abuse specialist community-based services. They were the ones who took the mantle the greatest, and they came on the farthest journey.
But so much of the credit needs to go to good leadership from Wes in putting in Jess Asato, another woman who is not afraid to hang people upside down and has a huge amount of knowledge. It is like a characteristic of being called Jess in this building and working in DA to really do a task and finish a piece of work. That is what every government department needs: they need a Jess, whether me or her.
The Chair: No wonder you express such loyalty to Wes Streeting now. All is now plain.
Jess Phillips: Yes, because he is the only one who gave me any cash—and John Healey, to be fair.
Baroness Neate: We are going to narrow down a bit with this question. One of the things that we have heard consistently from witnesses is that the police are still treating domestic abuse as incident-based and not focusing on the pattern of behaviour that is coercive control. What do you think needs to be done to change this? Will the formation of a national police force be an opportunity or not?
I have a third little question. Yesterday, we heard from survivors; it was a small group. They all felt that the DA Matters training is probably out of date now. So, bearing those three things in mind, including the national police force and DA Matters, what do you think needs to be done to get that focus on the pattern?
Jess Phillips: I say this tentatively, not knowing whether it will go ahead or not—we are all in a weird limbo—but there is a real opportunity with police reform to take a blank piece of paper and start again. From my experience of working with chief constables across the country, they want to do that. In grass-roots policing and at the very top of policing, there is no shortage of desire to improve the police response. There is definitely a problem with promotion and middle management—that is where I perceive most of the issues—as well as around who is held accountable in police forces for failures. The trouble is, when you start to talk about policing failures, you get people being kicked out and suspended because they are sex pests or do terrible things. On domestic homicide reviews, I am talking about much more pedestrian stuff—just not doing a good enough job, really.
I have to say, I feel for police forces across the country. A number of things could be done around promotion and training. I am absolutely here to hear that the DA Matters is potentially outdated. If you include just the online space, most police officers, if they sat in front of you now, would say that the digital element of violence against women and girls is their biggest problem in the workplace at the moment, and that they do not really have the tools and resources. Lots of them are working on various technologies to try to overcome that, but there needs to be better accountability around good service.
That can come from what the Home Office monitors. There is always a balance when you want to collect data. You want to monitor performance but not make a system that is too burdensome for a copper on a call-out, because I want them to act like a copper, with curiosity, and spend time with the woman. You have to find a fine balance. If the police were sitting here, they would say to you that getting a coercive and controlling charge over the line would be much harder. Looking at patterns of abuse is not actually how the court system works—certainly not with speed—so the vast majority of police forces have, in a good way, become much more focused on safeguarding the victim. They get them an order and get the person in front of a court tomorrow. It has become much more about safeguarding the situation than about following lines of inquiry on the perpetrator.
Operation Soteria has done some work there, in looking at that in rape and in looking much more at following lines of inquiry in rape cases, but we need an operation similar to Operation Soteria for DA. I have discussed this. The Government have funded a new national centre for violence against women and girls. We have had a discussion about what risk assessments it uses, let alone the training. Are they fit for purpose? We want to keep doing the safeguarding but also follow the lines of inquiry. Lots of us around this table have campaigned so much for getting women safe quickly. I take some of the blame for things moving away from lines of inquiry into patterns and on to immediate rescue. We need to look at risk assessment; that work is being done at the moment by the national centre. We also need to look at training and secondary risk assessments for other types of crime beyond the DASH or DARA risk assessments, which are the risk assessments that most agencies in the field use.
It is about having all that, as well as an accountability framework that you have opportunities to create. Also, you should not ever be able to get promoted on that basis.
The Chair: I have to tell you that I did a thing on banking once. There was a problem in middle management around not promoting women to the higher levels. I said, “All you have to do is introduce into middle management what they have done to promote women as one of the things that will determine what bonus they get”. So you create the carrots and sticks around that kind of thing; you could do that in the police as well.
Jess Phillips: If you were running, say, the public protection unit in Birmingham and working on child abuse and DA, and you had a much worse “no further action” rate nationally—maybe ask the people you are serving how it was for them; that is not a crazy idea—I do not know why that should not mark against you for promotion. I also do not think that you should ever be able to become a chief constable unless you have worked in public protection. The promotion pathways in policing are far greater if you hold a gun than if you hold a baby in your arms and rescue it. That is not acceptable. You should not ever be able to be a chief constable if you have not done a good, reliable job in public protection.
Q184 Baroness Sugg: I want to talk about tech and online. Obviously, you talked about those things in your introduction and shared some of your frustration around them in your resignation letter. We have heard lots of evidence about the growth of it all. You have talked a bit about the police talking about not being able to address this issue, but what are your thoughts on where we need to go forward from here?
Jess Phillips: There needs to be a whole-scale rethinking. I am quite old-school; I was trained in the field 25 years ago when this was completely and utterly not part of the issue. Looking across the boards of all agencies, I met all of the SARC clinical leads around the country when I was a Minister. I asked them, “How many referrals are you getting for online child sexual abuse?”; I asked this of all the children’s SARCs around the country. They said, “None. Our system is not there”.
The Chair: Technically speaking.
Jess Phillips: If a kid has images of her shared around the school, and she goes to a teacher and talks to them about that, at the moment, there is no proper guidance. The guidance is currently being updated because Josh—that is, Josh MacAlister, the Minister for Children; I should give everybody their full names—and I have started to work on it.
No way do people react the same way to online abuse, in terms of harm to a person, as they do to someone saying, “My uncle raped me last night”. There is an age problem in that as well, because we do not react in the same way if a young person says that a young person has raped them or abused them. That falls into it because, as digital natives, digital is much more likely to be part of their abuse. There is a cultural problem with not recognising online harm as actual harm. As a person who has suffered huge amounts of online harm, I do not think that the kinds of harm I have suffered should ever, in any strategy, trump the idea of a domestic abuse refuge. I do, however, think that that attitude among people—even people like me—has missed the moment in time when online harm became really bad and dangerous.
There is a need for a culture shift among all agencies in dealing with this. The police are crying out for it. I cannot sit in front of anyone, whether the local sergeant in my local force or, going right up, the head of the Met, without them saying, “Oh my God, so many of the cases that are coming into us are online harm and child abuse online”. They are desperate. There are technological solutions in this space, but what is needed is a much more fundamental regulation of the online space. I do not think that the Online Safety Act says “women” in it anywhere.
Q185 The Chair: One of the things that we in the House of Lords heard evidence about in the course of recent legislation was the grooming of children by bots online and the challenges that presents to a legal system that has not been prepared for it. Those challenges are really significant. Is there a sense in government of how that should be responded to?
Jess Phillips: I am going to be completely honest with you: any policy around the online space sits quite uncomfortably between the Home Office and DSIT, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. I will speak really frankly now. I would not say this about the Ministers, or certainly the Secretary of State—Liz Kendall and I were always on the exact same page—but when the machine starts to look at it, given the priorities that sit within DSIT, you cannot want growth from online and be responsible for policing it. Those things are completely and utterly at loggerheads with each other.
On the relationship between the Home Office and that department in trying to progress anything, Lords around the room might remember some of the disastrous issues around pornography, and the terrible and stupid outcomes that happened because there is a problem with the government departments that lead on growth in that sector. Of course, we could have loads of growth in our country if we went back to slavery. Any growth that is made on the back of child abuse is not something that should ever be welcomed. There is a fundamental problem. Some of the solutions sit in regulation that comes from the OSA, which sits with DSIT, and then the Home Office will stream in, quite rightly, when it is not happy with that and start making lots of criminal law. Then there is your point about who is responsible if it is a bot. How do you follow the money?
The Chair: It is about following the money, usually.
Jess Phillips: It is. How do you follow the money? How do you find out the platforms? The Home Office gets all, “We’ll put these people in prison”, and then once again you get into this argument about defunding everything in the UK. That is just a snapshot of the insanity of some of the meetings that I had to live through and my frustration with them.
There is a need for considerably stronger regulation. It starts to get into a massive mess. On the thing that I resigned over, regulating the platforms will make 91% of the abuse stop. The 9% that is done by adults to children is the responsibility of the Home Office. It is the responsibility of law enforcement to just focus on that part of it, and you need the regulation to do the other side.
The Chair: On the current regulatory framework, we have had discussions in this room about the problems and about accepting the powers that Ofcom has and whether they are good enough. What is your view on that?
Jess Phillips: It is still a bit too early to say, is it not? Yesterday I was with somebody from a charity dealing with child abuse online. We are arguing for similar things for women as exist for children and terrorism within Ofcom, which is what the people who want to see this improved have been arguing for in the build-up for 10 years. The trouble is that I am not sure that it has made child abuse online better. The simple question I asked the person from the charity was, “Do you think that the safeguards within the Online Safety Act have made child abuse online better?” The answer is “No, not really”. It has made some places safer. The big mainstream platforms act much quicker on child abuse on their sites than they ever did before and they have put in safeguards to try to stop them. However, I do not think that the current regulatory framework works. Lots of the work that went into the violence against women and girls strategy tried to look at different ways that we can regulate to prevent rather than detect.
The Chair: I would say that you cannot disentangle these things because they overlap: the violence against women and girls policies and efforts to deal with that seep into the whole business of domestic abuse and violence. But we are dealing with the Domestic Abuse Act and the extent to which new technology is, if you like, an enabler and, in fact, an expander of abuse. We have had evidence in relation to sexual violence against partners involving drugs to make a woman comatose so that they can have the kind of sex that she might not agree to. You also have the whole business of people being followed and pursued and people knowing what women are doing because of access to their phones and technology. Do you see that as an area that we have to get the Science and Technology Committee to engage with?
Jess Phillips: Absolutely. The strategy commits to the idea of safety by design, designing safety into the system, which DSIT wrote into it—I do not want to make out that it did not do anything because it absolutely did. If you go to America, you will see those stupid, massive Tesla cars that you will not see in Europe because the regulation would not allow for a weird box that looks like a fridge to drive around. There are glasses that can record you; you might as well just call them pervy glasses. I cannot imagine what could be the use for a pair of glasses that can record you other than harassment of one form or another. I am sure that Meta has a completely different view, but if there had been a woman in the meeting about that, they would have said, “Hang on a minute, that’s a bit pervy”.
Unfortunately, the greatest lie that was ever told by tech companies—I wish I could go back in time—was that phones that can ring doorbells would make you safer. They absolutely did not. They did not solve any crime. They did not make your neighbourhood any safer—people walking dogs makes your neighbourhood safer. They have been used to surveil everybody and make them feel frightened. The latter is an important point because you cannot domestically abuse somebody unless they feel frightened of their environment, and so much has been done with technology to advance the causes of stalking.
I will not ask you for a raise of hands, but I do not do this, and I am the only one among my friends who does not do this: I do not surveil my children. I do not know where they are, I do not watch them on a map, but every single one of my friends does that. Every parent thinks that when they gave their kid a phone it made them safer, but what it did was opened a room to a load of paedophiles. You basically said, “There’s a scout group down there that’s run by paedophiles. Why don’t you go and join it?”. We have to face the fact that we cannot put that genie back in the bottle, but we should massively regulate it. If it can be used to domestically abuse, either it should not be allowed, or specific safeguards should be put in place.
Q186 Baroness Hussein-Ece: I want to take you back; you mentioned this as a growing problem already at the beginning in your introduction. The statutory definition requires that both the perpetrator and the victim must be over the age of 16 in order for domestic abuse to apply. However, we have heard lots of evidence on, and now know far more about, the fact that this fails to capture domestic abuse in teenage relationships, which is a huge issue for those who are under 16. Do you think that there is anything more, if at all, that the Government would like to do or should do to address this?
Jess Phillips: The answer, seemingly, is to take the age limit out of the law, except that the definition of domestic abuse is that for 16 and 17 year-olds. I moved most of the amendments to the then Domestic Abuse Bill, I think, but we have not seen a massive increase in services for 16 and 17 year-olds. We have not seen a massive increase in charging there. I do not think that police forces have been particularly trained in how to deal with cases where it is between a 16 year-old and 17 year-old—we could even go with 16 to 25—where you are not living in the house with the person and it is a different sort of relationship. Obviously, that was not so for me, because I was a child bride, but I am absolutely fine with changing the law and taking age out of it.
However, that will not work on its own. There is a far bigger piece of cultural work to do. Before we do that, we should try to focus on why we have not improved anything for 16 and 17 year-olds, who are included in the definition. Where I live, there have not suddenly been loads of teenage relationship abuse services or strategies for the police. There is no team of police officers or people in the CPS specifically looking to become specialists in teenage abuse. So we in this building have to be really careful about thinking that our job is done when we change the law.
I do not recognise the age limit, actually. In the vast majority of cases, there are some areas where changing the law would make things better. One is domestic homicide review. The case of Holly Newton is the one that most people will know. I have met Holly Newton’s mum many times; she is an absolutely brilliant woman. Children’s safeguarding starts the review. It is not that you do not get a review; children’s safeguarding does it. I have to say, having spoken to Holly Newton’s mum about this, that she did not feel that it involved her and her family in the same way as a domestic homicide review, which has this absolutely built into it, would have.
Getting rid of the age would improve the domestic homicide review system in that area; there is no doubt about it. Everywhere else, though—we will likely come on to this later—we would just end up in the exact same place were we to write into the law that children are victims of domestic abuse in their own right. Those are just nice words, are they not?
Baroness Hussein-Ece: But would it be captured by that, under “children”?
Jess Phillips: Arguably, it is captured by that. In lots of cases, you could argue for a domestic homicide review in the case of a relationship involving somebody under the age of 16. You could probably argue for that, as the person who sat and said yea or nay to various domestic homicide reviews. I was quite lax; I let most of them through. I said, “Yeah, that seems like one, so we should do it”.
It is about how that interacts with children’s services. When the then Domestic Abuse Bill was going through, that was the argument to which we constantly came back. It caused much chagrin on my part because I thought, “Gosh, I’m talking to a Minister who’s clearly never made a children’s safeguarding referral”. If you try to make one on the basis of domestic abuse, unless somebody has a machete to your kid’s neck at that exact moment, there is no way in which you are going to meet the threshold. The fundamental problem in this space is how it all interacts with the children’s safeguarding system and the review systems that go on in that. We end up with both being unsatisfactory. If only we could all work together; that would be better.
The Chair: Because we have limitations on time, I am going to pause this question, but that was a very interesting answer about children’s safeguarding, including its interaction with the Domestic Abuse Act and how that could be used much more effectively. I will hold on to that thought; we may come back to you for ideas on that, but I am anxious about letting everyone have their opportunity to ask you specific questions.
Q187 Baroness Porter of Fulwood: We have had lots of evidence from people about the domestic abuse prevention order pilots. Can you say a bit about your views on the upcoming rollout? What do you think will or will not work? We have heard specific concerns around things such as enforcement and the extent to which, even within the pilots, there is adequate resourcing for the positive requirement provision services.
Jess Phillips: I imagine that it was Nicole who spoke to you; obviously, she and I talk about this quite a lot. The first thing I would say is positive: I have seen domestic abuse protection orders making a difference. Again, this goes back to my obsession with culture, but I feel very positive about this area. In the initial stages of the rollout in parts of Greater Manchester and boroughs in London, I saw two things happening in the pilots that gave me real hope for the future.
The first was a case where the Metropolitan Police had turned up to a drink-driving thing. A man had crashed his car. His son, who was an adult, had said something like, “Oh well, he’s always like this. When he’s not drinking, he’s beating up my mum”. He made that passing comment to a police officer, who, on that day—it was when the DAPOs started—then sat down with the women and asked, “Would you like a domestic abuse protection order?” It was done on the basis of coercive and controlling behaviour, not violence, which is obviously a good thing and a culture change. There was this idea of inquiry because they had a tool that they were interested in and wanted to try to use.
In another case, in Greater Manchester, a man had breached his order, so they gave him a domestic abuse protection order. He then breached that order, not by going back to the woman but by not being at the right address when the offender management was being done. He went to prison for eight months for breaching the order.
In both of those cases—this is what I mean when I talk about how culture matters—the woman never left her house. We did not rely on the free labour of women. The woman never left her house or went into a courtroom. A man ended up in prison, and a woman never had to step foot in a courtroom. To me, that is the police taking responsibility for keeping people safe, and them doing so without the woman ever having to do a moment’s piece of admin. It is manna from heaven to me that, within a week of you getting an order, you could have somebody in prison when you have not set foot inside a courtroom; I cannot let go of how much hope that gives me. It is not the woman’s responsibility to take that on; it is the responsibility of the police.
That said, the rollout clearly found that the stuff around positive requirements, which is part of the legislation, was not working because it was not mandatory. It is now; we have made it mandatory in the legislation. I have to say, the feedback from Greater Manchester was very strong—all our overlords come from there now, so I will say nice things about it. It was keenly fed back to us that, basically, without the requirements being mandatory and enforceable by a judge, they did not work. So we have changed the legislation.
The rollout has been different. It is almost all police at the moment. Hardly any of it is being done by family justice because it does not cover children. As one of our last acts, Alex Davies-Jones and I redrafted the legislation to make it include the protection of children so that it can be used in the family court. We sought to get it into the then Sentencing Bill—not that one, actually. Which one is going through at the moment? The one about juries where everyone is having a row.
Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: Courts.
Jess Phillips: The courts Bill—that is the one. We were seeking to get that legislative change into that piece of legislation. It came from meetings with members of the judiciary, specifically the family court bench, who basically said, “No one’s going to use it in the family court unless that is in there”. When I left, that legislation was due, but frankly, I do not need to be a Government Minister to amend legislation.
The Chair: It is interesting that you are talking about making things mandatory. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner told us that the courts can now make it mandatory, but she wants to see that becoming a positive requirement.
Jess Phillips: Yes. Now that the positive requirements are mandatory, we will see a greater uptick. The other problem that you raise is that, where I live, there are no perpetrator programme schemes that I would trust. That is a problem. At the same time as this is all happening, the Home Office is commissioning the Drive Partnership across the entire country. That is only for high harm, so in some of these cases we are going to get into a mess.
The Chair: What constitutes high harm?
Jess Phillips: Exactly. The Drive Partnership works on a MARAC—multi-agency risk assessment conference—protocol, or a child in need child protection.
Q188 Lord Polak: I am intrigued about this whole conversation. There is no point in us legislators putting down or enacting laws that then will not be followed through. You talked about the amendments you put down. Lord Russell and I put a load of amendments down too, and we succeeded in getting “children” into the Bill. Was it worth it? What else do the Government need to do to protect children?
The Chair: Jess, I was going bring in Baroness Barran. Generally, this was considered to be an effective piece of law, and there was some sense of celebration at having produced that. Although law does not always deliver everything, it is an important thing. You do need law—it is a glue. If you are talking about culture, law has a role to play in the creation of culture shifts within society. It is vital that it is not continuing to do the old tropes about women bringing these things on their own heads, et cetera. I will take Lord Polak first, but I am just giving you a little warning, because it would be quite useful if you could talk about the things that you feel are real gains—that should not be forgotten in the discussions about all this. Let us turn to Lord Polak’s question about children first.
Jess Phillips: Was it worth doing? Yes, because it eventually will change the culture; it just does not do it very quickly. When the then Domestic Abuse Bill was going through, coercive and controlling behaviour had been on the statute books for, at that point, six years, and in that year—and some of the years after—56 people went to prison for more than 12 months. Now there is a better story to tell. It does take time. In the Commons, I was certainly part of making sure that that got into the legislation as well, so I feel very keenly that it was the right thing to do and that it will change the culture.
What we have not seen, for example, is children being able to take cases against their fathers. We have not seen a case where a mother will not do it, but a child who has lived in that situation will. Arguably, if the child is a victim of domestic abuse, or a certain sort of crime, they should be able to do that. We have not seen any of that. There has not been any sort of case law that has shifted. That was the real worry of the civil servants at the time. They said, “Oh my God, what happens if this happens?”, and I said, “That is not going to happen”. But we have not seen a large uptick in the commissioning of domestic abuse services for children. Although it is not always perfect, the brilliant thing about the legislation is Part 4 of the Domestic Abuse Act, which makes it a statutory duty to fund refuge accommodation. That has had a cultural change in every local authority.
It is not perfect—loads of work needs to be done on how you make those standards right and good—but it did do that. It did that because it was given an amount of money from government to do it. There should have been the same thing around the children, which could have, at the same time as the law changing, started, for example, pilots on what would work or cultural stuff in local authorities. It is not okay that every children’s services in the country does not have a referral pathway for children’s counselling in cases of domestic abuse. That seems like something that should exist, but it does not exist anywhere and 80% of children who are victims of domestic abuse or sexual violence get turned away from CAMHS for being too complex. Those things should have happened at the same time, and they did not—that has been a failing. But it was definitely worth putting in there because we can do it now. We can then get some snazzy kid to take a legal case when it is not done properly. That is what we need: more kids who like judicial reviews.
Baroness Barran: I am very happy to let others speak.
Q189 Lord Polak: You talked about the refuges, but just a tiny percentage of people, children or adults, who suffer domestic abuse get to a refuge.
Jess Phillips: I think it is 40%.
Lord Polak: We tried to equal that up in the community, but it did not get anywhere.
Jess Phillips: I moved the amendments to the Bill to make community services a statutory duty.
Lord Polak: I know. We tried.
Q190 Baroness Neate: There are programmes, you know well as well as I do, for children and non-abusing parents together that could be easily commissioned and rolled out. But we have heard evidence that they are among the most vulnerable parts of community-based domestic abuse services. I wondered what you thought about that.
We heard yesterday from the survivors that women are being held responsible for protecting their child in a domestic abuse situation. I want you to talk about that a bit, and in relation to the child being a victim in their own right and the potential tension. Do you think that exists?
The Chair: We hear repeatedly—we heard it yesterday from survivors—of the fear of getting embroiled with social services, because they fear that their children will be taken away from them.
Jess Phillips: Of course—and they are not wrong. It is not an irrational fear; it is a completely regular fear that will play out. There was quite a lot of concern at the time that, with making children direct victims, the failure to protect them would be used on a legal basis against those women. I am not sure that the family court, and the manner in which it treats victims of domestic abuse, needed any extra tools to fail quite so badly, in my view. One of the failings of the Domestic Abuse Act was the failure to get any real advancement in the change to the family court, which has been put subsequently into other Bills. There is quite a lot more attention on that now.
However, you are absolutely right that there is a fundamental problem. The new way that the Government and the Department for Education are looking to do “families first” and the rebranding of the children’s centres is a real opportunity to try to shift the ideal. It is a fundamental ideal that is taught to social workers. I have trained many social workers myself in my time on the front line, because they all come and do their periods of practice with us when they are being trained.
Quite rightly, after cases like Victoria Climbié or Child P, there has been this idea of the focus on the child. There is a fundamental failure of children’s social care—and, therefore, of the agencies that sit around it—to recognise that happy mothers make happy children, and that the protection of the woman in these circumstances is as important.
When I was a Minister, we were on a round table for a serious case review of a baby; it was the famous case of the aristocratic woman who had gone on the run. The baby’s death in that case highlighted the real need for early interventions that are supportive of mum, not punitive towards her. For those systems, we cannot do it until we have built it, so we are trying to build it. We are trying to build a perpetrator system across the country because, where I live, if you are a victim of domestic abuse, you get sent on a course. I am not saying anything against the Freedom Programme in Birmingham, which is brilliant and run by some of the most amazing women. It gives succour to those women—I would personally attend it because it is good fun—and is a lifeline for them.
However, the perpetrators are not sent on courses. There is no system in the country that says, “Actually, you’re the one causing the problem and making the errors. You’re going to lose your children. I’ll tell you what, you’re going to lose them, and we’re going to do everything we possibly can to support your missus to find a nice house. She will get away from you”. We do not do that. They do not even attend the conferences. Dads are always missing from the conversation. Where I live, that is fair enough, because they do not have a thing to be referred to, whereas they have the Freedom Programme because they rely on the free labour of women to provide the services. They just refer them to that then do not pay for it, and we end up back where we started.
The Chair: It was interesting that, yesterday, the survivor said that their experiences of the family courts were much worse than those of the criminal courts.
Jess Phillips: They are a million times worse. Women are treated like pariahs. There is also the growing issue of women being criminalised for being victims of domestic abuse. On an anecdotal basis, as a person who always holds a case load of around 100 cases at any one time, I see again and again, just in my own constituency, a large amount of women who are charged with harassment, with the criminal justice system being used against them as a tool of control. What has happened in the family justice system for decades is creeping into the criminal justice system.
Q191 Baroness Gohir: My question is on migrant victims of domestic abuse. We have heard that their situation is made worse when they do not have indefinite leave to remain. They cannot access funding or accommodation, and there is a lack of a firewall between the police and the enforcement agencies. We are now hearing that they will be asked for permission to let enforcement agencies know; I am not sure how free and informed that consent is going to be. I would like to know how you think that issue can be addressed, but I will add something else as well.
I feel that, when it comes to minority-ethnic women, they can tend to be put into the bucket: “migrant women who have insecure immigration status” or “minority-ethnic women who experience forced marriage or honour-based abuse”. You know about this; I have written many letters to you about it, so I declare my interest. A large number of minority-ethnic women will not fit into those categories. They will be British-born, English-speaking and not experiencing honour-based abuse, forced marriage, intimate domestic abuse or intimate partner abuse. They tend to get ignored. How are we going to address domestic abuse for those women? Is there a cultural shift that needs to happen?
Jess Phillips: There needs to be far greater buy-in for services. If you are talking about minority-ethnic women who are less served by, for example, specialist services in domestic abuse—Black women, for example—there will be all sorts of reasons as to why they would need a specialist approach. That is nothing to do with migrancy and absolutely nothing to do with forced marriage. They might need a real specialist from within their own community.
We live in the same place—we literally live very close to each other—so I do not need to tell you this, but, where we live, there is far greater representation in terms of south Asian women’s services than there is for Black women, Polish women or newly settled women from Romania, where there is a really key issue around exploitation. Those specialist services do not exist in the same way for them. That is almost certainly led by commissioning done on the basis of percentages. Obviously, where we live, there is a very high percentage of south Asian people, so, in a very brutal way, commissioning says, “Okay, 28% will go to south Asian women’s services”.
So we really need to look at where there are gaps in local commissioning and how things get commissioned nationally, whether through helplines or advocacy. We do not have a lot of military people where we live. In Portsmouth, you absolutely need Aurora New Dawn, the organisation that focuses on this. There might be somebody needing it where I live, but they cannot go to Portsmouth, so you need to look at how you offer nationally at least a base-level support service to everybody in those minoritised and specialist groups—one that is run by those people and organisations—while making sure that commissioning is done better on the ground.
On migrancy, obviously, the firewall is under development with the sector at the moment in terms of how it will look. I saw many wild iterations of what it could look like, which went through various people, but, in essence, there will be a firewall. We are quite late in the day in solving a problem that does not exist quite as much as it did. The fear exists within the community, though. One of my constituents—this is why I am looking for kids to do a judicial review—was part of the supercomplaint and judicial review because she was sent to Yarl’s Wood detention centre when she rang up because her husband had threatened to kill her. Those sorts of case are not happening any more; there has been a shift, so we see that much less now. However, the fear that it exists is still there, and that is a problem as well. Hopefully, the firewall that will be created will solve that.
As somebody who has handled thousands of these cases, as have you, on the issue of consent, which you talked about—it is important to get people’s consent—the vast majority of women with whom I have dealt in that circumstance are already interacting with immigration services because they are part of trying to get visas. So, in my head, that consent means asking, “Have you got an open immigration case, and would you like me to help you get in touch with them to say that you’re in trouble?” That is what it means to me. I do it all the time; I seek that consent from migrant victims with whom I work all the time. So that is how I perceive that idea of consent, but the vast majority will already be in the immigration system somewhere, as you know. I do a million immigration cases a week. That is how I perceive that being rolled out.
Q192 Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: Apologies, but we are briefly going to go back to the family courts; I think we can all agree, from the variety of evidence we have heard, on the significant issues there. More positively, we have heard some good things about the pathfinder court pilots, which are to be renamed child focus courts when they are rolled out nationally. What can we do to ensure that the positives from those pilots are retained and developed in that rollout?
Jess Phillips: We have a pathfinder court in Birmingham. I can be quite a cynic, but the woman who runs Birmingham & Solihull Women’s Aid, Maureen Connolly—I am sure that she would not mind me saying this—is the greatest cynic on earth about whether new things will work. She absolutely loved the pathfinder court. So I feel that, if it has her sign of approval, we are okay. It just needs to be available everywhere, and we have to make sure that we put whatever pressure we can on the Ministry of Justice to make sure that the pathfinder system is available everywhere. I would also say that, similarly, we also have in Birmingham the drug and alcohol courts, as well as the women’s specialist courts. I have seen a lot of things in my life, but I see the brilliance of the women’s and drug and alcohol courts that exist in Birmingham. You are talking about 80% of it being DA. There is proper wraparound. It is all done, frankly, on a wing and a prayer, with a bit of commissioning from good police and crime commissioners and a bit of money from the Ministry of Justice. The benefit I have seen to women and children in the community of those courts existing in Birmingham should not be underestimated. Frankly, with the drug and alcohol courts and the women’s courts, we are talking about £5 million from each government department that is involved in it—it is peanuts, seriously. More would make such a massive difference.
The Chair: We went to see the court the other day. What is clearly vital is that there is real integration of organisations, people—usually women, as you say—who have real experience in the field, and a really good programme co-ordinator to pull this all together and to work with the prosecution people, the Probation Service and the court administration. It was really great to see the clerks as well.
Jess Phillips: Somebody said to me that the clerk is the most important person there. This whole thing works because we have amazing administration of the court.
The Chair: Apparently, there is a real issue with the recruitment of clerks to the magistrates’ courts.
Jess Phillips: If anyone is listening: go and be a clerk.
Q193 Baroness Rafferty: Thank you, Jess, for the brilliant insights and for sharing your expertise so generously with us. I am just speaking as an ingénue in relation to court systems; I have a nursing background. I am struggling to understand why the family courts seem to fail in these instances. The courts seem to have different distinctive cultures and modi operandi. What is at fault with the family courts? Why are they failing?
Jess Phillips: There are two things: the first one is patriarchy. That is the reality of the situation. These are patriarchal institutions built on the basis of the idea of the supremacy of man in a family. I am sure that none of the judges, none of the clerks and none of the people at Bull Street in Birmingham thinks that, yet the entire institution is built on that basis.
The Chair: It is also about the fact that there is an unwillingness to break the link between a parent and a child. That is informing this.
Jess Phillips: Yes. That comes from here as well—this building is similarly very anxious about that. You would be surprised about how Christian and traditional family values go through absolutely every part of public policy. You have to untangle some of that. I do not say “Christian” in any derogatory sense.
The Chair: I do not think that you would find it was that different in most of the other main religions.
Jess Phillips: I mean “patriarchal Christian” because we have a state Church. The idea of traditional family values, of course, is so fundamental to our lawmaking. The other thing is secrecy. Other courts are much more—
The Chair: Transparent.
Jess Phillips: Yes. Judges say some things I do not agree with, and that gets written in a newspaper and they get pilloried. I do not like any of that particularly, but the lack of scrutiny over the family court means that it is sort of going on in total secret. I want to pay absolute tribute to the past two heads of the family court division, who definitely recognise that this is a problem. They are not showing me anything patriarchal. They are absolutely saying that it is too secret. Munby absolutely tried to get rid of the secrecy in the family court—there are two ways about that.
The Chair: Munby was a remarkable judge.
Jess Phillips: Absolutely. What I always like when anyone comes to their end of their tenure—a bit like the Prime Minister; you get a lot of stuff done at the end of your tenure, do you not?—is that there is often a swan song. There was a whole lot done at the end of Munby’s tenure. We said, “Rush in. Let’s get him to do all this stuff”.
Also, there is definitely an appetite for improving the family court, but we have to change the law in this country. At the moment, the law is the presumption of contact and the bond between a parent and a child, and the very fundamental idea that a child having two parents is the very best thing for it. When I say it is “patriarchal”, I mean that you are raised to think that—it is in your bones to think that. But where I worked, the absolute opposite was true: it was definitely better to have just the one parent. That is fundamental. The Bill that is passing through the House will change the presumption of contact, and hopefully that will do some of the work. We also really need to regulate the kind of people who can call themselves an expert in the family court.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: Jess, you keep on talking about amazing women and the patriarchy. When you are looking at culture change, it occurs to me that getting men to accept that we are predominantly the problem, and that we have to take responsibility for it, is a fundamental part of the culture change. Do you agree?
Jess Phillips: Yes, I absolutely agree. For too long, I think feminists like me hoarded the gold like Smaug. Actually, I do not think that we hoarded it, but there has been quite a lot of gatekeeping that has not meant that men felt like they could talk about it. That was really dangerous post the #MeToo movement, because we did not talk to boys about what that meant. I watched my own teenagers overreact, for want of a better word. With any slight infraction by any boy in their class, they would say, “Oh, you’re wrong”. I do not think anyone spoke to boys, and that was a real failure.
The Chair: We can count on Lord Russell and Lord Polak as being champions on this issue of challenging the patriarchy.
Jess Phillips: And Munby.
The Chair: I think we have covered the terrain. It really has been wonderful having you come here. The whole wealth of your experience has been great to hear—thank you. I have to end this session, but this has been invaluable. Jess Phillips, thank you very much indeed.
